Yossi Sarid wrote, sardonically, in Haaretz today that Fayyad’s “scheming knows no bounds or fences. After mapping Israeli neglect precisely, he leaped into no man’s land. If Israel will not build and renovate the schools in East Jerusalem, then he will step in to fill the vacuum. If Israel neglects the roads and sidewalks despite repeated complaints, he orders them repaired and paved. And as if that provocative and scandalous interference were not enough, he has the chutzpah to openly celebrate the completion of these works. That won’t do. Netanyahu and Mayor Nir Barkat and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch will head him off. Fayyad may spend money in our stead, but quietly. The right to noisy celebration is reserved for the Jewish settlers of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. Our right to the entire city of Jerusalem has expired, and not only because half of it is Arab and has remained so despite all the cleansing and Judaization efforts. Our right expired because we never genuinely joined it together. Just the reverse: We divided and governed, stole and inherited, and even the new wall we stuck in its heart in order to divide it, Hallelujah”. This is published here.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff wrote, in another piece in Haaretz, that “Senior military sources were critical yesterday of Israel’s conduct in the Fayyad visit to East Jerusalem. They said that Israel had made a mistake when it opted to confront the PA prime minister over the visit. ‘Were it not for Israeli objections, no one would have paid attention to Fayyad. But we are the ones who helped him make the rounds of the international media’, the sources said. They noted that Fayyad lives in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and as such is in Jerusalem and its environs all the time in any case … [But] On Monday, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch issued an injunction banning any Palestinian Authority activity inside Israeli territory”. This article added that “Fayyad also promised that the PA will continue its assistance to Palestinian institutions in the city, especially educational institutions, and would help build new schools and offer other services”. It can be viewed in full here.
The Jerusalem Post reported that “In response to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s dedication ceremony at a PA-renovated school in east Jerusalem on Tuesday, MK Danny Danon (Likud) toured a girls’ high school in the capital’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to check out school conditions in the area … Danon visited Al- Mamunia Secondary Girls’ School in Sheikh Jarrah, a 10th-12th grade high school with 1,452 students. He was shocked at the small amount of Hebrew the students were learning at municipality schools: Students at Al-Mamunia learn Hebrew for three hours per week, compared to five hours per week for English, and fewer than 10% of the students speak Hebrew at even a basic level … Danon said he would speak to the education minister about looking into increasing Hebrew requirements in Arab schools … Danon had originally planned to be at the same school dedication ceremony as Fayyad to reassert Israel’s sovereignty over the area, but he decided not to enter the area after police reported that there were 400 residents ready to protest his arrival … ‘The fact that he [Fayyad] wants to come and dedicate schools in east Jerusalem is crossing a line, it’s crossing a red line, and I’m happy that we managed to clear up his visit’, said Danon as he stood on a hill overlooking a renovated school in Shuafat, which is on the other side of the security barrier but still within Jerusalem boundaries. ‘But we have to understand that the authority of the Education Ministry and the Public Security Ministry inside these areas in Jerusalem is minimal’ … The Association for Civil Rights in Israel estimates that there is a shortage of at least 1,000 classrooms in east Jerusalem, and says that the Education Ministry and the municipality are not building classrooms fast enough to keep up with the rapidly growing population.” This is posted here.