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Sharon Moves to "Settle" the Jerusalem Question

By Henry Norr

To anyone passing through East Jerusalem or nearby sections of the West Bank in recent months, it’s been painfully obvious that big changes are under way—changes that could, if not
soon reversed, all but extinguish the prospects for peace in the region.

It’s not just the Wall, growing from day to day in all its concrete ugliness, as it snakes through the Palestinian towns and villages north, east, and south of the city. It’s also the elaborate international-border-style “terminals” Israel is building to replace the once-ramshackle facilities at the major checkpoints at Qalandia, on the road north to Ramallah, and on the Hebron Road leading south to Bethlehem. And the construction cranes you see everywhere in the hills to the east of the city, as settlements like Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa expand and giant new developments like Nof Zion take shape. All in all, as the head of the Israeli organization Settlement Watch put it recently, the Israelis are “building like maniacs” around Jerusalem.

In one sense, this is nothing new—Israel has been building on Palestinian lands around Jerusalem ever since its soldiers seized the area 38 years ago. Regardless of who’s in power—Labor or Likud in Israel, Republican or Democrat in Washington— and no matter what’s happening in the so-called “peace process,” the Zionists have been busy establishing what they call “facts on the ground.”

But if you put all the pieces together, you begin to sense what’s different: Ariel Sharon evidently thinks he has a unique opportunity, thanks to the unstinting support of the U.S.A. and the illusions he created in some circles by pulling his settlers out of Gaza, to impose a unilateral and irreversible solution—a final solution, you might say—to the question of Jerusalem, one of the most contentious issues between his country and the Palestinians.

Shortly after occupying the Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel redrew Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries: to the 38 square kilometers of the city Israel had controlled since 1948 were added not only Arab East Jerusalem (6.4 square kilometers) but also 64 square kilometers belonging to villages north, east, and south of the city. Defying international law, Israel then annexed this entire area; the U.N. Security Council (including the U.S.) declared this annexation “invalid,” and to this day few nations recognize it.

Those borders weren’t big enough for Sharon, though. In defining the route of the Wall, he has created an even larger entity the Israelis call the “Jerusalem envelope,” which combines the post-1967 municipality with the large settlement blocks of Giv’at Ze’evto the north, Gush Etzion to the south (west of Beth-
lehem), and Ma’ale Adumim to the east.

The eastern extension is especially notable. Ma’ale Adumim itself, a settlement-city that looks like it belongs in the San Fernando Valley, is the largest Jewish colony in the West Bank, with a fast-rising population already totaling more than 30,000. But the wall surrounding it will also take in the nearby industrial park of Mishor Adumim and the currently undeveloped zone known as E-1, where Israel plans to build a giant police headquarters and a whole new town. Altogether, it will add another 60 square kilometers of Palestinian land to the “envelope.”

What makes the Ma’ale Adumim salient significant is not just its size, but also its location: extending almost halfway from Jerusalem to the Jordanian border—at the point where the West Bank was already at its narrowest. In effect, it divides the West Bank in two, making it easy for Israel to block movement between Bethlehem and Hebron in the south and Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin to the north. (Actually, there will soon be three parts, because the northern section will soon be cut in half again when Israel finishes extending the Wall around the settlement of Ariel and completes a huge new checkpoint under construction at Zaatara/Tappuah, between Ramallah and Nablus.)

Surprisingly at first glance, the Wall’s route leaves a few small pieces of post-1967 Jerusalem on the Palestinian side. Why? Apparently it’s because Israel’s goal is never just to maximize the amount of Palestinian land it can steal; it’s also to minimize the number of Palestinians left within its boundaries. In a few places, such as the densely populated Shu’afat refugee camp north of the city, the Israeli planners evidently decided they’d rather give up the land than take its residents.

In all, at least 55,000 Palestinians who now hold Jerusalem ID cards will find themselves walled out of the city, while some 196,000 will be left on the Israeli side.

This is a tragedy for both groups. Those who live on the Palestinian side will lose access to Jerusalem’s religious sites, schools, hospitals, jobs, and markets, on which they’ve depended for decades; many will be cut off from friends and relatives. (Israel promises that it will build gates and create a system of permits to alleviate such problems, but Palestinians living near sections of the Wall already built know how hollow such promises prove to be.)

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Jerusalemites left on the Israeli side will be isolated from the rest of the West Bank - not just by the Wall, but by the Jewish settlements growing into a tight ring around them. Their neighborhoods will no doubt face the same treatment they’ve been getting since 1968: grossly inferior municipal services, denial of permits for new construction that’s desperately needed to accommodate population growth, and frequent demolition of housing built without permits (or for any other pretext). And new settlers will keep arriving, even within well established Palestinian communities such as Silwan and even the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. (Many of these urban “in-fill” settlements are financed an American Jewish doctor named Irving Moskowitz, whose millions come largely from a casino he runs in a poor, predominantly Latino section of Los Angeles County.)

Israelis make no secret of the underlying objective of their policy in these areas: sooner or later, they hope, their Palestinian subjects will be so beaten down that they’ll give up and move out. The Israelis even have a name for this process: “slow transfer.”

Although Palestinians, supported by the ISM, progressive Israelis, and other internationals, have mounted non-violent demonstrations against the Wall in Abu Dis and other towns around Jerusalem, the area has not seen the kind of sustained grass-roots campaign that has arisen in rural villages such as Bil’in today and Budrus and Jayyous in years past. That may be starting to change - in recent weeks (Nov. 2005) there have been major protests at the Qalandia checkpoint and in Eizarya (Bethany), one of the towns hardest hit by the Wall.

Given the present balance of power, though, it’s clear that Palestinians won’t be able to stop Sharon’s Jerusalem plan by themselves—the international community must step in. On this front, too, there are a few moderately encouraging signs: In August the International Crisis Group, an ultra-establishment NGO, issued a remarkably forthright analysis of the plan, appropriately entitled “The Jerusalem Powderkeg.” In November United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, usually wishy-washy on Palestine, issued a relatively forthright statement charging that further construction of the Wall and expansion of Israeli settlements—he singled out Ma’ale Adumim—are obstacles to “revitalizing the peace process.”

Shortly thereafter, the British press reported that the European Union’s Council of Ministers was considering a confidential memorandum prepared by the British Foreign Office accusing Israel of attempting a de facto annexation of the whole Jerusalem area. (As a friend put it to me, a confidential memo to make this point is like “a secret document revealing that the earth is round.”)

For the moment, the political forces opposing Israel’s plan for the Jerusalem area are no match for the Sharon and his American allies. But with the Bush administration imploding, Israeli politics in turmoil, and the world at last, perhaps, waking up to the tragedy at hand, there’s still a chance that the plan can be stopped.

If not, I think the conflict is bound to continue for years, perhaps generations, to come, because no one who knows Palestine believes its people will accept a peace that excludes them from their historic and religious capital.

An earlier version of this article appeared at the International Middle East Media Center (www. imemc.org).

Henry Norr, a journalist who was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle for participating in demonstrations against the war in Iraq, has spent three and a half months in Palestine over the last three years.