No one would have been more surprised than Fawziya Khurd by the
recent pronouncement of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, that
Israel operates an “open city” policy in Jerusalem.
Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that Israel’s annexation
of East Jerusalem following the 1967 war -- what he called the city’s
“unification” -- meant that all residents, Jews and Palestinians alike, could
buy property wherever they chose.
“Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments
anywhere in the city,” he said. “There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in
the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the
city's east.”
Mr Netanyahu was trying to justify recent construction in East
Jerusalem by settler organizations in defiance of demands from the US that
Israel halt all such work. In particular, US officials are objecting to the
recent takeover of property by settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood,
where Mrs Khurd used to live, as well as the Old City, Silwan and Ras al-Amud.
According to experts, however, the reality is that in both a
practical and legal sense Mr Netanyahu’s “open city” is a fiction, extended only
to the settlers and not to Mrs Khurd or to the 250,000 other Palestinians of
East Jerusalem.
Mrs Khurd, for example, has been forced to
live in a tent after settlers ousted her from her East Jerusalem home of five
decades in November. She also has no hope of moving back to the house taken from
her family in Talbiyeh, now in West Jerusalem, during the 1948 war that
established Israel.
In addition, movement restrictions mean that almost all of the
nearly four million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are banned from
entering the city or visiting its holy sites.
Inside Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, Israel enforces a strict
programme of segregation to disadvantage the Palestinians, says Jeff Halper, of
the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
Israeli Jews have the freedom to live in both parts of the city,
with 270,000 in West Jerusalem and a further 200,000 living in East Jerusalem in
rapidly expanding settlements heavily subsidized by the state.
Palestinians, meanwhile, are denied the right to live both in
West Jerusalem and in many residential areas of East Jerusalem. Even in their
tightly controlled neighborhoods in the city’s east, at least 20,000 of their
homes are subject to demolition orders, according to Mr Halper.
Daniel Seidemann, a Jerualem lawyer, says that in his 20 years of
handling residency rights cases for Palestinians he has never heard of a
Palestinian with a Jerusalem ID living in West Jerusalem.
The reason, he points out, was that almost all land inside
Israel’s 1948 borders, including West Jerusalem, has been registered as “state
land” managed by a body known as the Israel Lands Authority.
The authority allows neither Palestinians nor Israelis to buy
property on state land. Instead long-term renewable leases are available to
Israeli citizens and anyone eligible to immigrate to Israel under the country’s
Law of Return -- meaning Jews.
The settlements in East Jerusalem -- now covering 35 per cent of
the eastern city, according to Mr Seidemann -- are also built on land declared
as “state land”, in violation of international law. Again this means that only
Israelis and Jewish foreign nationals are entitled to lease land there.
Because they do not hold Israeli citizenship, the Palestinians of
East Jerusalem are disqualified from acquiring property either in West Jerusalem
or in the settlements of East Jerusalem.
“The extraordinary situation is that a Palestinian who had his
land expropriated to build the settlement of Har Homa [on the outskirts of East
Jerusalem] cannot lease land there, whereas a Jew from Paris or London who is
not even an Israeli citizen can.”
Mr Seidemann also pointed out that the country’s Supreme Court
ruled in 1978 that a Palestinian family forced out of what became the Jewish
quarter of the Old City in 1967 had no right to return to their property.
The court justified its decision on the grounds that each
religious community should have its own quarter. “However, that ruling has not
stopped the Israeli government from helping Jewish settlers to encroach on the
Muslim and Christian quarters.”
This week, the Israeli media reported, several families from a
settler organisation, Ateret Cohanim, had moved into a building in the heart of
the Muslim quarter. The property was bought by Ariel Sharon in the 1980s to
assert Jewish sovereignty over all of the Old City, although he never moved in.
Mr Halper says that in addition Jerusalem’s Palestinians, unlike
its Jews, face municipal policies designed to make life as unbearable as
possible. Demolitions of Palestinian property are widespread. Police, for
example, have torn down Mrs Khurd’s tent on six occasions since November and she
faces a series of fines.
“Even according to Israeli figures, East Jerusalem lacks 25,000
housing units to cope with the Palestinians’ minimal needs,” said Mr Halper.
“The land is available, it’s just that Israel wants to induce a severe housing
shortage for Palestinians.”
The hope is that they would move to the West Bank, he said.
Mr Seidemann said a handful of Palestinian families -- faced with
this housing shortage -- had managed to rent homes short term from Israeli
owners in East Jerusalem’s larger settlements, such as French Hill and Pisgat
Zeev. This marginal phenomenon, he said, had been misleadingly trumpeted as
proof of the “egalitarian nature” of Israel’s property laws.
According to the Israeli media, Mr Netanyahu’s remark may have
been intended to throw mud in the eyes of the US Administration as it steps up
pressure on Israel to halt settlement building in East Jerusalem.
Mr Seidemann said: “The [US] State Department understands these
issues better than Mr Netanyahu. There is zero possibility that his comments
will be treated as credible by any of their negotiators.”
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
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