Settlers strategically split East Jerusalem

On the eve of Israel's Jerusalem Day holiday, marked last Thursday, Jewish settlers moved into a vacant, dilapidated building in an Arab area of East Jerusalem and began studying sacred texts. Their inspiration was religious, but the far-right politicians who encouraged them have a not-so-hidden agenda: making the city less Palestinian.

The move comes two weeks after 43 Palestinians were evicted in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood after they lost a legal battle against settlers.

In Jerusalem, what may sound like microgeography has far-reaching implications: New settlements in Sheikh Jarrah can, say settler leaders, cut off the Palestinian core in the Old City from the populous northern Palestinian neighborhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanana. Severing this link – and thereby breaking the continuity of Palestinian East Jerusalem – would make it even more difficult to enact a peace plan that includes a hand over of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Sheikh Jarrah is best known as the site of the American Colony Hotel and a nearby mosque, but the settlers emphasize that Jews lived in it before the Arab-Israeli fighting of 1948. They call the building "Simeon's Heritage Neighborhood."

"We aspire to [be] a prosperous neighborhood with a lot of people," says Tahel Elinson, a settler activist. Another settler, Ephraim Giami, linked the move to Ezekiel, chapter 36, which speaks of the destroyed being restored and the House of Israel being rejuvenated.

"They want to take our neighborhood house by house," says a Palestinian woman who asked not to be identified.

Benny Elon, an ultra-nationalist member of the Knesset who is spearheading the settlement effort, puts it this way: "If you don't create facts on the ground, everything blows in the wind. We saw that during Barak's time – Jerusalem was on the negotiating table."

Mr. Elon says the new sites are links in a map of Jewish territorial contiguity in East Jerusalem. His plan is to ring the old city with 17 settlement points, some just a few houses, but one, with 130 planned units. Many of the points already exist, the houses or land purchased privately but the security, roads, and infrastructure paid for by the government.

In Sheikh Jarrah, at the traditional burial site of the Judean sage Simeon the Just, authorities last month paved a road for three closely guarded settler houses. The left fork, which accesses Palestinian homes, remains a dirt path.

Since 1967, Jerusalem's neighborhoods were almost all segregated, until Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spearheaded a Jewish drive into the Old City's Muslim quarter during the 1980s. At present, up to 2,000 Jews live within the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The more than 215,000 Palestinians in the city comprise roughly a third of its population.

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