UN-Truth

Go west, Israeli authorities are suggesting to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.

To the West Bank, that is.

It is an offer to go into voluntary exile from people and places that have been most meaningful to these Palestinians’ lives — and this is not just insurance benefits, but family, friends, loved ones, stores, schools, places of worship, and much more.

They would then live in a completely different system under the Palestinian Authority, with little or no future access to Jerusalem barring an Israeli permit, or a miracle – and sometimes they are the same.

Silwan area activist Jawad Siyam, 35-year-old head of the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood’s Popular Committee, said in an interview on Saturday that two offers have been made in recent months to resettle him and his East Jerusalem neighbors in the West Bank.

One location is mid-way to the Dead Sea, at Mishor Adumim. The other is in Anata, which formerly had access to Jerusalem but which is now cut off by The Wall.

Both areas would be in the middle of nowhere.

Siyam lives in Wadi Hilweh, but has land is in the area where some 88 homes, housing about 1,500 Palestinians, are under demolition orders in the Bustan (Garden) area of Silwan just down the hill from Wadi Hilweh

“They want to take my land, and use it for a parking lot”, said Siyam, who was injured and hospitalized after a recent run-in with private Israeli security guards working for the “City of David” project just up the hill from where he lives and works. “When I realized that, I, too, felt that I would die rather than leave and lose my land”.

Then, he paused, and added that he didn’t honestly know if he would have the courage to stand and face the bulldozers, when they come.

At least one of the offers was made recently by a Yakir Segev, a newly-elected municpal council member who was given responsibility for the East Jerusalem portfolio by the newly-elected Jerusalem Mayor, Nir Barakat. Siyam said that when he objected to being asked to leave, Siyam said, Segev said offhandedly, “That’s life”.

That is life here, at least.

At a book reading (Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree) in West Jerusalem about a year ago, an American woman in the audience, who was visiting her sister who had emigrated or made aliyah to Israel, piped up to say, in all sincerity and candor, that she just couldn’t understand why the Palestinians, knowing that they are not wanted, don’t just leave.

That is the way life is here, and that is the way some (even many) people talk, here.

The evening before we met Jawad, there had been an eruption of a fight between two families in the neighborhood. At least one person died, and five were injured. Some reports say it erupted 24 hours earlier, with a slap to the head of a 10-year-old boy. Other reports indicated that drugs were involved. (Young men in East Jerusalem are terrified and furious, they are the target of any police hostility, their lives are completely expendable, and they have no future as far as they can see. The entire East Jerusalem population is complaining that they have no protection or representation from any Government or Authority. Drugs, smuggled via the West Bank from God-knows-where, are now one of the major social problems in the “crescent” of Palestinian communities that circle the eastern part of East Jerusalem, fromnorth to south).

Jawad, who said he is trying to mobilize his community on the principle of non-violent civil resistance, is still recovering from injuries he suffered a week earlier, in the middle of the night, when he went to help after an alert went out that a Palestinian woman and her small child were being jostled and insulted by armed private security guards deployed at the “City of David” visitor’s center just up the hill, which is also just outside the wall of East Jerusalem’s Old City, beside the Haram ash-Sharif Temple Mount where Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located. The western side of that mosque plateau is the Western Wall, believed to be part of the foundation of the second and maybe also the first Temples, and the most sacred spot in Judaism.)

Did he go to the (Israeli) police to complain about the beatings and his injuries? Jawad smiled and said no. He explained that the last time he went to the police to complain (about the activities of Israeli settlers in his neighborhood), he was accompanied by an Israeli lawyer from a human rights organization, and he was arrested by the police.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have a long list of grievances — not limited to their experience that they are not protected but only victimized by the Israeli police whose salaries must be paid in part by the taxes levied on Palestinian East Jerusalemites.

The Jerusalem Post reported that “Israel’s Magen David Adom [Red Star of David, the Israeli counterpart of the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations] rescue service does not enter Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem without police authorization and escort, a spokesman said Sunday. The clarification came a day after Israeli ambulances did not enter the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan during a clan dispute which left one person dead and several others wounded. Two Magen David Adom ambulances waited for two hours on the outskirts of the neighborhood, located just outside of the Old City of Jerusalem near the Dung Gate, during the incident, since they did not get police permission to enter, said MDA spokesman Danny Rotenberg.
He noted that MDA ambulances routinely enter Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem under police escort, but that in this case the situation was simply too dangerous to enter and so the ambulances waited at a parking lot on the edge of the neighborhood”.

The same JPost article also reported that “police had separated the two sides in the brawl – which was spurred by a Friday evening scuffle between two clans in which a 10-year-old boy was slapped – but did not find any of the weapons used in the shooting. About three hours later, with police still in the neighborhood, the shooting resumed, police said. Additional undercover forces were called in, and three people were arrested in the shooting. No weapons were found during a second police search”.

The JPost noted that *The neighborhood in question is at the epicenter of a controversial frozen municipal plan to demolish scores of illegally built Arab homes”.
It failed to note that it is virtually impossible for Palestinians in this neighborhood to obtain a legal permit.

And, in the JPost story, the same Yakir Segev mentioned above, who suggested that the Palestinian residents of these East Jerusalem neighborhoods move to the West Bank, commented to the JPost that ” ‘When it comes to anything related to law enforcement, police practically don’t exist in east Jerusalem’. He added that this not only hurt the quality of Arab residents of east Jerusalem, but also ‘critically damages’ Israeli sovereignty in the city. ‘If we will not enforce the law in east Jerusalem, then the PA, Fatah or even Hamas will’, he said”.

But, the problem as perceived by the Palestinians is that the police are ready to come in anytime to “search for weapons”, or to arrest residents who make complaints against settlers, but not to escort ambulances called to help injured Palestinians — or to protect the Palestinians in any way.

As the JPost put it, the residents feel that “police were simply disinterested in the goings-on in the Arab neighborhood of east Jerusalem since they were not terror-related”.

The JPost quoted Fakhri Abu-Diab, head of the residential committee for the whole of Silwan, as saying that “Had the police acted as needed, starting on Friday evening, we would have not reached this tragic ending … They had 24 hours to act … The writing was on the wall.”

Abu Diab added that the while the MDA ambulances hesitated to come in to assist the injured or the dying, Israeli officials by contrast routinely entered the neighborhood without needing police escort [though the police sometimes are asked to come along now] to issue demolition orders for illegally built homes.

Filed under: Human Rights, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians