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Jerusalem's growing web of walls
A holy city grows increasingly divided
Hassan Abu Asleh spent his working years laying the physical foundation for life in East Jerusalem.
Mr. Abu Asleh's career as an urban planner and surveyor began with the Jordanians who ruled the eastern side of the Green Line until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. When the Israelis annexed the eastern half of Jerusalem, "they took me with my table, my chair, my pencils, and maps. They needed me," says Abu Asleh. He retired last year to an airy, open home he built in East Jerusalem's Sur Bahir neighborhood, just north of Jamal Dirawi's village. Time has bleached Abu Asleh's close-cropped hair and lined his skin, but his hazel eyes still convey the thoughtful intelligence evident in early photos.
The Israelis were new to East Jerusalem in 1967, but they had ideas. Abu Asleh watched them extend the city's boundaries, confiscate Palestinian land for settlements, and institute new construction rules in East Jerusalem.
"Nothing happened to Palestinian land in Jerusalem without me having a finger in it," he says. "After the war, people had to apply again to build and the Israelis said, 'Wait, we want to do new planning,'" He pauses. "Today there are places that still haven't got permission to build."
Planning - the decisions about whether you can build, where and what you can put up - can determine the potential and limits of a community, and, to some degree, the lives of the people residing there. Building a school, park, business, or even just a home extension creates new options for communities and families.
In East Jerusalem, a thicket of bureaucracy and an absence of planning have stilled that potential. This is a deliberate policy, critics say, driven by the Jerusalem municipality's stated goal of maintaining a ratio of 72 Jews to 28 Arabs in the city.
Abu Asleh nudges aside the bowl of fat purple figs on his coffee table and pulls out maps of the Palestinian villages now part of Jerusalem.
Large kelly-green splotches enliven the charts, connoting the city's "open green spaces." These aren't parks, but private Palestinian lands where all building is forbidden. These areas make up 54 percent of East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD).
In the already crowded areas where building is allowed, complex restrictions and legal and financial hurdles delay construction for years.
And as Israel continues to confiscate land, the squeeze on Palestinian East Jerusalem grows ever tighter. Abu Asleh has only to look out his living room window to see 1-1/2 acres of family land seized for the creation of a Jewish neighborhood in 1970. This July, a confiscation notice arrived for his remaining 2-1/2 acres, claimed for barrier construction.
"It makes me feel ill," he says, curling a fist against his chest as he turns from the window. "I have the land under my feet now, that's it. And it's not just my story; it's the story of everyone in my village. There's not an inch for people to grow or expand."
As a result, when families expand, Palestinians build illegally.
In response, Israel demolishes. Israel has destroyed an estimated 2,000 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem since 1967 and has more than 1,000 demolition orders outstanding, according to ICAHD.
"It is part of the strategy," says Shuli Hartman of Bimkom, a group of Israeli architects and planners who study Israel's use of urban planning. "There has been no planning in these neighborhoods, so anything they do is illegal."
After a home demolition, families are forced to move, often outside Jerusalem. If they do, the Ministry of Interior invalidates their ID; they can no longer enter the city legally.
"In Jerusalem, Israel turned urban planning into a tool of the government, to be used to help prevent the expansion of the city's non-Jewish population," Amir Cheshin wrote in his 1967 book, "Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem." A retired army colonel, Mr. Cheshin went on to become a mayoral adviser on Arab affairs in Jerusalem.
"The idea was ... to move as many Arabs as possible out of the city," he wrote. "Policy in east Jerusalem was all about this numbers game."
The floor-to-ceiling windows in Benny Kashriel's office offer a view of single-minded determination in the form of row upon row of neat, new steeple-roofed houses. Mr. Kashriel is mayor of Maale Adumim, the 30,000-strong settlement east of Jerusalem. As an assistant to Israel's housing minister in 1980, when Maale Adumim was founded, then as mayor for the past 14 years, Kashriel has been concerned principally with the settlement's safety and growth. He says the Defense Minister recently assured him that Maale Adumim will fall within the Jerusalem district fence, part of the barrier projected to swing out some 9 miles into the West Bank, far beyond the current borders of the settlement's urban center.
Kashriel, an urbane man with a politician's easy warmth, says he isn't all that impressed. "The fence doesn't give security," he says. "It's more a temporary medicine for politicians under pressure."
The mayor believes security can be built in other ways, though, and there are seemingly few restrictions on his community's expansion. "In the next five years, we'll build neighborhoods between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim and you won't even know you're leaving Jerusalem," he says. These neighborhoods, along with the barrier, form what Israel calls the "Jerusalem Envelope."
Another 2,000 units planned for the settlement's eastern edge will extend its reach toward the West Bank city of Jericho.
For Kashriel, the impetus to build on the West Bank side of Jerusalem amounts to a case of "us or them." "If Maale Adumim wasn't built 23 years ago, there would be one big belt of Palestinian towns around the east of Jerusalem," he says.
While the barrier and Israeli housing regulations are converging to squeeze Palestinians out of Jerusalem, the Maale Adumim expansion project - named "E1" and deemed a top priority by the Defense Ministry - will effectively block any future Palestinian state from attaining easy access to Jerusalem, says Jeff Halper, coordinator for ICAHD.
"Jerusalem is being transformed from a city into a region that cuts the West Bank into north and south islands," he says. "E1 is the key to dividing and controlling the West Bank."
Seideman likens Israeli policy in and around East Jerusalem to Russian Matryoshka dolls. "It's about containment, within containment, within containment," he says of the barrier, the settlements, the E1 plan and the roads that ring East Jerusalem. "Every time the Palestinians turn around they bump into something. You think you're finished with one doll and you get another."
The image of imprisonment resonates bleakly for Jamal Dirawi. The border police no longer rob him of sleep - a court appeal put a temporary stop to the raids - but anxiety keeps him awake now.
"We have the advantage of our families and houses, but we're becoming prisoners on our own land," he says. He's sitting under a leafy almond tree in his front yard surveying the village's golden-green hills. He used to tell visitors proudly of an Israeli journalist's description of Nu'man as "Eden." Now it is becoming something altogether different.
The water and electricity haven't been shut off yet, but the army confiscated 36 acres of land this month and began the final barrier section around his village last month. A political consultant for the Palestinian Authority, Dirawi sounds increasingly worn out. "It's a matter of days before life shuts down here, they're squeezing us out of this place," he says. "We don't know yet if they're going to build us a gate to get in and out."
His 6-year-old daughter wobbles by on her bike and training wheels. He worries about what to say on the day the barrier cuts her off from her school in a neighboring village. It's easier to find words for the adults around him. "We're going to stay," he says. "We're not leaving." He says it again, perhaps to convince himself as much as his listeners, and then adds an afterthought. "We have no place to go."
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TOM BROWN - STAFF
SOURCE: FOUNDATION FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE, NEGOTIATION SUPPORT UNIT
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