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JERUSALEM WEB REVIEW

June 2010

CONFLICT IN CITIES AND THE CONTESTED STATE Everyday life and the possibilities for transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and other divided cities

w w w . c o n f l i c t i n c i t i e s . o r g

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Jerusalem Web Review (June 2010)

Contents

Silwan

1. 'Israel's plan to raze E. Jerusalem homes is an obstacle to peace' 2. Crunchtime for Silwan 3. Jerusalem Municipality plans to demolish 22 houses in Silwan to build

archaeological garden. 4. The Dig Dividing Jerusalem 5. Price Tag in Silwan

Settlement Plans and Responses

6. What Freeze? 7. APN letter to Obama: Engage NOW to get Jerusalem under control 8. Jerusalem: An Open City? 9. Jerusalem master plan: Expansion of Jewish enclaves across the city 10. Planning committee to release blueprint outlining takeover of East

Jerusalem 11. Fatah warns Israel: No more Jerusalem settlements

Revoking residencies and expulsion

12. Barred from Jerusalem for crime of being Palestinian 13. Jerusalem politicians face expulsion - Israel creating loyalty test, warn

lawyers

Islamist groups

14. The Rise of Raed Salah 15. Police raid 'Hamas office' in east J'lem

Christian Minorities

16. 'No Quarter' for Jerusalem's Armenians 17. Greek Tragedy in Jerusalem

Jewish Ultra-Orthodox

18. The Orthodox Jews fighting the Judaization of East Jerusalem 19. Israel pressure to reform ultra-orthodox schools

Other Current Issues

20. Jerusalem Day 2010 Figures 21. New campaign promotes internal tourism to Jerusalem 22. Meretz Quits Jerusalem City Council 23. Museum of Tolerance Special Report / Part I: Holes, Holiness and

Hollywood 24. Police Kill Palestinian Driver in East Jerusalem

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Silwan

1. 'Israel's plan to raze E. Jerusalem homes is an obstacle to peace'

Haaretz Service, 30/6/2010 http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-s-plan-to-raze-e-jerusalem-homes-is-an-obstacle-to-peace-1.299171 EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton says 'settlements and demolitions of homes are illegal under international law.'

Israel's planned demolition of Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan is "an obstacle to peace," European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton said Wednesday.

The city's plan would raze 22 Palestinian homes and construct a tourism center in their place. An additional 66 homes built without the proper permits would receive approval retroactively.

The tourism center for the area, which is called Al Bustan in Arabic and Gan Hamelekh (King's Garden) in Hebrew, is to include restaurants and boutique hotels.

The city said it would help residents of the 22 homes due for demolition to move to other areas of Silwan.

The French news agency AFP quoted Ashton Wednesday as saying that "'settlements and the demolition of homes are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible."

Ashton added that the European Union has never recognized Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, saying that "if there is to be genuine peace, a way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states."

According to AFP, Ashton urged Israel "to refrain from measures which may undermine the ongoing proximity talks" between Israel and the Palestinians, where mediators shuttle between the two parties. "These talks enjoy our full support and the parties need to engage seriously in these negotiations."

Silwan is part of the so-called Holy Basin, just outside the walls of Jerusalem's famed Old City, and is believed to be the site of ancient Jerusalem during the time of the biblical kings David and Solomon.

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2. Crunchtime for Silwan

By Abe Hayeem, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, 30/06/ 2010 http://www.jnews.org.uk/commentary/crunchtime-for-silwan New clashes between Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem this week throw into relief a long running conflict in the holy city. Since Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, ultra-nationalist settler communities like Elad and Ateret Hacohanim have been infiltrating the heart of Palestinian neighbourhoods like Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah with the intention of creating an “undivided Jewish city”.

Maverick mayor Nir Barkat, an ex paratrooper turned businessman, is forging ahead with a programme of house clearances intended to forestall the possibility of a shared capital for the Palestinians and to alter the demography of the city to ensure a Jewish majority.

Despite pressure from Washington to halt demolitions and illegal settlement building, Barkat’s most controversial plan got through the first of three stages at a meeting of the Jerusalem Planning Council on June 21, with the world’s media in attendance.

The ‘King’s Garden’ plan designed by architect Arieh Rahamimov involves demolishing 89 Palestinian homes in the Al-Bustan area of the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan, home to around 50,000 Palestinians and 70 Jewish families.

Silwan residents’ opposition to the plan is backed by Israeli and international NGOs and peace activists. The US State Department reacted to the planning committee decision by saying it “undermines trust fundamental to progress in the proximity talks”

The response of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to meet President Obama next week, fell far short of all-out disapproval. He said he “hopes that since this project is only in a preliminary stage, that the dialogue can continue with those who have built homes on public land and it will be possible to find an agreed solution in accordance with the law.”

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Defence Minister Ehud Barak, speaking in Washington last week, simply noted the Jerusalem authorities’ “lack of common sense and sense of timing”.

In March 2010 Mayor Barkat presented his plans for Jerusalem to British media, and at Chatham House in London he said, apparently without irony: “The whole world is watching us. This obligates us, Jews and Arabs, to work together, without discrimination, to advance the city’s interests”.

Many felt rather that he should have been arrested as a war criminal for his push to Judaise the city under the pretexts of development, biblical archaeology, tourism and business.

The 89 Palestinian homes under threat are on a site where settlers claim King David wrote his psalms. ‘King’s Garden’ is intended as part of a ring of park projects around Jerusalem being pursued as a ‘Modern Vision’ for the city.

Ir-Amim, the Israeli organisation promoting a ‘viable and equitable’ Jerusalem, described the projected tourist sites as a “Disneyland” in a crowded Palestinian neighbourhood.

Excavations during the British Mandate period (1917-1947) revealed tunnels beneath Silwan dating from the Canaanite period 4000 years ago. But now unorthodox and dangerous archaeological techniques, condemned by Israeli experts, are being employed, tunnelling under Silwan’s houses and schools

These settler-inspired digs destroy the history of Jerusalem through other, mainly Islamic, eras but retain parts that aim to bolster Israel’s biblical claim to the land. Despite having failed to establish a connection with King David, they have renamed part of Silwan the “City of David” and set up a visitor’s entrance in an expropriated Palestinian house.

By extending the Jewish Quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old City into key areas of Silwan and driving Palestinians out of occupied land, the project contravenes Article 53 of the Geneva Convention.

Occupants of Palestinian homes targeted for takeover or demolition regularly face intimidation by extreme settler groups like ‘Elad’. These have been given free reign and backing from private and state security police.

International pressure has delayed the Al-Bustan demolitions. Now, a pall hangs over the lives of families in Silwan, afraid to lose their homes at any moment. Fakhri Abu Diab, an Al-Bustan resident whose house is scheduled for demolition, says anxiety destroyed the joy of his daughter’s wedding last weekend.

For 43 years the Jerusalem authorities have approved not a single development project for Palestinians, who are deprived of many basic rights and have no say in the numerous plans for Jewish-only projects on land expropriated by the State.

Orly Noy of Ir-Amim, says that since 1967 the State of Israel has built 50,000 housing units for Israelis in East Jerusalem alone, while in the same period, “it gave

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Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, whose numbers have since grown from 70,000 to 300,000, a total of only 5,000 building permits”. 1,010 Palestinian housing units were demolished in East Jerusalem over the past decade.

Despite its residents paying full taxes, Silwan has seen no improvement to its notoriously inadequate infrastructure and social provision, while the municipality has prioritised plans for more recreational sites for tourists. Inequalities in municipal services are well-documented in Jerusalem, which was intended under the 1947 Israel/Palestine partition plan to be administered under United Nations sovereignty as an international city or “corpus separatum”.

Netanyahu, under pressure from President Obama and Hilary Clinton, had ostensibly frozen all settlements and other changes to the status quo, including those in East Jerusalem.

Mayor Barkat seems to have decided to go ahead partly as payback for being ordered to evacuate an illegal settler building, the seven storey Beit Yonathan in the heart of Silwan.

He claims that “The new plan for Silwan allows for the addition of thousands of housing units for the Arab sector and the resolution of hundreds of construction violations”. But such expansion would be virtually impossible for Palestinians to implement, requiring access roads, parking and sewage infrastructure that simply don’t exist in Silwan.

An excellent alternative plan produced by the architect Youssef Jabareen, keeping all the existing homes, and also creating parks, was rejected by Barkat’s municipality.

In pursuing Barkat’s biblical fantasy for East Jerusalem Israel seems determined not to accept any limitations on its illegal territorial expansion, or its persecution and hounding of Palestinian residents. The recent killings on the Gaza flotilla and Israel’s evasion of any attempt to call it to account, as with its dismissal of the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead, lead to one logical conclusion.

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine concludes that unless the United States takes drastic action, like the withdrawal of billions of dollars of US funding for aid and weaponry; unless the European Union removes Israel’s trade privileges; and unless the call for comprehensive BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions) is applied, Israel will continue in its dangerous trajectory as a rogue state that is out of control.

Abe Hayeem is the Chair of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine.

The map of Silwan is from http://www.alt-arch.org/map.php

3. Jerusalem Municipality plans to demolish 22 houses in Silwan to build

archaeological garden.

B’Tselem Report, 28/6/2010

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http://www.btselem.org/English/Jerusalem/20100628_JM_Municipality_plans_to_demolish_22_houses_in_Silwan.asp

On 21 June 2010, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Planning and Building Committee approved the municipality’s plan to demolish 22 houses in al-Bustan, a neighborhood in the center of Silwan in East Jerusalem. In recent years, the Municipality has been advancing a plan to build an archaeological garden in the neighborhood. The plan calls for the demolition of a sizeable percentage of the houses in al-Bustan. The Municipality refused to discuss with the residents an alternative plan they proposed. The Municipality’s plan requires the approval of the District Planning and Building Committee, in the Ministry of the Interior.

According to the plan, one-quarter of the houses in al-Bustan (22 of the 88 houses) will be demolished and an archaeological garden will be built on the land. The Municipality proposes that the residents of the houses slated for demolition should move to another area in the neighborhood, and promises to approve retroactively the other houses, which were built without permits. However, the Municipality does not own the land in these other sections, so it has no authority or ability to make this offer to the residents. The families will have to purchase land and build their houses after the Municipality demolishes their property. Even if they manage to buy the land, there is no guarantee they will be able to build there. The substantial prerequisites for obtaining building permits that the Municipality places on East Jerusalem residents regarding proof of ownership and installation of the requisite infrastructure effectively prevent lawful Palestinian construction in East Jerusalem.

One thousand persons live in al-Bustan. Most of the houses were built in the 1980s and 1990s. A few were built prior to Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967. In November 2004, the Municipality began to promote a plan for an archaeological garden, known as “The King’s Valley,” which will surround the Old City. The city engineer, Uri Shetrit, ordered the demolition of all the houses in the neighborhood in order to increase the area of the archaeological garden. In early 2005, the Municipality began to carry out the directive. Residents of the neighborhood began to receive demolition orders and indictments were filed against them for building without a permit. At the time, the Municipality demolished two houses in al-Bustan. Currently, orders to demolish 43 structures remain in force.

Local residents requested the attorney general to prevent the destruction of the neighborhood. Also, international pressure was brought to cancel the plan. Subsequently, Mayor Uri Lupoliansky stated in 2005 that he had retracted the plan and that the residents would be allowed to propose a plan that meets their development needs. In August 2008, the residents presented their plan. The city engineer, Shlomo Eshkol, informed them that the plan would not be considered in the immediate future, and that the Municipality was proceeding with the plan to build an archaeological garden on the site.

The Municipality’s outline plan for the Old City, drafted in 1977, marked the existing structures in al-Bustan, although the neighborhood was classified as open space. Although more than thirty years have passed since then, the Municipality has refused to issue building permits or approve existing construction, except in isolated cases.

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Choking development of the neighborhood is a typical example of the Municipality’s planning and building policy in East Jerusalem since 1967.

This policy is especially problematic in that, in Silwan, plans are being advanced to develop the compound run by the settler non-profit societies Elad and Ateret Cohanim, and build the City of David National Garden, operated by Elad, which is being constructed between Palestinian houses surrounding al-Bustan. In addition, these societies are building institutions and parking lots, and archaeological excavations are taking place close to Palestinian houses in Silwan. Also, the Municipality has refrained from sealing a seven-story structure that Ateret Cohanim built in Silwan without a permit.

The plan to demolish houses in al-Bustan denies its residents the right to housing, which is derived from the right to an adequate standard of living as defined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In addition, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the occupying state to destroy the property of residents of occupied territory, who benefit from the status of protected persons, “except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military actions.” The Convention further states that “extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” constitute a grave breach of the Convention.

4. The Dig Dividing Jerusalem

By Ahdaf Soueif, The Guardian, 26/05/ 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/26/jerusalem-city-of-david-palestinians-archaeology

The search for the City of David may offer tourists a reminder of Jerusalem's ancient past.

But for the Palestinians whose homes are threatened by the excavations, archaeology is

merely the latest weapon being used against them.

If you walk out of Jerusalem Old City through its south-eastern gate and on to the perimeter road encircling it, you will most likely see several large coaches with elderly western tourists climbing out of them. You will see them stand at the low wall at the edge of the road and peer down into the lush valley with its pretty houses that nudge and lean against each other. The tourists may notice the woman marking exercise books on her sunny terrace, they may smile to see the bright-haired four-year-old riding her tricycle round the yard. Some of them will think of a favoured grandchild back in Kansas or Ottawa.

Now, if this were a scene in Italy, Spain, or even Turkey, we might have left it there: the tourists come, stare, spend money and go. But here their effect is devastating – and most of them don't even know it. For the town that nestles here, in this valley on the southern flank of Jerusalem, is Silwan, home to some 55,000 Palestinians, annexed by Israel along with east Jerusalem in 1967, and currently one of the hottest spots in the contest between the rights of the Palestinian townspeople and the plans that Israel has for the area – plans put into effect through a series of administrative

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measures, clandestine coalitions, and progressive-sounding projects. None of which could work without the funding that floods into Israel from the west.

What do the tourists know of this? These gentle, grey-haired folk have come here, on their Jewish National Fund coaches, to visit the archaeological dig for Ir David, the City of David, which, it is claimed, lies below the Wadi Helweh neighbourhood in Silwan and justifies the digging, the shafts and the tunnelling going on in the belly of the hill and under the homes of the people who live here.

Maryam puts aside the exercise books: "This road, from Jerusalem all the way down the valley, was a main road. People did good business here, if you had an ice-cream shop, a cafe, a barber, food shops, souvenirs. Then Elad came, the City of David Organisation; they take the people into their centre and they never see us."

Silwan, and particularly the beautiful Wadi Helweh – the Valley of Sweet [Water] – has always welcomed strangers. Traditionally, it has been the last resting spot for travellers approaching Jerusalem from the south and a favourite recreation area for Jerusalem's residents. People would come here for picnics, and in summer the cool caves of Ein Silwan spring were a much-loved playing space for children. Even now people ask if I am visiting Silwan for a shammet hawa, a breath of air, though there is hardly air to breathe with the dust and the noise Elad is generating.

Elad is an acronym in Hebrew meaning "To the City of David". Dedicated to "strengthening Israel's current and historic connection to Jerusalem", it was founded in 1986 by David Be'eri, who, "inspired by the longing of the Jewish people to return to Zion", left his elite army unit to set it up. For a long time Elad refused to reveal the names of its funders; eventually they submitted the names but successfully requested they be kept under privilege. Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich have been present at Elad events.

Elad set up a two-pronged strategy: to strengthen Israel's "connection to Jerusalem" they started to dig – under Silwan and into the land under the al-Aqsa mosque – for the biblical City of David and to create the Ir David tourist site. They called it "salvage excavation" to avoid getting official permits. The "salvage" has lasted for more than 10 years and Wadi Helweh's houses have started to sink into the hill.

To help "the Jewish people to return to Zion", in 1991 Be'eri started to acquire Palestinian property (supported by Ariel Sharon, then minister of construction and housing). His target was principally two Silwan neighbourhoods: Wadi Helweh and al-Bustan (the Garden).

The Abbasi family's home, with its nine apartments and two warehouses, was Be'eri's first target. Be'eri's wife, Michal, has described how he acquired it: "Davida'leh took a tour guide card and put in his picture, and for a long time he would take bogus tourists on a tour . . . and slowly he befriended Abbasi . . . Of course, it was all staged." In 1987, Elad pressured the government to declare the Abbasi house "absentee property" and in October 1991, Be'eri led a settler invasion of the house with the intruders singing and dancing and waving the Israeli flag on the roof at daybreak. The Abbasi family went to court and the Jerusalem district judge found "no factual or legal basis" for the takeover; indeed, he found it characterised by "an extreme lack of good faith".

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Yet still the property continues to be caught up in legal proceedings and Elad people continue to live in it – and to acquire more Palestinian property: to date Elad has gained control of a quarter of Wadi Helweh.

What is happening in Silwan is not unique; it is part and parcel of what is happening across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Only the specific tactics are different. Before I came to Silwan, I had been travelling in the West Bank for a week, noting how every Palestinian community has its appointed settlement, its stalking "other". There is hardly anywhere you can look up and not see a settlement lowering at you: bristling with barbed wire and flags and antennae and cameras and floodlights and – although you can't see them – arms.

Most scholars agree that, to this day, no evidence of the presence of Kings David or Solomon has been found at the site. But our group of elderly American tourists are spellbound by the stories they are hearing from Elad's guides, stories which are conjecture, projection and myth .

"I found a Byzantine water pit," Professor Ronny Reich of the Israel Antiquities Authority says. "They [Elad] said it was Jeremiah's pit. I told them that was nonsense." But for a long time the guides would tell the tourists that this was the hole Jeremiah was thrown into. Close to half a million visitors come here each year and are treated to the Elad version of history. Professor Binyamin Ze'ev Kedar, chair of the Israel Antiquities Authority Council, wrote in 2008: "The Israel Antiquities Authority is aware that Elad, an organisation with a declared ideological agenda, presents the history of the City of David in a biased manner."

None of this activity would have been possible without the support of the Israeli state. An Israeli activist tells me: "If you ask the Israeli government what is happening in Silwan, they say it's not a government matter; these are private people buying and moving in legally. But now [the east Jerusalem settlement of] Nof Zion is being built. The Zoning laws permit building there only on 37.5% of a piece of land. But Nof Zion has permission to build on 125% of the land! And inside Ras el-Amoud, above Silwan, they are building five-storey apartment blocks for settlers. But they refuse to allow Palestinian families to build a third floor on their house. A settler organisation buys a police station from the government. A bus line in Ma'ale Zeitim is diverted to serve a settlement. In Silwan, the City of David Organisation is telling the archaeologists where to dig and what to look for. So one has to ask the question with regard to the City of David Organisation and the state of Israel: which is the tail and which is the dog?"

A critically important study by the independent monitoring organisation, Ir Amim, reaches the same conclusion: "Elad, which is officially a private organisation, serves as a direct executive arm of the government of Israel, and enjoys comprehensive and deep backing by the Israeli administration." More chillingly, Doron Spillman, Elad's director of development, has said: ". . . We are almost a branch of the government of Israel, but without getting buried under government bureaucracy."

The main government project right now is for Jerusalem. And in Silwan and Jerusalem, on 12 May, Jerusalem Day, the day I visit, you can see it clearly. This morning, Silwan is blockaded by the police, and it's on alert. The settler, security,

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police and army vehicles racing up and down the roads are quietly monitored by the neighbourhood watch people. In the cafe at the bottom of the valley, three young men wipe tables and stock the fridge while keeping an eye on the jumpy young security guard who patrols in front of them.

"These are private security for the settlers. They don't go anywhere without them. They cost around 50m shekels a year. And they're paid for by the government. Out of taxes," says one of the young men.

"And the security are protected by the police, and the army's always round the corner. Just think what it's costing."

On the eve of Jerusalem Day celebrations, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: "Jerusalem is our city and we never compromised on that, not after the destruction of the First Holy Temple, nor after the destruction of the Second . . . There is no other nation that feels this deeply about a city."

Now, in the pleasant afternoon, I stand in the Solidarity Tent in al-Bustan with two men whose homes are among the 88 threatened with demolition to make way for an "archaeological garden in the spirit of the Second Temple".

"So they distribute bits of paper that say that since King David used to go for walks here, it's wrong that our houses should be here and it must just be a park. You notice that for them he is King David but for us he is el-Nabi Daoud: David the Prophet. So who holds him in higher esteem? Plus there's no evidence he ever walked here," says one.

"And what if he did? It was empty. You know, there's one thing we've held against our parents, our grandparents: that they left their land. They thought they'd be back in a couple of weeks. We don't have the excuse of ignorance. We are not leaving. And my children will not wash the dishes in their national park," says his friend.

In Silwan and Jerusalem, the conflation between settler rightwing ideology, government policy, big money, real estate interests and bad taste produces its unique blend of kitsch and nightmare. Under cover of excavation, massive infrastructure work is done in Wadi Helweh in preparation for the construction of an 115,000 sq m commercial centre, without a town plan scheme and without permits. The work stops only when it comes up against the foundations of Palestinian homes.

"The streets cave in," says one of the men. "You see that darker stretch of tarmac? We had to patch up the road. And the school: the floor of the classroom collapsed under the girls. Fourteen girls fell 2m into the tunnel they'd dug below the school. And we had to hush it up because they would have said the school was unsafe and closed it down." The Israeli military barricade continues to block Silwan's high street.

In Jerusalem earlier, I had seen thousands of young people who had been bused in from the settlements stream through the streets. Military police with guns and flack-jackets guard them. The Old City is closed – except to them. Women trying to take their children home are turned away from the gates of the city. Men carrying briefcases sit on raised pavements. More soldiers watch from the ramparts of the old

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city walls. From time to time the police come up to us: "You speak Hebrew?" No. "You speak English?" Yes. "Back! Move back!" A man standing next to us says maybe they want us to back off all the way to Spain. "Where are you from?" he asks me. Egypt. "Cairo?" Cairo. "May God forgive Cairo," he says.

Darkness settles. The Palestinian residents of Silwan feed their kids and hush them. They visit each other, chat, watch the news. In the cafe at the bottom of the hill the young men are courteous but not chatty. On their TV screen Alan Curbishley talks about the match that's about to start: the final of the Europa Cup. The young men keep one eye on the screen, the other, vigilant, is on their town. On the ledge above their heads, but hidden from their view, is the stage set up by Elad, with its "Lion of Zion" banners. And we can hear the amplified voices celebrating the three Israelis each being awarded the $50,000 "Lion of Zion" Moskowitz award for deeds that "deal with the challenges facing Israel in the fields of education, research, settlement, culture, security and more".

From the al-Aqsa mosque further above comes first the call for evening prayer, and then, for good measure, the Chapter of the Merciful: "Which then of our Lord's signs do you deny?" The lights in the Palestinian houses dot the hillside and the trees around the small cafe where I sit are also strung with fairy lights. In a layby 20m away an Israeli army personnel carrier stands poised, its blue lights flashing.

The Palestinians sense that Israel has moved from ihtilal to ihlal; from occupation to replacement, and that making life unliveable for Palestine's Palestinians is the prelude to transforming Palestine itself. This is what the money coming from the west will achieve. To see the future projected for Jerusalem, you need only visit the spanking new Jewish Quarter. Go into the Temple Shop and buy tea towels and doilies and puzzles featuring the Third Temple rising out of al-Haram al-Sharif in place of the Dome of the Rock. In this approaching future it will be impossible to look out at the landscape and think of continuity, or eternity.

In place of the old, mellow stone, of the interdependent structures, softened and polished by time, there will be the jagged and the new and the fake. In place of trodden paths along the valleys and children playing freely, there will be chairlifts and viewing points and fast food outlets and always, always the iron gates and the security checks and the ticket kiosks and the merchandising. In place of the thousands of stories laid down over the ages above, below and around each other, there will be one story – and it won't, actually, be the Jewish story, because the Jewish story in Jerusalem is indivisible from the Roman, the Byzantine, the Arab, the Muslim, the Christian. It will be a fake. Like the fake inscribed prayers or mezzuzas the settlers carve into the Arab houses when they take them over. Soon, in Jerusalem, if the world does not wake up, there will be one voice: the crash of the cash register.

5. Price Tag in Silwan

By Orly Noy, Ir Amim’s spokesperson, 15/06/2010

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/?CategoryID=327&ArticleID=733

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On June 13, 2010 it was published in the press that Netanyahu’s office prevented the demolition of homes in Silwan: The story began with the intention of the municipality to carry out an eviction and sealing order against Beit Yohonatan. As a result, right wing activists, including Member of Knesset Uri Ariel, demanded that demolition orders against hundreds of Palestinian homes in Silwan also be carried out. The orders were prepared, but cancelled at the last minute following the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office. This move agitated the right wing.

The latest intention of realizing the three-year-old eviction and sealing order against Beit Yohanatan, located in the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem, led Knesset member Uri Ariel to express his deep concern for the value of equality in the face of the law: in parallel to the eviction and sealing orders against Beit Yohanatan, Ariel demanded that the city destroy hundreds of Palestinian houses in Silwan that also have had demolition orders served against them.

Simply put, Knesset member Ariel suggested to the Jerusalem Municipality to adopt the tactics taken by extremists in the West Bank settlements: the price tag policy. After years during which the highest level politicians, including Knesset members and the Mayor of Jerusalem Barkat himself, tried to prevent carrying out the eviction and sealing order against Beit Yohonatan by using various tricks and legal maneuvering, Knesset member Ariel changes strategies and pulls out the stick: that every Palestinian in East Jerusalem should know that evicting a Jewish settler from his residence is liable to lead to the destruction of more than one Palestinian home.

The phenomenon of Palestinians having to build without permits in Jerusalem is clearly a political issue, whose roots have been grounded in Israeli policy since 1967, when Israel sought to limit and even push out Palestinians from Jerusalem using various means. Whoever raises the notion of equality before the law should have a look at the following data: while the State of Israel has built 50,000 housing units for the Israeli public in East Jerusalem alone since its annexation in 1967, during those same years, it gave Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, whose numbers have since grown from 70,000 to 300,000, a total of only 5,000 building permits. Most of the Palestinian neighborhoods have not had effective master plans already for dozens of years, and even Yakir Segev, who holds the portfolio of East Jerusalem in the Jerusalem municipality and is identified as being on the right, admitted that Palestinians have to be more than a saint in order to receive a proper building permit.

From the correspondence between Knesset member Ariel and the director of the Jerusalem municipality, it becomes clear that in accordance to new policy, the issue of housing demolitions in East Jerusalem now is being handled by the Prime Minister’s Office and requires its approval. If this is indeed the case, the Prime Minister should be blessed for his understanding that this is a sensitive issue that demands the consideration of the head of the government. In the last few months alone it has proven again and again that as long as matters hinge upon Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, Israel’s foreign relations are at stake. In addition to the political aspect, Jerusalem’s security and stability need to be taken into account, as they are liable to be harmed as a result of the wave of demolitions that Knesset member Ariel wishes to promote in East Jerusalem. This is a consideration that the Jerusalem police must take into account, as they are responsible for the residents of the city, and not just toward political interests and so forth.

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As a result of the American pressure, Israeli building plans in East Jerusalem have been frozen already for several weeks. Logic demands that demolitions of Palestinian homes also be included in this freeze, as they represent two sides of the same coin: at the end of the day, the future of Jerusalem must be decided upon by negotiations table and not bulldozers.

East Jerusalem, Settlement Plans and Responses

6. What Freeze?

Settlement Report FMEP | Vol. 20 No. 3 | May-June 2010 May-June 2010 Settlement Report http://www.fmep.org/reports/archive/vol.-20/no.-3/what-freeze Construction Summary of 2009 There were 1,703 housing starts in West Bank settlements in 2009 according to data released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in February 2010. This number compares to 1,518 starts in 2006, 1,471 starts during 2007, and 2,107 starts in 2008, during which construction was expedited in the wake of the November 2007 Annapolis conference. Construction on 2,077 housing units was completed in 2009. CBS also reported that as of December 2009, soon after the construction moratorium went into effect, a total of 2,778 housing units were in various stages of construction in West Bank settlements. ————————————— Construction Freeze Compensation The [Israeli] cabinet will soon be asked to approve $27,000 in compensation to 3,000 settler families that were harmed as a result of the construction freeze. . . . Those families which received building permits by November 26, 2009, will be entitled to compensation. Each family will receive a sum equivalent to ten months rent in a house of equal value to the one they had planned to build. The amount will vary by community and the size of the house. Compensation requests may be submitted by September 26, 2011—one year from the freeze. Anyone who received a permit to establish a business will also be compensated. “We must not allow the failure of the disengagement repeat itself,” said Danon. “It is inconceivable that to date the state has not given so much as a penny to the very public that is paying for the freeze out of its own pocket.” Yediot Aharanot, May 14, 2010 ————————————— Houses in Exchange for a Sapling In January, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu planted a tree in the West Bank

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settlement of Kfar Etzion to mark the Tu Bishvat festival. There were twenty houses in the settlement that had already been sold, although the foundations had not been poured and their construction was halted because of the construction freeze (the foundations for 29 other houses in the settlement had been poured already and therefore were not affected by the freeze). When Etzion Bloc Council chairman Shaul Goldstein realized that Netanyahu would face resistance from settlers, he contacted the Prime Minister’s Office and negotiated an agreement that would calm the settlers. When officials from the Prime Minister’s bureau asked that Netanyahu be allowed to plant a tree in honor of Tu Bishvat in the Kfar Etzion settlement, Goldstein hinted that in exchange for agreeing to the request, officials would have to grant settlers concessions on the freeze on construction in the settlement. According to reports by Amihai Attali of Ma’ariv, the day after the tree planting, Kfar Etzion settlement received a verbal message from the Prime Minister’s bureau that the settlement would not be included in the freeze, and twenty houses were removed from the list. Amihai Attali, Ma’ariv, March 21, 2010 ————————————— Israeli Construction Company Demands Compensation for Freeze Construction companies affected by the settlement freeze initiated by the Israeli government have started suing the State of Israel for financial compensation. A construction company in Modi’in Ilit, Neot Hapisga, has filed a claim is demanding $4.8 million in compensation from the government for damages. . . . Neot Hapisga said it had been in the midst of constructing hundreds of housing units in the settlement of Modi’in Ilit, as part of an overall project to build 2,300 housing units. The company claims that the 10-month freeze instated by the government ruined its ability to fulfill obligations made to purchasers of the housing units, and that this did inestimable damage to its public image. Neot Hapisga says the sum of the compensation demanded takes into account [economic] damages as well as the damage done to its image. Yediot Aharonot, January 7, 2010 ————————————— According to data given to the Supreme Court on May 2, 2010, inspectors supervising the freeze have carried out 1,044 patrols and confiscated construction equipment 39 times. In 20 cases, violations of the freeze were razed by the Civil Administration, and in 15 others, by the owners themselves. A total of 427 cases have been brought before a subcommittee supervising the ban, and 389 requests for exemptions from the ban have been discussed. This week, the head of the Civil Administration’s infrastructure department, Lt. Col.

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Zvika Cohen, prepared a document listing 46 violations of the construction ban in the northern West Bank. Copies of the document were sent to the director of the Civil Administration and the heads of the regional liaison and coordination offices. Orders to raze the offending structures are first issued to the owners, who are supposed to do the job. If they do not, the Civil Administration carries out the demolition. Ha’aretz, May 11, 2010

7. AP8 letter to Obama: Engage 8OW to get Jerusalem under control

By Lara Friedman, Americans for Peace Now, 28/6/2010 http://peacenow.org/entries/apn_letter_to_obama_engage_now_to_get_jerusalem_under_control Today APN sent the following letter to President Obama, urging him to engage, urgently, on Jerusalem: June 28, 2010 Dear President Obama, As strong supporters of Israel and efforts to achieve peace, we ask you to take urgent action to address the rapidly deteriorating situation in East Jerusalem. This deterioration threatens everything you are trying achieving in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Recently there has been a steady stream of provocative Israeli announcements, decisions, and developments related to East Jerusalem. These include: * the decision of the Jerusalem Planning Committee to approve two plans to re-zone/re-develop parts of Silwan; * plans that include the demolition of at least 22 Palestinian homes and the post-facto legalization of a large settler apartment house; * reports that settlers (with support from right-wing Knesset members) are preparing to evict Palestinians from another property in Silwan; * Israel's decision to deport Jerusalemite members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) who are members of Hamas; * reports that the Jerusalem Municipality is moving forward with a new Jerusalem "master plan" that will, among other things, permit major settlement expansion in East Jerusalem as well as residential development in Silwan; * reports that construction has started at Shepherd's Hotel. Tensions in East Jerusalem are running high, and have already started to escalate into clashes between Palestinian residents of the city and Israeli security forces. Mr. President, it is urgent that you engage now, personally and resolutely, to convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to get Jerusalem under control. We urge you to take action now, before Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington next week.

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Failing this, it is likely that either another visit to the White House by the Israeli Prime Minister will be poisoned by events on the ground in East Jerusalem, or that any good will generated by the visit will shortly thereafter be destroyed by events in East Jerusalem. And failing this, it is a near certainty that the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace - and all that they mean for Israeli security, regional stability, US national security, and your broader foreign policy agenda - will be dealt yet another painful, and entirely preventable, body blow. Jerusalem can be brought under control if Prime Minister Netanyahu has the political will to do so. It is therefore imperative that the Prime Minister understand that you expect him to muster that political will. It is imperative that he realize that from the perspective of the White House, actions that destabilize Jerusalem and undermine the peace process are not mere local matters, but matters that impact directly on the national security of the United States. It is imperative, Mr. President, that Prime Minister Netanyahu understand that you, personally, care about what happens in Jerusalem, and that, as Israel's best friend and ally, you expect him to take your concerns seriously. Sincerely, Martin Bresler Debra DeLee Chair President & CEO

8. Jerusalem: An Open City?

Ir Amim and Bimkom Report, June 2010 To read the full report: http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/openCity.pdf Introduction

Of all the issues that comprise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem is one of the most, if not the most complex. Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and massive construction of thousands of housing units for the Israeli public in the annexed territory, along with the enormous growth of the Palestinian population, which today constitutes more than one third of the city's residents, has made the city's geopolitical and demographic reality an extremely complex mosaic. However, as a rule, Israelis and Palestinians have preferred to maintain their national distinction by living in separate and usually homogenous neighborhoods. In the last few years, this trend has been changing, mainly by an increased Jewish presence in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Even though this change clearly is driven by ideological motives, it is being treated as a simple real estate issue. Moreover, very senior figures have justified this trend with the argument that Jerusalem maintains a free real estate market in which each resident can establish residence wherever he or she pleases, regardless of their national or religious identity. Thus, at a cabinet meeting on July 19, 2009, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared, in response to reports of pressure from the US administration to stop Israeli

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construction in East Jerusalem, that "there is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in West Jerusalem and no ban on Jews buying or building apartments in East Jerusalem – it is a policy of an open city and an undivided city, that is not separated by religion or national identity." Various political and public figures recently made similar comments in reference to Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, as if there were a neutral policy allowing all residents of the city to purchase homes in any area of their choice. The renowned Jewish author Elie Wiesel reiterated that point when he said "Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city." The question of construction in East Jerusalem is a complex issue in and of itself. The report by Ir Amim and Bimkom, "Making Bricks Without Straw: The Jerusalem Municipality's New Planning Policy for East Jerusalem" shows how limited construction options really are for the Palestinian residents of the city even inside East Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods. This brief report sets out to examine the declarations about a policy of an "open city" that supposedly exists in Jerusalem, and the possibility for Palestinian residents of the city to buy homes anywhere in Jerusalem, including West Jerusalem, and to ask: is that so? Categories of land ownership

As a rule, land in Israel is divided into two categories: privately-owned land (including church properties) and state lands. State land is administered by the Israel Land Administration (ILA), a legally appointed statutory body;, the Jewish National Fund (JNF); and the Israel Development Authority. The ILA is in charge of three kinds of land, which, combined, constitute 93% of the total land of the State of Israel: · State land -- land the State of Israel "inherited" from the British Mandate, and land purchased or expropriated for it after Israel was established. · J8F land -- land purchased by the JNF since it was founded in the early 20th century, designated for Jews only. · Land belonging to the Israel Development Authority – a body established in 1951 to administer lands expropriated under the Absentee Property Law and transferred, sold or leased to the Development Authority by the Custodian of Absentee Property. According to the basic law establishing the ILA and the covenant signed between the state of Israel and the JNF, a person wishing to purchase ILA land, or a building constructed on ILA land, does not acquire ownership of the property itself but rather leases it under a development contract or a leasing contract for residence (a "lease for generations" is for 25 years and up). An ILA leasing contract is restricted to people who are citizens of Israel or who are entitled to become citizens under the Law of Return (namely, Diaspora Jews). The Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who are not citizens of Israel but rather have the status of permanent residents, are not entitled, therefore, to lease ILA land. Who has access to the land? Even though, as a rule, land is transferred from the ILA to private hands by leasing rather than purchase of the land, since the mid- 1990s the ILA began, as part of a series of government reforms, to capitalize saturated building in order to reduce citizens' dependence on the ILA and allow the land to be registered with the Land

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Registry. According to the recommendation of the "Ronen Committee" of 1997, a government committee for reform in ILA policy, "all capitalized apartments (whose full leasing fees were paid in advance) in the urban sector will be transferred to private ownership.” This arrangement would be possible, by agreement with the JNF, only regarding property built on state land or Development Authority land, and would not apply to JNF land, which continues to be available only to Jews (i.e., not even to the Arab citizens of Israel). In this way more than 400,000 apartments have already been registered in the names of their buyers at the Land Registry. In August 2009 an amendment to the ILA Law was passed in the Knesset, by which the lessees of 800,000 dunams would become owners of the land, but this reform has not yet been fully implemented.

9. Jerusalem master plan: Expansion of Jewish enclaves across the city

By Akiva Eldar and Nir Hasson , Haaretz, 28/06/2010 http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jerusalem-master-plan-expansion-of-jewish-enclaves-across-the-city-1.298651 The Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee is set to approve a master plan that calls for the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee is set to approve an unprecedented master plan that calls for the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, a move largely based on construction on privately owned Arab property.

The committee's proposal would codify the municipality's planning policy for the entire city. In essence, Jerusalem would uniformly apply its zoning and construction procedures to both halves of the city.

Before giving the go-ahead, the committee will give objectors to the plan 60 days to submit their reservations. This is the decisive stage in the planning process, because only rarely are plans altered.

Once the 60-day period expires, the plan's approval is a fait accompli. Such a development would probably invite a hail of criticism from the Palestinians, Arab countries and the international community.

The United States has recently communicated its expectation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will prevent any change in the city's status quo pending the conclusion of final-status talks with the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington early next month.

For over a decade, dozens of architects have worked to draw up the latest Jerusalem master plan, meant to replace the one in effect since 1959, eight years before the Six-Day War. While the plan did not attract opposition from the international community and leftist organizations, political developments over the last year - including the spat with the United States over the Ramat Shlomo building project - are likely to touch off renewed diplomatic tensions.

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According to a document prepared by Ir Amim, an NGO that "seeks to render Jerusalem a more viable and equitable city," the master plan vastly underestimates the construction needs of the Arab population in the city. While the plan calls for 13,500 new residential units in East Jerusalem for Palestinians, updated demographic studies indicate that this amount barely represents half the minimum needs for the Arab population by 2030.

Ir Amim officials also said that while the plan allows for Palestinian construction in the north and south of the capital, it barely provides for an expansion of Arab construction projects in the center of the city, particularly in the area next to the holy basin.

The group added that the plan creates a spate of bureaucratic obstacles for Palestinians who wish to build in the city. Ir Amim warns that the plan is likely to be perceived as an Israeli provocation because most of the Jewish building projects are designated for areas east of the Green Line.

In October 2008, the district committee opted to promote a master plan submitted by Moshe Cohen, formerly the chief Jerusalem planner at the Interior Ministry. Right-wing political parties in Jerusalem protested to Interior Minister Eli Yishai over the plan's intention to add significantly larger residential areas for the benefit of the Arab population at the expense of green areas.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat instructed his subordinates to alter the plan in line with his policy of thickening the Jewish presence around the holy basin and the eastern half of the city.

Despite the National Planning and Building Committee's decision to designate the City of David - which sits in the heart of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan - as "a national park," the new master plan allows for the construction of residential units in the area.

The Ir David Foundation, a non-profit group that seeks to increase Jewish settlement in the City of David and whose heads are close associates of the mayor, has in recent years bought houses near the Old City in an effort to "Judaize" the area.

Last week, the Jerusalem municipality's planning and building committee approved a controversial plan for the Silwan neighborhood that calls for razing 22 Palestinian homes built without permits and constructing a tourism center in their place. Barkat said the illegal construction in the area is preventing the municipality from building a tourism center, which would include restaurants and boutique hotels.

Earlier this year planning officials received an internal memo circulated by Cohen, who was later dismissed as head of the master plan staff. Cohen wrote that the plans for the City of David are an example "of the district committee's ambitious intention to satisfy contradictory positions." He warned that this would not pass legal muster.

Cohen objected to the city's decision to convert 2,500 dunams that were listed as "open areas" into residential neighborhoods.

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A Jerusalem municipality spokesman said in response: "Indeed, the plan will be brought for a discussion before the district committee." A spokesman from Yishai's office said: "Professional deliberations are taking place in an effort to approve the plan."

10. Planning committee to release blueprint outlining takeover of East

Jerusalem

By Akiva Eldar , Haaretz, 26/06/2010 http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/planning-committee-to-release-blueprint-outlining-takeover-of-east-jerusalem-1.298472?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.225%2C2.226%2C Approval of the plan is expected to result in a wave of protest from Palestinians and Arab states, as well as international criticism of the government in Israel.

The Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee at the Interior Ministry will publish in the coming weeks a new blueprint program for development in Jerusalem that will include plans to expand Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Most of the land earmarked for this expansion is privately owned by Arabs. If the plan is approved, after objections to it are heard, it will grant official approval to an urban plan for the Israeli takeover of East Jerusalem.

Approval of the plan is expected to result in a wave of protest from Palestinians and Arab states, as well as international criticism of the government in Israel. The U.S. administration has made it clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it wants him to prevent all change to the status quo in Jerusalem until the completion of negotiations on a final-status settlement.

In October 2008, the District Planning and Building Committee decided to advance the blueprint plan, which was prepared by a team headed by Moshe Cohen, who was the Jerusalem planning official at the Interior Ministry.

Right wing elements and factions in the Jerusalem municipality complained to Interior Minister Eli Yishai that the plan would add large residential areas for the city's Arab population, at the expense of open space and also argued it would take away from areas earmarked for Jews.

Mayor Nir Barkat ordered adjustments to the blueprint plan in line with his support for broadening Jewish presence in the Holy Basin in East Jerusalem.

Even though the National Planning and Building Committee had determined that the City of David would be categorized a "national park," the blueprint plan allows the construction of residential areas there.

The Elad NGO, whose heads are close to Barkat, purchased in recent years homes in the village of Silwan, which is near the walls of the Old City, in order to "Judaize" the area.

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Last week, the municipal planning and building committee approved Barkat's plans to destroy 22 homes in the Al-Bustan neighborhood, in the southern part of Silwan. Barkat explained that illegal construction in the area is blocking the plan to transform Al-Bustan, also known as Gan Hamelech, into a part of the national park.

A spokesman for the Jerusalem municipality confirmed that "in the coming weeks the plan will be brought for discussion before the district committee.

A statement from the Interior Minister's office said that "there are discussions at a professional level in order to approve the plan."

11. Fatah warns Israel: 8o more Jerusalem settlements

Maan news, 30/06/ 2010 Source: http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=295901 Bethlehem – Ma'an – Following an Israeli media report on the immanent construction of a 1,400-unit settlement hotel in East Jerusalem, a Fatah official said patience was running out, and warned the situation was at risk of an "explosion." The statement followed the airing of a Channel 10 News report on Tuesday, where reporters said the construction of 1,400-unit hotels on disputed lands in Jerusalem were given the go-ahead by Israel's regional planning committee. Representing Fatah, party member Usama Al-Qawasmi lashed out, saying the self-styled moderate political movement had had "long patience toward these provocative procedures." According to the report, two hotel buildings will be constructed on what was no-mans land until 1967, and is now located between the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpyot and the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal Al-Mukaber. Palestinian families say they hold deeds to at least some of the lands. The report was released one week ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to the United States, representatives of which have repeatedly called for a halt to settlement construction in the West Bank including East Jerusalem. Channel 10 quoted one Israeli official as saying “this approval is no more problematic than building works in the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo north east of Jerusalem." Al-Qawasmi did not share the same sentiment, saying the timing of the revelation just ahead of a US visit, where the White House hopes to "push the political process" could not go well. He called the decision to build "racist," and an "imposition," adding that the planning committee was "abrogating international law and decisions of the United Nations and the international community." The official warned that Fatah would not "stand helpless, it will defend its lands and

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peoples from Israeli provocations and threats." According to Channel 10, Netanyahu was not likely aware of the issue, as Israeli Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai would have made the decisions independently. The station did not accord a great deal of weight to the timing of the decision to build, saying that the project was lost in bureaucracy and regional committees since 2003 when the Israeli Society for Protecting the Environment filed a series of objections on environmental aspects in the planned construction. Last week, the report noted, a joint session was held for the pioneers of the project and environment society, where concerns were addressed and the plans given the go-ahead. According to this news report, tenders will be submitted to sell the land beginning to build the two hotels. Revoking residencies and expulsion

12. Barred from Jerusalem for crime of being Palestinian

Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 29/06/2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/barred-from-jerusalem-for-crime-of-being-palestinian-2013066.html Engineer's battle to overturn loss of residency highlights plight of thousands To say that Palestinian Murad Abu-Khalaf's roots are in Jerusalem is a serious understatement. His family lived in the Baka district of West Jerusalem until they were forced to leave in the war of 1948. They have since lived - and live - in the inner East Jerusalem district of Ras al-Amud. His family doctor father's clinic in East Jerusalem's main street of Salahadin is opposite three shops owned by each of his uncles. One of his brothers, also a doctor, works at one of Jerusalem's two main (Israeli) hospitals, the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre. The city is, in short, his home. But when the next hearing of a case of fundamental importance to the future of this super-qualified young man takes place in the Jerusalem District Court today, he won't be there. At the age of 33, he has suddenly become, to use his own word, "stateless". His only "crime" has been to spend several years in the US doing an electrical engineering PhD, completing post-doctoral research funded by a division of the US Army, acquiring high-tech work experience with the sole purpose of bettering his future career prospects in the Holy Land, and being a little homesick. Yet in 2008 the young Dr Abu-Khalaf became a statistic, one of a record 4,577 Palestinian residents to have their Israeli-conferred status as a resident of East Jerusalem revoked in that year and with it the right to live permanently or work in either Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories. It is this revocation which is being challenged in court on his behalf by the Israeli human rights lawyer Leah Tsemel today, and about which he says: "Losing my residency in my country is a source of

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pain to me... I feel I am being asked to choose between building my career and my homeland." For Dr Abu-Khalaf has been told his only chance of having the revocation "reconsidered" - and it's far from certain this would succeed - is if he gives up his high-flying job as a software developer, leaves the US and stays here for at least two years - maybe "working in a café", as he puts it. So far Dr Abu- Khalaf has been told he will no longer qualify for an Israeli travel document. He would still be able to visit the country as a tourist, though not work or live in it, and then only if he obtains a US travel document. If Dr Abu-Khalaf was an Israeli citizen he would be able to take up temporary residency for as long as he liked without losing his rights. But his case exemplifies the fragile status of more than 200,000 East Jerusalem Palestinians, who have Israeli conferred ID, and the right - denied to most West Bank Palestinians - to travel in Israel and access to certain benefits like Israeli health insurance, but not the security of full citizenship. According to Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO campaigning for an "equitable and stable" shared Jerusalem, the sharp increase in residency revocations are part of "an ongoing Israeli policy to reduce the Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem". When Israel unilaterally annexed Arab East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War - an annexation whose legality has never been accepted by most of the international community, including Britain - it offered Palestinian residents citizenship. But the large majority refused, believing that to accept would reinforce Israel's claim on occupied East Jerusalem. Part of Dr Abu-Khalaf's problem was that he applied successfully for a "green card" purely to maximise his job opportunities, but unwittingly reinforcing Israel's determination to cut off his Jerusalem residency. Dr Abu-Khalaf said when he was job-searching "many potential employers replied to me asking if I held a green card." They told him that "otherwise they could not employ me... I never knew it would cause all this fiasco." His father, Samir Abu-Khalaf, wanted Murad to return and marry when he had laid the firm basis of a career. "It's injustice to deal with us in this way," he said. "It seems they want Palestinians only to be workers, cleaners." To his son it is illogical that in an age when academic and corporate life is increasingly multinational, he should be penalised for participating in it. The loss of residency "in my home country", he said, is "at best inconsiderate... extremely backward looking, and short-sighted." An Interior Ministry spokeswoman said the law prescribed that East Jerusalem residents were treated like any other people with resident status, losing it if they are away for more seven years or take up residency elsewhere. Asked whether the position of native East Jerusalemites was not different from - say - those from France temporarily living and working in Israel she added: "If you want someone to justify the policy you are asking the wrong person. But it's the law."

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13. Jerusalem politicians face expulsion - Israel creating loyalty test, warn

lawyers Jonathan Cook, The Palestinian ,ote, 29/06/2010 http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/blogs/archive/2010/06/29/jerusalem-politicians-face-expulsion.aspx Israeli human-rights groups and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, have condemned a decision by Israel to expel four Palestinian politicians from East Jerusalem by the end of this week. The Israeli government revoked their residency rights in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, after claiming they were "in breach of trust" for belonging to a "foreign parliament", a reference to the Palestinian Legislative Council. All four men belong to Hamas and were arrested a few months after taking part in the Palestinian national elections in January 2006. They remained in jail until recently as "bargaining chips" for the release of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who is being held captive by Hamas. Observers say Israel's move reflects its anger at Hamas's growing hold on the political sympathies of Jerusalem's 260,000 Palestinians and is designed to further entrench a physical separation Israel has been imposing on East Jerusalem and the adjacent West Bank. Israel has not said where the three MPs and a former cabinet minister will be expelled to. The loss of residency effectively leaves the politicians stateless, in breach of international law, according to human-rights lawyers. Hassan Jabareen, the director of the Adalah legal centre for the Arab minority in Israel, said a "very dangerous precedent" was being set. "It is the first time Palestinians in East Jerusalem have had their residency revoked for being 'disloyal' and this could be used to expel many other residents whose politics Israel does not like. "This is a draconian measure characteristic of dark and totalitarian regimes," he said. The January 2006 vote for the Palestinian Legislative Council, in which Hamas won a majority of seats against its Fatah rivals, was the first time the Islamic party had participated in a national election. Jerusalem politicians were allowed to stand only after the international community insisted that Israel honour the terms of the Oslo accords. Unlike the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel following the 1967 war and its Palestinian inhabitants were given the status of "permanent residents". Israel has violated international law by building large settlements throughout East Jerusalem that are now home to 200,000 Jews.

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After the 2006 vote, the government of Ehud Olmert responded to Hamas's success in East Jerusalem by initiating procedures to revoke the residency of three MPs - Mohammed Abu Tir, Ahmed Attoun and Mohammed Totah - and Khaled Abu Arafeh, who Hamas appointed as the PA's minister for Jerusalem affairs. Before the revocations could take effect, however, Israel arrested the men, as well as dozens of other Hamas legislators, in retaliation for Sgt Shalit's capture four years ago. Since their release, all four politicians have had their Israeli identity cards confiscated and been told they must leave the city within a month. Mr Abu Tir, 60, was supposed to leave on June 19, but has so far evaded expulsion. "I will not willingly leave the place my family has lived for 500 years," he said last week. The deadline for the other three expires on Saturday. Unusually, the plight of the Hamas politicians has won the support of Mr Abbas, who also heads Fatah and has been seeking to overturn Hamas's rule in Gaza. Calling the expulsions one of "the biggest obstacles yet on the path to peace", Mr Abbas has vowed to put pressure on the US to reverse Israel's decision. During a meeting with three of the men last week, he said: "We cannot stand idly by while people are expelled from their homeland, which we consider a crime." Mr Abbas is reported to fear that Israel is hoping to establish a new precedent for expelling thousands of Palestinians from the city. Hatem Abdel Kader, Fatah's minister for Jerusalem affairs, was warned this month by the Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, that he would have his residency revoked if he continued his political activities in the city. Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said Israel was issuing "a very clear warning to Hamas and all those who promote terror" that they would face a "backlash". Lawyers for the four Hamas politicians petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court this month for an injunction on the expulsions until a hearing can be held on the men's residency rights. Last week, however, the court declined to stop what it called "deportations", saying it would issue a ruling at a later date. Mr Jabareen, whose Adalah organisation is advising the politicians, said he was "astonished" by the court's position, and that in all previous expulsion cases an injunction had been issued before the expulsion took place. He added: "Under international law, an occupying power cannot demand loyalty from the people it occupies. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are 'protected persons' in law and cannot be expelled."

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Israel has based its decision on the Entry into Israel Law of 1952, which governs the naturalisation process for non-Jews. It allows the interior minister to revoke citizenship and residency in some cases. "The purpose of this law is to oversee the entry into Israel of foreigners," said Mr Jabareen. "The Palestinians of East Jerusalem did not enter Israel; Israel entered East Jerusalem by occupying it in 1967." The revocations of the politicians' residency comes in the wake of a rapid rise in the number of Palestinians who have been stripped of Jerusalem residency on other grounds, usually because Israel claims the city is no longer the "centre of their life" and typically because a resident has studied or worked abroad. In 2008, more than 4,500 Palestinians lost their Jerusalem residency, interior ministry figures show. The number has been steadily rising since 1995, when 91 Palestinians were stripped of their rights. According to Israel, a total of 13,000 Palestinians have had their residency revoked since 1967. The loss of residency is seen by the Palestinians as part of a wider Israeli strategy to weaken their hold on East Jerusalem and its holy sites. Israel has built sections of its separation wall through Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, cutting off some 60,000 residents from their city. It has also shut down all Palestinian political institutions in Jerusalem associated with the Palestinian national movements, and banned events - including a literature festival last year - that it claims are financed with PA money. Last week police forced the closure of Hamas' political office near the Old City. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, had earlier accused Hamas of trying to buy property in Jerusalem. In early 2006, shortly before they were arrested, Mr Abu Tir and Mr Abu Arafeh were revealed to have established a diplomatic channel with several prominent Israeli rabbis to negotiate Sgt Shalit's release and the terms of a possible peace deal. The talks were effectively foiled by their arrests. In a related move, Israeli officials have also been threatening to revoke the citizenship of Palestinian leaders inside Israel, including Haneen Zoubi, the Israeli MP who was onboard last month's aid flotilla to Gaza that Israeli commandos attacked, killing nine passengers. Islamist groups

14. The Rise of Raed Salah

By Yaakov Lappin, Jerusalem Post, 29/06/2010 http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=179827

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The incendiary leader of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch is posing a growing challenge to the security authorities. Umm el-Fahm – the heartland of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch – was on the verge of full scale rioting in the hours after the Gaza flotilla incident. False rumors saying that its head, Sheikh Raed Salah, had died aboard the Mavi Marmara led dozens of masked youths to hurl stones at border policemen in Umm El-Fahm on May 31. “If it turns out Sheikh Salah is injured, there will be big problems here and across the Arab areas,” said Ibrahim Mahajane, a young resident of the town, as he looked at the disturbances unfolding. “Salah is our leader, not just here, but for all the Arabs in Israel.” Salah later returned to a hero’s welcome in the Galilee town, and delivered a characteristically fiery speech in which he predicted that “Zionism would end in Turkey.” Founded in 1971 by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, the Islamic Movement has become a dominant force within the Arab community, pushing aside secular Arab nationalist movements and promoting Islamist doctrines. In 1996, the movement split into two factions over the question of whether to participate in the general elections. The result was the creation of a more moderate Southern Branch, which is represented by Arab Knesset members. The Northern Branch, under Salah’s leadership, refuses to partake in Israeli democracy. Throughout the 1990s, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) monitored and closed down front organizations run by the Northern Branch, which were disguised as charities and transferred funds to Hamas in the West Bank. Today, the Shin Bet continues to closely watch the Northern Branch and Salah. Salah, who has served time in prison for transferring funds to Hamas, and who is arrested periodically and banned from Jerusalem for incitement to violence, leads an organization described by security experts as the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel. “The Islamic Movement is a faction of the regional Muslim Brotherhood organization. It is therefore the sister movement of Hamas,” said Ely Karmon, a senior terrorism expert at the Institute for Counterterrorism in Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center. “It operates like Hamas did before 1987, before the first intifada broke out and Hamas made a strategic decision to switch to terrorism.” The Islamic Movement’s current goals are to indoctrinate Israeli Arabs with Islamist ideology (an effort the Movement calls da’wa) and to confront Israel on the rhetorical battlefield.

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Salah, an expert media manipulator, will rarely allow more than a few weeks to go by before ensuring that his name or that of his movement are in the headlines. Last week, a delegation of the Islamic Movement headed by deputy leader Sheikh Kamal Hatib visited injured IHH members in a Turkish hospital. The visit followed repeated calls by Salah for more flotillas to be sent to Gaza and vows that he would board future ships. Earlier this month, far-left activist Tali Fahima, who served time in prison for passing on illegal information to Fatah Aksa Martyrs Brigade commander Zakaria Zubeidi, converted to Islam in Umm el-Fahm after being contacted by the Islamic Movement’s Sheikh Yussuf Elbaz. “THE ISLAMIC Movement’s da’wa system and its principles are completely identical to that of Hamas, and derive from the Muslim Brotherhood,” Reuven Paz, director of the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements at the Gloria Center, based at the IDC, said. At the same time, he added, the Northern Branch does not encourage acts of terrorism “and attempts to operate as much as it can within the framework of the law. In certain actions, it stretches the limits and violates the law, but only within the context of demonstrations and similar activities. Even then, these are mainly the personal acts of... Sheikh Salah.” The Islamic Movement cannot be described as preparing a generation of jihadis, but can be said to be instilling attitudes within Israeli Arabs that lead them to oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, said Paz. But while the movement has not become a full-fledged terrorist organization, it has played a key role in encouraging violence, and was behind the events that led up to the outbreak of the second intifada, Karmon argued. “In the 1990s, the Islamic Movement created an enormous underground mosque on the Temple Mount [in Solomon’s Stables], while constantly claiming that Israel was seeking to destroy the Aksa Mosque. This is why the second intifada is called the Aksa intifada,” Karmon pointed out. The Islamic Movement incited Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to violence, he said. Within Israel, one of the results of such incitement was the October 2000 clashes in the Wadi Ara region between Israeli Arabs and police, in which 13 protesters were shot dead. “At that time, the government and police did not know how to deal with the movement,” Karmon said. Similarly, Salah played an important role in the flotilla clashes, Karmon added. “He briefed Turkish IHH members, who later initiated violent action against IDF soldiers. He systematically confronts security personnel and the political authorities. Salah is a saboteur who seeks the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. His incitement is very severe, and his movement is very dangerous.” Paz said the Northern Branch did “endanger Israel’s security to a certain degree,” but added that its chances of recruiting the majority of Israeli Arabs to the cause anti-Israel political action “are quite low.”

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“Most of its subversive efforts have in recent years been directed toward Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. But there too, it does not form a real threat. The fact that the Northern Branch boycotts the elections to the Knesset as a matter of principle also lowers the threat that it could increase its influence,” Paz continued. Israel has so far refrained from outlawing the organization. “At this stage in its activities, I do not see a need to outlaw the Northern Branch,” Paz said. “I assume that, ahead of the next elections, right-wing circles will urge such action... [but] if the nature of the branch’s activities does not change beyond what they are today, I assume that the High Court would reject such an initiative.” For now, the authorities are attempting to keep Salah and his organization under close watch, without falling into the publicity stunt traps he appears to be setting for the state. Police and Shin Bet officials regularly meet to discuss the Islamic Movement’s activities, and have in the past equated the Northern Branch’s activities with actions by Hamas. Karmon, on the other hand, believes that the time has come to outlaw the Northern Branch. “In Spain, a democratic state, ETA and all of its front groups have been outlawed. Even ETA activists who protested outside Spanish prisons against the incarceration of ETA members were sent to prison. I see no reason why the same thing can’t happen here,” he said.

15. Police raid 'Hamas office' in east J'lem

By Abe Selig and Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, 06/20/2010 http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=178979 Armed with recently acquired intelligence information and an order signed by Police Insp.-Gen. David Cohen, Jerusalem Police on Sunday shut down an office in the eastern section of the city that had allegedly been used by Hamas as a fundraising and recruitment center. No violent incidents were reported as officers arrived at the office – located at 19 Haroun el-Rashid Street, near the Herod’s Gate entrance to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City – and carried out the order to shut it down. Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby confirmed that one man had been inside the office when police arrived early Sunday afternoon, although he was not taken in for questioning and complied with police orders to vacate the premises while the office was shuttered. Ben-Ruby added that the office had been a managerial branch of the movement, used for raising funds and recruitment, and was not part of Hamas’s military wing. Nonetheless, the move came some five days after Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Hamas was

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making a concerted effort to purchase land and properties throughout the Jerusalem municipal area. Diskin also said that, along with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and the Islamic Movement were all currently operating in east Jerusalem and that the groups were competing with one another in an effort to gain influence and widen their presence in the area. Also on Sunday, Nayef Rajoub, a Hamas legislator from the Hebron area, was released from Israeli prison after serving a 50-month sentence. Rajoub was one of 40 Hamas legislators and senior officials who were arrested by the IDF in the West Bank shortly after the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in 2006. Prior to his arrest, he served as Minister for Wakf Affairs in the Hamas-controlled government. In recent months, Israel has released many of the Hamas representatives who were arrested then. With the release of Rajoub, only nine Hamas legislators remain in Israeli prison. Another two Fatah legislators, Marwan Barghouti and Jamal Tirawi, are also in Israeli prison. Upon his release from prison, Rajoub urged the Palestinian Authority to stop security coordination with Israel “as a first step toward confronting Israel’s racist policies.” He also called on the PA to stop pursuing Hamas supporters in the West Bank. He is the brother of Jibril Rajoub, a former PA security commander and one of the prominent leaders of Fatah in the West Bank, who was one of the first to conduct security coordination with Israel. The former security commander was also known for his ruthless crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel’s decision to deport four Hamas legislators from east Jerusalem has angered both the PA and Hamas. The Ministry of Interior last month revoked the permanent residency status of the four men and confiscated their Israeli ID cards. The four were given one month to leave Israel or face detention. The Palestinians fear that the deportation of the four Hamas legislators [which was upheld by the High Court] could serve as a precedent for revoking the permanent residency status of thousands of Arab residents of Jerusalem. Last week PA President Mahmoud Abbas asked US special envoy George Mitchell to put pressure on Israel to rescind its decision. The PA has also sent a letter to the US Administration warning that such a move

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could lead to the suspension of peace talks with Israel. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said on Sunday that the decision to deport the four legislators was “one of the most dangerous decisions against Jerusalem and Palestinian legislators.” Haniyeh, who was speaking at a special session of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza City to discuss the repercussions of the decision, condemned the move as “another Israeli crime.” Christian minorities

16. '8o Quarter' for Jerusalem's Armenians

The Palestinian ,ote, 30/06/2010

http://palestinenote.com/cs/blogs/news/archive/2010/06/30/no-quarter-for-jerusalem-s-armenians.aspx

Washington - Despite having lived in Jerusalem for some 1,500 years and survived a genocide of their own, Jerusalem's Armenian community faces an uncertain future as Israel asserts it claim to the multi-religious city.

The Armenian population of Jerusalem's Old City, roughly a thousand strong, face double standards and territorial insecurity from the Israeli government, Reuters reported Monday. The Armenian Quarter community has resided in Jerusalem for hundreds of years, but "The withdrawing of ID cards is becoming very serious," resident George Hintlian said, adding that five locally-born Armenians lost their residency rights last month. The Israeli government encourages Jewish immigration, the report sad but "is not obliged to grant re-entry to other residents who emigrate."

The Old City is located in East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1967. Israel later announced the annexation of the city in a move never recognized by the international community. Ninety seven year-old Armenian Quarter resident and former schoolmistress Arshalouys Zakarian told Reuters that most often when children go abroad for school or employment, they fight a losing battle with the Israeli government to retain their residency rights. One man told Reuters, "For the first time in our history, we are not sure we can stay, after 1,500 years." His daughter was born in Jerusalem; now she can only visit but may not live in her home city.

The Armenian Church holds the small community together, Zakarian said. And Armenian Patriarchate officials "share a view held by the mostly Muslim Palestinians," the report said: "that Israel's designation of the whole city as capital of

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the Jewish state means its control of residence and building permits is being used to press Arabs and other non-Jews to give up and leave."

The Armenian Church feels relative security, Reuters said: "Its history, income from local rents and gifts from the diaspora, should assure the Church's future here." But the rest of the Armenian community does not feel as sure of its future in Jerusalem. "It's a demographic struggle," Hintlian said. "The basic struggle is to have numbers... Diplomats say, 'Look, the Armenians have a lot of space and very few people...'."

While the Israeli government says is respects the other faiths represented in Jerusalem and denies any discriminatory policies, Armenians feel they are being pushed out of their home.

'Full-time Palestinians' George Hintlian is a historian who makes it his business to preserve Armenia's legacy. "What remains of historical Armenia is these books. For a people who suffered genocide, it is very important," Hintlian said. The Armenian Genocide drove scores of displaced Armenians to join a small community of their compatriots in Jerusalem. However, Armenians rarely feel support from the Israeli state as fellow survivors of persecution, he said: "For the private Israeli, we are full-time genocide survivors ... But for the Israeli bureaucracy, we are full-time Palestinians." Reuters reported on the deteriorating situation in the Old City:

Many fear territorial designs on their Quarter, which covers a sixth of the square kilometre (230 acres) inside the walls but houses only a small fraction of the Old City's 40,000 people. It lies next to the Jewish Quarter, ravaged under Jordanian rule after 1948. Israelis have rebuilt and expanded it since 1967.

A rash of spitting at clergy in the street by ultra-Orthodox Jews in recent years add to a sense of siege among a community which traces its roots back to monks and pilgrims who settled in the 5th century. By the mid-1940s, the community numbered 16,000 across Jerusalem and other cities of British-ruled Palestine.

Dividing the Old City Many are concerned that Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations could see Jerusalem's Old City split - awarding the Christian and Muslim Quarters to Palestinian control and the Jewish and Armenian Quarters to Israeli control, though most proposed initiatives award the Palestinians control of the Armenian Quarter. If the city is divided, some Israeli ministers have made it plain, if they lose part of Jerusalem, they intend for what is left to be Jewish. Administrative alternatives like the Jerusalem Old City Initiative preserve the integrity of the Old City Quarters as they stand, but once a plan like the JOCI could be implemented, there is no telling what might be left standing.

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But the Armenian Quarter is not going down without a fight. "The Armenians had a hard life," Zakarian said, "but they are survivors."

17. Greek Tragedy in Jerusalem

Palestine Monitor, 10/06/2010 http://www.uruknet.info/?p=66927 Omar Ibn al-Khattab square, near the Jaffa Gate entrance of the Old City of Jerusalem, is a site rich with the memory of conquerors past. From Khattab himself through to Kaiser Wilhelm II and General Allenby in the 19th and 20th centuries, this has been the location of choice for victorious invaders. Over the past few years the area has witnessed new history being written. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Israeli government, and a settler organisation hiding behind shady offshore companies are conspiring to conquer the Old City in a new way. Its not easy to pinpoint when the saga began, but it gathered momentum following the March 18th, 2005 headline in right-wing Israeli tabloid Maariv that proclaimed “Omar Bin Khattab Square is ours”. It emerged that the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, one of the biggest private landowners in Israel, had issued long-term leases on two buildings running along the north side of the plaza. These include the Palestinian-owned Imperial Hotel and Petra Hostel, as well as numerous shops and houses. The buyers were to pay $135 million for a 99-year lease. Tenants of the buildings, including Abu el Walid Dajani, owner of the Imperial Hotel, received letters telling them to contact lawyers representing the new owners. “I was told to make an appointment with the office of Joseph Richter and gather together all documents and contracts. He claimed to represent the new owners” he told us. The issue became politically charged when it became clear that the offshore companies behind the deal – Gallow Global, Richards Marketing Corporation and Berisford Investments Ltd: one based in Guernsey, the other two based in the Virgin Islands – were actually a front for Ateret Cohanim, a right-wing Jewish settler organisation. Ateret Cohanim dedicates itself to the so-called ‘redeeming’ of properties in East Jerusalem and the Old City. This translates to moving them into the hands of Jewish owners. Indeed, the organisation’s website happily declares that “Jewish settlements establish the borders of the State”. The Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the Old City contravene the Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power may not transfer its population into occupied territory.

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In December 2009, it emerged that Friends of the Ateret Cohanim, a New York based group, claims tax-exempt status as a not-for profit, apolitical NGO in the US, despite funding activities that are clearly political in nature. The behind the scenes manoeuvrings that led to the deal are at least as intriguing as the chain of events they set off. Irineos I, the Patriarch at the time, gave power of attorney to the Patriarchate’s financial manager, Nikolas Papadimas, in May 2004, as documents from the Patriarchate show. The leases were signed in August and October of 2004. Lawyers representing the companies claim that they thought that the leases were made in good faith and with the authority of the patriarch. But the leases were never approved by the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate, a requirement for any property transaction. The deal has ground virtually to a halt, and no tenants have yet been evicted. Irineos was ousted as Patriarch by the Synod, and returned to Greece, demanding immunity from prosecution, but not before forcibly seizing his office in the church compound with an armed escort. Papadimas disappeared in November 2004 and is still on the run. He is believed to be somewhere in South America. He claims that he was working on the orders of Irineos, whilst conveniently Irineos claims that Papadimas was acting without his knowledge. Both have ignominious pasts that predate the Jaffa Gate drama. Irineos in particular has often been in hot water. In 2005 the Greek press reported that he had ties with Apostolos Vavilis, a drug dealer wanted by Interpol. Vavilis claimed that Irineos offered him $400,000 to run a “dirty tricks” campaign against his rivals for the Patriarchy. The manoeuvring for the position was rife with rumours and allegations, with Irineos accused of bribery and publishing forged photos of his rivals. The Jaffa Gate properties are so desirable to Israeli settler groups because they offer the possibility of breaking up the Christian and Muslim character of this area of the Old City, undermining the principles laid down in the “Clinton parameters” at Camp David in 2000, wherein Muslim and Christian neighbourhoods would become part of a future Palestinian capital. If Jewish control were established over the Jaffa Gate area and the nearby Armenian quarter this would create a contiguous Jewish presence from the west of the city to the Western Wall, a clear strategic investment for the Israeli government. For this reason the Israeli cabinet intervened once the embattled Irineos returned to Greece in disgrace. To officially become Patriarch in Jerusalem, a religious figure must be recognised by four governments: Greece, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. In February 2007 it was reported that Israel had withheld its recognition of the new Patriarch, Theophilos III, in an attempt to put pressure on him to recognise the legitimacy of the Jaffa Gate lease deal. In a 2006 meeting with Theophilos, cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi told him that Israel would only recognise his legitimacy if he complied with this demand. A document sent to the Patriarchate by minister Rafi Eitan, dated 9th October 2006, made further demands, including giving the Israeli government first right of refusal on

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any property put up for lease or sale. This came after a June 2006 letter to the Attorney General from Renato Jarach complaining about exactly this kind of government pressure. Theophilos’ lawyers described these actions as "flagrantly illegal effort to mix recognition of the patriarch’s election and matters relating to land transactions in which the government of Israel has no legitimate interest." An Ateret Cohanim member boasted, “everyone knows that if the patriarch wants to be patriarch, he must be acceptable to Mati [Dan, head of Ateret Cohanim]”. Israel eventually recognised Theophilos’ legitimacy. Abu el Walid Dajani, the owner of the Imperial Hotel who has been in close contact with the Patriarchate, claims this was due to the intervention of the United States. Further, a historical precedent has led some commentators to suggest that the Israeli government may actually be behind the deal financially. In the early 1990s, the Patriarchate sold St John’s Hospice, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to settler groups, who it conspired had been financed by the Israeli housing ministry, acting via a foreign company. Dajani is full of praise for Theophilos, comparing him to the 7th century patriarch Sophronius, for not caving in to the demands of settlers. Ironically, Theophilos actually positions himself as a Zionist, but his unwillingness to mix religion and politics has earned him the respect of the Imperial Hotel owner. If settler organisations do gain control of the Jaffa Gate area, it will be a tremendous blow for Palestinians in Jerusalem. But things look hopeful. In March this year, Renato Jarach, the lawyer representing the interests of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, successfully petitioned the Jerusalem District Court to throw out the case against the tenants until the legality of the deal is clarified. The case against the Patriarchate continues. Jarach is confident of victory and Dajani too, who will take heavy losses if the case is unsuccessful. If he loses, he will have to retroactively pay six years worth of rent to the new owners and may lose his hotel. “The Patriarchate can only buy and sell property with the approval of the Synod. This didn’t happen, so I am confident.” He would, however, be unwise to think his opponents have no more tricks left.

Ultra-Orthodox

18. The Orthodox Jews fighting the Judaization of East Jerusalem

By Nir Hasson , Haaretz, 24/06/2010 http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/friday-supplement/the-orthodox-jews-fighting-the-judaization-of-east-jerusalem-1.298113

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Leading the demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah are some young Israelis with a religious background. They explain their activism and how it correlates to their conception of the true meaning of the Torah

Not long before Hillel Ben Sasson attended his first demonstration in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Aryeh King − perhaps the person most identified with Jewish settlement there − declared that in the battle over the capital of Israel, the left had been defeated.

“In the past they organized demonstrations,” King told Haaretz last November, “but now we have made them understand that they have lost the battle. They can’t even recruit 20 people, and if there is a demonstration it’s Europeans who take part. Israelis don’t show up anymore. We have won.”

But King was wrong. A few days later, Ben Sasson and his friends joined the demonstrations in support of residents of Sheikh Jarrah, and thus launched a rearguard battle not only on behalf of the residents’ rights, but on behalf of both the status of the left in Jerusalem and their own identity.

“From my point of view, being in Sheikh Jarrah is the full and supreme realization of my religious existence,” Ben Sasson says, as he walks on a recent day through the neighborhood. “When I don’t show up on a Friday, I feel as though I have not put on tefillin [phylacteries] in the morning. When I am here, I am fighting against the expulsion of people who will become refugees for a second time, but also against the settlers − because they are trying to expel me from the boundaries of legitimacy. They are double enemies: They are trying to plunder the homes of the Palestinians and, by contrast of course, also the religion to whose God I pray.”

The eviction of a few families from Sheikh Jarrah last summer spurred one of the most intriguing protest movements in Israel in recent times. Like the weekly demonstrations against the separation fence in the West Bank villages of Bil’in and Na’alin, there is no single body behind this movement. A few dozen activists, in partnership with the residents, are its driving force. They have been joined, every Friday afternoon since last November, by between 200 and 300 people, only a few of whom are Palestinians or are not Israeli citizens.

It is possible to estimate cautiously that about half of the 30 key activists in Sheikh Jarrah are now or were in the past religiously observant. Most are young people in their twenties and thirties, and they represent an entire spectrum: religious, datlashim (formerly religious, but usually people for whom religion and tradition are still important to some degree ), datlafim (sometimes religious ), “transparent skullcaps” (bareheaded people who describe themselves as religiously observant ), secular, and those who do not want to specify their position along this continuum. In any event, nearly all consider Judaism and their religious education and background to be important elements in their political thinking and activism. They also wonder if their presence in Sheikh Jarrah spells the advent of a new phenomenon in religious society, or whether they represent a disappearing breed of the religious left.

The most veteran beard and skullcap in Sheikh Jarrah probably belong to Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights. For years the Reform

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rabbi, who speaks Arabic with a pronounced American accent, has fought shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and many other locales.

“I think this is a new phenomenon,” he says. “Something that crosses religions is emerging in Jerusalem today. [These are] young people who are not bound to their parents’ conventions and don’t care whether their partners in the struggle are religious or not, but all of them share the feeling that our future is in danger.”

‘Symbolic capital’

“I can imagine one of my cousins saying, ‘Again those leftists are identifying with the other side and not with the unfortunate people among us,’” Ben Sasson says. “But in Sheikh Jarrah there is no mistaking the good guys from the bad guys. No matter how you look at it or describe it − there is no way the settlers living there can be considered the good guys and the Palestinians the bad guys. Maybe in other places you can consider Palestinian suffering to be somehow relative, but here it’s so clear. And it doesn’t matter how what additional data you factor in or even if you ‘recruit’ Herzl [in your arguments]: It won’t make a difference.”

A few dozen Palestinian refugee families have been living in Sheikh Jarrah for the past 60 or so years. Of late, a company called Nahalat Shimon, an operative arm of settler organizations, has started to evict them, based on Jewish ownership documents from the end of the 19th century which have been validated by the courts (See box ). The settlers have already taken permanent possession of three homes. Many more Palestinian families are in danger of eviction.

Israeli law permits people to claim Jewish property abandoned almost a century ago, but does not permit Arab families to claim ownership over property they abandoned during Israel’s War of Independence. Thus, refugee families of 1948 are liable to become refugees again, in 2010 − and this asymmetry is nourishing the struggle in East Jerusalem.

Ben Sasson, son of the president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, historian Menahem Ben-Sasson, is currently writing his doctoral dissertation in Jewish studies. The subject: the explicit name of God. He describes the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations as “worship of Hashem [the Hebrew name for God]” and is very eager to engage his settler-adversaries in theological debate. It’s clear he has already rehearsed these arguments in his mind many times.

“If you take away their Uzis and kick out the police, sit us down and remove the media − they will leave with their tail between their legs,” he says emphatically. “In the Middle Ages disputations were held between learned Jews and Christians. Sometimes the Jews won, in which case they had to escape to avoid being killed. If you bring [the settlers] for a disputation now, I will win. All the Jewish sources are on my side. Their whole activity is twisted. What they are doing is desecration of God’s name, in the most explicit way.”

Asked to illustrate his thesis, he recites rapidly: “Ezekiel 33: ‘O mortal, those who live in these ruins in the Land of Israel ... and you shed blood, yet you expect to possess the land!’”

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Another longtime activist who has been prominent in the struggle, Assaf Sharon, 35, is less assertive in this regard. “There is no such thing as [one form of] Judaism,” he says. “There are many ideas and streams and motifs − some of them on our side [politically], others not. Unfortunately, the latter are more dominant in the society I grew up in.”

Sharon, now secular and a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Stanford University, attended a hesder yeshiva (combining religious studies with army service ), studying at Alon Shvut in the Etzion Bloc south of Bethlehem and Otniel Yeshiva, also in the West Bank.

“In one of the left-wing actions in the southern Hebron Hills, we escorted Palestinian children to school, with about 100 settlers surrounding them and the Jeep,” Sharon recalls. “They started hitting us and in the midst of all this I heard my name called. It was a friend of mine from high school, who was with them. In the middle of everything there were hugs, and the Border Police removed all the left-wingers, but took no notice of me, because I was with the settlers.

“I was alone facing 40-50 guys, who started to engage in a theological debate. ‘Plunder is plunder,’ I shouted at them, citing verses from here and there. It was interesting and enjoyable to argue, and it’s important for me to feel that Judaism is on my side, not theirs. I really do think that the right and beautiful parts of Judaism are with me, but there is also a great deal of racism and violence in Judaism. Roughly speaking, they are still with the early prophets, at the stage of the conquest of the land, and I am in the era of late prophets, building society. I say we have finished conquering the land, the War of Independence is over and the question that remains is what type of society we will have.”

Like most of his friends in the protest movement, Sharon is from a liberal religious family, a relative anomaly in the religious-Zionist landscape. One of the turning points in his political thinking and on the path that ultimately led him into the secular world was November 4, 1995 − the night Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

“It wasn’t done in my circles, but I went to the square that evening [for the peace rally] and after the murder I stayed until almost dawn. In the morning I went to the yeshiva. I was very religious then. That day the rabbi of the yeshiva told me that people from [the left-wing youth movement] Hashomer Hatzair wanted to meet with us.

“Just think what a crazy reversal it was,” he continues. “Rabin’s body wasn’t yet cold, and instead of us looking for a way to reach them and ask them for forgiveness − they come to us, on top of which the rabbi approached me because he knew I was considered left wing and that most of the students would not agree to meet with them. In the end, we met, but not in the yeshiva; in an apartment, so people wouldn’t see. The Rabin assassination became a ‘lever’ for the settlers: Not only did they not back down, but since then they’ve gained key positions, influence in the media, in politics and in culture. Most important, they seized control of the ‘symbolic capital’ of Israeliness. They are now identified as owners of the Jewish cargo. They constitute the hegemony.”

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Activist religion

Some members of the Sheikh Jarrah group associate themselves with the remnants of a liberal left-wing religious community which once existed in Jerusalem, but disappeared within the nationalist currents of religious Zionism.

“Sociologically, Jerusalem religiosity is far more pluralistic,” says Amos Goldberg, 44, who teaches in the contemporary Judaism department at the Hebrew University and is a major activist in the struggle. “The Jerusalem left is far less anti-religious and contains many more people who are now religious or were observant in the past.”

Sharon proposes a different explanation for recent left-wing religious activism: “Maybe it’s precisely because we did not come up through the intellectual left, but through Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful], where the principle is that politics must be manifested through activity − you have to be where things are happening and not only where it’s convenient to be. The idea is that political activity means action, not persuading someone you are in the right. Maybe from this point of view we are a lot closer to the ‘Zambish’ types [nickname of Ze’ev Hever, a settler activist] than to others. We also learned from them how to confront the state’s mechanisms.”

Goldberg mentions a “formative moment,” when he experienced the change that led him to Sheikh Jarrah − and even to a detention cell. A few years ago, he joined an escort group provided by peace organizations for Palestinian farmers who were being harassed by settlers.

“I was always left wing, but also a soldier. Suddenly I saw an elderly Palestinian who wanted to plow his field being chased away by a soldier. You identify instinctively with the old man, and you say, ‘That soldier is a brute,’” says Goldberg, a doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on Holocaust survivors.

“Suddenly you’re in reverse mode: My solidarity is unequivocally not with the state, not with its symbols and not with the police. I consider them ... I hold myself back from saying ‘the enemy.’ After that you can no longer see things as you did beforehand. I have not switched sides, but one’s map of identification changes and once it does, there is no going back.”

As a researcher who deals mainly with the Holocaust, Goldberg lets history direct his conscience: “At the personal psychological level, this is a matter of moral duty, the duty of those who are bystanders. It might be a large or a small injustice, but there is no need to wait until the situation becomes so extreme. When one sees injustice and racism such as we have here, you have to intervene.”

Goldberg ceased being religiously observant years ago but refuses to define his status today. His children are religious and he wears a skullcap. “It’s for protection against the sun and does not make it possible to define me. It’s also convenient, because I am getting bald,” he quips.

Indeed, he still sees hope in the thinking of some members of religious society, even settler circles: “The discourse of large swaths of the religious public is saliently racist. Their conceptual world resonates with ideas espoused by folk movements in Europe

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in the 1920s and 1930s. But at the same time, we have to remember that the greatest wrongs against the Palestinians were perpetrated not by the settlers, but by secular nationalism. To pin the blame on the settlers is a type of internal cleansing process that you find in Israeliness. It’s precisely within the religious-settler discourse that the potential exists for a different type of political discourse − one that is far more egalitarian. I am referring to ideas that spring from a religious worldview that will sanctify the entire region, because the land is God’s and not a nation’s. That is where ideas of equality can spring from.”

Goldberg draws the ire of his fellow protesters by not rejecting the name Simeon the Just, as used by the settlers, the Jerusalem Municipality and the police to denote the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, because the Second Temple high priest’s tomb is there. The debate around the name is the symbolic manifestation of the struggle for the neighborhood.

Goldberg: “The tomb of Simeon the Just was there for a great many years and did not bother the Palestinians. Jews came and there was no violence,” he notes. “I want to believe that a joint struggle should also give rise to new language. We have to find a way to say that it’s both Simeon the Just and Sheikh Jarrah.” Religion, he says, can be helpful in this regard.

To which Ben-Sasson responds, “If only the day will come when the name Al-Quds [the Arabic name of Jerusalem] will also appear at the entrance to the city. If only we will be deserving of this.”

Practice and belief

“To grow up in religious society means to translate your beliefs into deeds,” says Elisheva Milikovsky, a 27-year-old social worker who was raised in a national-religious home in the settlement of Efrat, near Bethlehem. “You don’t just sit at home and cogitate. You put into practice the things you believe in.”

Milikovsky gained fame a few years ago, when she became a one-woman institution looking after the African refugees who reached Israel. The standard operating procedure was for the army to leave the refugees it had rounded up crossing into Israel from Egypt on a street in Be’er Sheva, after which someone from the army would call Milikovsky and inform her. She did all she could to help the refugees get through their first days in the country. Since then she has continued to work with refugees, and this, she says, is what eventually brought her to Sheikh Jarrah as well.

“In Efrat it’s very obvious that the Palestinians are transparent people. You live in the settlement and don’t have the slightest notion of what’s going on around you. As a teenager I viewed myself as left wing, but the true change was fomented by my activity with the refugees. I made an effort to see the other side.”

Gil Gutglick, 44, production director at Keter Publishing House in Jerusalem, was not a political activist before joining the Sheikh Jarrah protest movement. He has long been secular, but admits that his religious past is one of the reasons he demonstrates in the East Jerusalem neighborhood.

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“My Jewish identification is very strong. I feel ashamed that the Jewish settlers are entering the homes [of the Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah] while the beds are still warm. That feeling of shame was the first thing that induced me to participate. Amos [Goldberg] sent me an email saying they needed people to be with them. I went after work that day and since then I have been in the neighborhood, whenever possible.”

Gutglick is one of 14 activists who are under court order to stay away from the neighborhood for five months, after being arrested in a demonstration on May 14.

“I am religious, but there was a period in which, even though I did not stop believing, I did not want to walk around with a skullcap,” says Netanel Warschawski, 27, who also works at Keter. “I was a bit ashamed that in the name of the beliefs of the settlers, and in the name of the skullcap, as it were − people say and do terrible things. I did not want to identify with that society, did not want them to think that I was like them, that we share the same views. Eight years ago I had an argument with friends, during which one said I was ‘shaming’ the skullcap on my head, and since then I decided that it is precisely an opposite symbol. I am proud to be religiously observant and I represent the religion better than they do. That is why I still wear the skullcap and go to demonstrations with it.”

The group of religious and formerly religious activists in Sheikh Jarrah includes young adults as well as people in their mid-forties. Their life stories are illustrative of the changes religious society has undergone in recent decades. Years ago, Goldberg and Gutglick participated in peace demonstrations of religious youth. Sharon, 35, attended the rally after which Rabin was assassinated. The young women in the group, Milikovsky and Shira Wilkof, 29, an M.A. student in town planning at the Technion − Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, are amazed to hear that such activities even existed.

“What I remember from the sixth grade, three years before the Rabin assassination,” Wilkof says, “was a rabbi who taught us Gemara in a special girls’ class. When he arrived for the first class he wrote on the blackboard, ‘A good Arab is a dead Arab.’”

On the night of the assassination she was in the Ra’anana branch of the national-religious Bnei Akiva movement. “I remember the spontaneous cheers of joy of children in the ninth grade when they heard about the murder,” she relates. “There were very few left-wingers where I grew up. That probably has something to do with the difference between Jerusalem and Ra’anana. In Jerusalem you had the liberal intellectual elite. But I am from the intermediate generation, in which there was a facade of open religious Zionism. An atmosphere of ‘You are either with us or against us’ has now taken over, so I suppose it’s 10 times harder these days.”

In contrast to Ben Sasson, Wilkof considers her activity the opposite of “worship of Hashem”: “My experience is totally different,” she explains. “There is no dimension of religiosity in my going to Sheikh Jarrah. On the contrary: It constitutes a very clear decision between the particularist, isolationist messages of religious society and messages of universalism.”

Gutglick, who until three years ago lived in the Galilee, has a distinctive take on the whole process: “I lived in a bubble and am missing 14 years of acquaintance with the

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changes that have occurred in Israeli society. Since I moved back, I have not been able to understand the hatred. I grew up in a right-wing society; we were taken on trips to Judea and Samaria, but there were other things, too. I don’t remember hatred like there is today − of Arabs, left-wingers, Tel Avivans, of the other.”

It seems that there is no simple answer to the question of what will be considered a victory in the Sheikh Jarrah struggle.

“It’s not the kind of thing where if you just solve something, everything will be all right,” Sharon explains. “What is happening there is a reflection of the foundations of the Israeli regime: the race-based privileges. So in a profound sense, success in the struggle will be almost a revolution.”

Late start

The struggle between the Sheikh Jarrah demonstrators and the Jerusalem police recently took a very peculiar turn. At 5 A.M. on Wednesday two weeks ago, police arrived at the home of the parents of one of the main activists, and asked her to accompany them for questioning. Her mother told the officers that her daughter was not living at home and refused to give them her address.

The next day, the young woman went to the police station at her initiative. An officer asked her to join him for a “conversation.” He told her that she had been summoned to the station in the wake of intelligence information, to the effect that she intended to set herself ablaze at the next demonstration. “I was told that I had written in Facebook that I was going to throw Molotov cocktails and set myself on fire to cause provocations,” she says.

The woman, who had never written anything remotely resembling that, told the interrogator, “You should question whoever gave you the information.” She was released after 20 minutes.

The activists believe that the fabricated report was given to the police by right-wingers as part of a harassment campaign. The activist’s name, along with the names of many others, was recently placed in right-wing websites calling for the harassment of protesters.

“Instead of dealing with the lawbreakers on the right, the Jerusalem police are continuing to pester the Sheikh Jarrah activists,” Assaf Sharon notes. “We filed complaints about harassment and threats from extreme right-wing activists three months ago. The police did nothing to investigate the threats or to put an end to them. That is another manifestation of the dangerous bias of the district police, which has become an operative arm of the right-wing associations. The police find themselves wasting their meager resources in futile pursuit of ghosts.”

A spokesperson for the Jerusalem police stated that, in the wake of “serious statements and grave actions attributed to the female activist, policemen searched for her the whole day to hand her a summons for questioning. Someone was found to be

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home before dawn, so the policemen arrived. At midday she appeared for questioning accompanied by her lawyer, was questioned and released.”

A simple question

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built in the 19th century as a luxury Arab quarter. The homes of some of the most distinguished and best-known Palestinian families, such as Nashashibi and Husseini, are still there. For centuries, the burial cave in the center of the neighborhood has been considered the final resting place of the high priest Simeon the Just. A small Jewish neighborhood sprang up around the tomb toward the end of the 19th century. Like similar Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, it was abandoned during the 1920s and 1930s, in part because of harassment by Arab neighbors.

During Israel’s War of Independence the Jordanians nationalized the land of the Jewish neighborhood in question and in the 1950s, 28 Palestinian families who were uprooted from their homes inside the Green Line were relocated there. The Jordanian government and UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency, settled the refugees for a symbolic price on land that had been purchased by Jews. In return, the Palestinians gave up their refugee certification and paid low rent.

In the early 1970s, two groups − the Sephardi Community Committee and the Knesset Israel (a term referring to the Second Temple period ) Committee − succeeded in receiving rights to land there from the Israeli custodian of absentee property, and registered it in their name. In 1982, the Palestinians made what, in retrospect, appears to have been a crucial mistake in terms of the continuation of their struggle. In the wake of misguided legal counsel, they signed an agreement recognizing the committees’ ownership of the land and in return were granted the status of protected tenants. Since then, the Palestinians and their lawyers have tried to disavow and annul the agreement, but all attempts have been rejected by the courts.

The situation of the Palestinian residents was aggravated after the Nahalat Shimon company purchased part of the land from the two committees. It is this company that has been waging the legal battle to remove the residents. To date, three families have been evicted. Legal proceedings are under way to evict many others as well. The evicted families erected protest tents on the sidewalks opposite their homes, which have become permanent sites of friction and confrontation with the settlers.

The legal proceedings over Sheikh Jarrah have serious political and moral implications. The Palestinian residents, who have almost despaired of the Israeli judicial system, are planning international action based on a simple question: Why did the Jewish committees receive their property, which was abandoned in the 1930s, by presenting Ottoman documents in court − whereas the Palestinians are unable to put forward an identical claim to property they abandoned in 1948? The families that were evicted say they are ready to forgo their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in return for properties they abandoned in the past in Jaffa, Tzrifin and elsewhere.

The settlers plan to demolish the 30 homes in Sheikh Jarrah and establish on their ruins a new neighborhood of 200 residential units, which will be part of a string of other communities planned in the area: the Shepherd Hotel compound, which has

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been acquired by the settlers’ American patron, Irwin Moskowitz, the Kerem Hamufti section and others. In such a scenario, the veteran Palestinian neighborhood will undergo rapid Judaization.

Given Israel’s current sensitive political situation, and in the light of the difficulties involved today in receiving authorization for housing projects that are far less provocative − it’s hard to see such a plan being approved in the foreseeable future. But in Sheikh Jarrah it sometimes looks as if not much more provocation is needed to ignite the powder keg called East Jerusalem.

‘This land is our land’

The leading spokesperson for the Jewish settlers, in what they call the Shimon Hatzaddik (Simeon the Just ) neighborhood, is Yonatan Yosef, grandson of Shas spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the son of former MK Yaakov Yosef, who has led the current struggle to integrate Sephardi ultra-Orthodox girls in the Haredi school in Immanuel.

Yosef downplays the phenomenon of religious demonstrators in the other camp. “I am there seven days a week and we have a photographer who films all their demonstrations,” he says. “The number of religious people is minuscule to the point of a non-presence. There are maybe a few with small skullcaps.”

In any event, Yosef continues, “Anyone who is religious and acts against the religious belief that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, anyone who has doubts and adopts the Arab narrative and marches under the PLO flag and pesters Jews who come to pray on a Jewish tomb − he has removed himself from the religious community.”

Nor does Yosef fear a theological disputation. “Why does the Torah begin with Genesis and not with basic precepts? The answer that is given is that the Holy One blessed be he created the world in order to give the Land to the people of Israel. They tell us that we are coming to steal, but how can you steal something that belongs to you? Anyone who argues otherwise is violating an explicit rule of the Torah − any infant who has studied a little of it knows that.”

Yosef also mentions large-scale demonstrations organized at the site by the right. “On Lag Ba’omer we had 27,000 people and on Jerusalem Day many thousands more, and the media make a fuss over 150 anarchists.”

19. Israel pressure to reform ultra-orthodox schools

By Wyre Davies, BBC News, 22/06/2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/10369998.stm Jerusalem Ultra orthodox, or Haredi, Jews make up 10% of the Israeli population and for thousands of years the way that ultra-orthodox Jewish children are taught has changed little and is based almost entirely on study of the Torah - the Jewish Bible.

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But now a group of leading secular Israelis wants to force the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, education system to modernise and adopt standard subjects like maths, science and English.

The reason, they say, is that thousands of Haredi students are unable or unwilling to participate in wider Israeli society and are becoming an increasing economic burden.

Last week, in ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, more than 100,000 devoutly religious men took to the streets in protest.

We try to keep the way we've been doing things for generations ... It's the same idea of studying the Talmud, an explanation of the Torah

On this occasion the men, clad in the traditional plain black clothing and distinctive headgear of Ashkenazi Jews, were campaigning for the right to educate their children separately from other Israelis - even from other Jews.

Education has become the focus of the many tensions between modern secular and ultra-orthodox Israelis.

A few days ago I was given rare access to the traditional and private world of ultra-orthodox education.

The Kol HaTorah Yeshiva, or religious seminary, in Jerusalem is regarded as one of the finest seats of learning for young ultra-orthodox boys.

In one, huge classroom several hundred boys - huddled together in groups of two or three - argued noisily.

Dressed in black trousers, plain white shirts with black velvet "kippas" or skullcaps, these teenagers were debating passionately - not about politics, history or sociology but about the Talmud - Jewish Bible studies.

It's all they study, day in day out.

Students at a Haredi seminary dedicate their lives to Bible study

About 10% of Israelis are ultra-orthodox, or Haredi - a figure that is growing, partly because they have very large families. One of the teachers at the seminary is Rabbi Yechezekel Koren.

He has 13 children of his own, all following an ultra-orthodox way of life.

The rabbi acknowledges that most of the boys he teaches will never work or participate in "wider" Israeli society - dedicating themselves instead to a life of religious study.

"We try to keep the way we've been doing things for generations - for hundreds, even thousands of years," he says. "It's the same idea of studying the Talmud, an

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explanation of the Torah. We see the success, the great success and don't want to change a thing."

Mixed education

An hour's drive from the Jerusalem yeshiva, but separated by thousands of years of style and tradition, is the thoroughly modern IDC College in Hertzliya.

It is a mixed campus of young men and women dressed casually and learning together.

A growing number of Haredim, who don't know anything about the outside world, is a real burden on the economy and wider society

Professor Amnon Rubenstein Former minister of education

Zammi Kobalkin went through the Haredi education system, but found himself totally unable to integrate outside that community.

"I didn't start doing my A,B,Cs until I was 23," says Zammi, who has now joined mainstream education and is a law student at Herzliya, but at the cost of being disowned by his ultra-orthodox family in Jerusalem.

Most Israelis are still educated in a mixed, secular environment. They use lap-top computers and study a wide range of modern subjects.

But the increasing number of ultra-orthodox students, funded by the state, is a dynamic problem that has to be addressed, says Professor Amnon Rubenstein. He is a former minister of education in Israel and now lectures at IDC.

"If you don't teach them maths, English or computing they cannot be integrated into Israeli society," says the professor, who has co-sponsored a petition before the Israeli Supreme Court which would force ultra-orthodox schools to teach some core, secular subjects.

Most Israelis study a secular curriculum in mixed schools

"A growing number of Haredim, who don't know anything about the outside world is a real burden on the economy and wider society," he adds.

Some, less strict Haredi schools, have relented and now teach a few lessons from the wider curriculum. But, sitting studiously beneath pictures of famous rabbis and reading passages from the Torah, most of what they learn is still Bible studies.

The debate over education between secular Israelis and the ultra-orthodox is passionate. There have been some changes but both communities are still a long way apart.

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Other Current Issues

20. Jerusalem Day 2010 Figures

Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies http://www.jiis.org/?cmd=newse.322&act=read&id=542

• In the end of 2009 Jerusalem population stood at 774,000 residents (provisional data, courtesy of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics)

• In 2008, the fertility rate (the number of children a woman is expected to bear during her life) of Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem became equal, and is now 4 children for both Jewish and Arab women in the city.

• Jews: The rate of women’s participation in the labor force in Jerusalem (50%) is higher than that of men (46%). In Israel as a whole the situation is the reverse, with the rate of women’s participation (57%) being lower than that of men (62%).

Geographic distribution of the population in 2008

• 456,300 residents (Jews and Arabs) lived in neighborhoods built in areas added to Jerusalem in 1967, representing 60% of the total population of Jerusalem – among the residents of these neighborhoods, 192,800 are Jews (and other non-Arabs) (42%), and 263,500 are Arabs (58%).

• 39% of the total Jewish (and other non-Arab) population lived in neighborhoods built in areas added to Jerusalem in 1967. 98% of the total Arab population in 2008 lived in areas added to Jerusalem in 1967.

Migration

• In 2009, 12,800 persons moved to Jerusalem and 19,900 residents of Jerusalem left the city. The negative migration balance stood at -7,100. (Provisional data, courtesy of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics)

• In 2009, 51% of residents leaving Jerusalem moved to the localities surrounding Jerusalem (West Bank Jewish settlements, west to Jerusalem in Jerusalem district and Modiin-Maccabim-Reut)

Religious and secular

• The percentage of Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews in Jerusalem is 3.6 times greater than their percentage in Israel as a whole. The percentage of religious (but not Haredi) Jews is 1.4 times greater, while the percentage of secular non-religious Jews in Jerusalem is less than half their percentage in the country as a whole. (The figures refer to adult Jews aged 20 and above, on average for 2006 – 2008, processed for the social survey of the Central Bureau of Statistics - CBS)

• 27% of Jewish men aged 15 and above in Jerusalem studied or are studying in a yeshiva (2008 census, CBS)

• Jerusalem’s education system 2009/10

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• The education system in Jerusalem is the largest and most complex in Israel, and serves almost quarter of a million students.

• 64% of the students study in Hebrew education schools and 36% learn in the Arab education stream.

• 62% of students in Hebrew education study in the Haredi stream, and 38% in the state and state religious education system.

Participation in the labor force

• Jews: The rate of women’s participation in the labor force in Jerusalem (50%) is higher than that of men (46%). In Israel as a whole the situation is the reverse, with the rate of women’s participation (57%) being lower than that of men (62%).

• The rate of participation in the labor force in Jerusalem is relatively low, with a slow trend towards a further decrease, from 46% in 2000 to 45% in 2008, despite the increase in participation in the labor force countrywide from 54% to 57%. In Tel Aviv, for example, the rate of participation in the labor force increased from 60% to 66%.

Tourism

• In 2009, for the first time in 5 years, there was a decrease in the number of tourists coming to Israel and to Jerusalem. It can be assumed that the global economic crisis contributed to this decrease. The number of hotel guests in Jerusalem decreased in 2009 by 17% relative to 2008, with 1,124,000 guests; 769,900 of these were tourists from abroad (70% of all guests).

• The number of tourists from abroad in Jerusalem’s hotels decreased by 29%, while the number of Israeli tourists in the hotels increased by 28%.

• Construction • Increase in the number of the residential apartments completed. In 2008 the

construction of 2,265 residential apartments was completed, in comparison to 1,755 apartments in 2007.

21. 8ew campaign promotes internal tourism to Jerusalem Ynet News, 1/7/2010

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3913036,00.html Objective of NIS 1M summer campaign is to position capital as attractive cultural destination for Israelis A new campaign titled "Take two days for Jerusalem" was launched recently with the objective to encourage Israelis to travel to the capital. It will offer attractive vacation packages and discounts at cultural sites. Launched with a budget of one million shekels, the campaign invites the general public to take part in some of the city's top cultural events, such as the International Film Festival (July 8-17), the celebratory reopening of the Israel Museum (July 29-

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31), the International Arts and Crafts Festival (August 2-14), and the Puppet Theater Festival (August 8-13). Partners in the campaign are the Tourism Ministry, the Jerusalem municipality, the Prime Minister's Office, the Jerusalem Development Authority, and the Jerusalem Hotel Association. As part of the campaign, special tourism packages will be offered that include tickets to events, discounts on accommodations in the best hotels in the city, and reduced rate entry to sites and tourism centers. For the first time, all people staying in the city during the campaign's events will be granted tickets to walking tours around the Old City and the west of the city. Among the tours offered will be a tour in the footsteps of the films being shown during the film festival, a tour in the footsteps of David Grossman's books, and more. Jerusalem: An attractive night spot The campaign, which will run until the end of August, intends to expose the Israeli public to the range of recreational options in Jerusalem, to increase the number of people staying over in the city and entrances to cultural sites, and to position Jerusalem as an attractive nightlife destination. To this end, ads will be run on the radio, in newspaper print ads, the internet. In addition, a booklet detailing the events and discounts offered during the campaign will be printed. Two weeks ago, the Jerusalem Light Festival in the Old City came to a close. The impressive festival, which included light shows, outdoor shows, and showcased the work of 70 leading artists from throughout the country, kicked off the city's summer events. Some 300,000 visitors from Israel and abroad attended the event. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat noted, "Jerusalem is in the midst of a revolution, and is taking its place as the cultural capital of Israel. This year, we are producing two and a half time as many cultural events than years prior. This is a direct result of the doubling of budgets while integrating Jerusalem art in cultural events throughout the city. "Together with the growing support for cultural centers in the city and the highest concentration of art schools in the country, the city's residents and tourists visiting it at an increasing rate are enjoying more shows, more international festivals, more street parties, and more events in a unique Jerusalem atmosphere."

22. Meretz Quits Jerusalem City Council

Yeshiva World, 22/6/2010

http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/Israeli+News/63292/Meretz-Quits-Jerusalem-City-Council.html

In response to the decision of the Jerusalem Planning Committee on Monday to approve the King’s Garden project in the Shiloach area of the capital, the left-wing Meretz Party has submitted its resignation from the council. Meretz Deputy Mayor

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Pepe Alalu was fired on Monday for opposing Mayor Barkat’s plan. When asked to confirm reports that he was fired, Alalu told Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) host Razi Barkai “yes because we have a dictator”.

The plan calls for razing 22 Arab homes towards rebuilding and rejuvenating the area, to build a major park project and installing modern electricity and sewage infrastructure. It is important to realize the homes being razed were built illegally, on public lands.

The homeowners being ousted, the overwhelming number of which living in primitive homes without sewage and electricity will be given land to build new homes.

Meretz strongly objects the city’s vision of improving the eastern areas of the capital, which it views the rightful property of Arabs and the future capital of the State of Palestine. Meretz remains an ardent supporter of protests against the growing Jewish presence in previously Arab-occupied areas of Yerushalayim, despite court validation regarding the legality of the home acquisitions, determined to hand the eastern areas of the capital over to Arab control.

Meretz officials on Tuesday announced the party will be submitting a no-confidence motion against the government in response to the Jerusalem approval of the plan which calls for razing 22 [illegal] Arab homes.

The US Dept. of State did not waste time and released a statement that the planning committee’s policy decision compromises ongoing efforts to advance peace initiatives between Israel and the PA (Palestinian Authority).

Seeking to allay any harsh Western response, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office on Tuesday released a statement that the plan is far from the implementation stage and it must pass many stages prior to any concerns to razing any homes. This is in line with reports that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has already reassured the White House that he will comply with its demands regarding concessions in the eastern areas of the Israeli capital despite the prime minister’s sharply contrasting public statements of White House defiance here at home.

(Yechiel Spira – YW, Israel)

23. Museum of Tolerance Special Report / Part I: Holes, Holiness and

Hollywood

Nir Hasson, Haaretz Special Report, 18.05.10 http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/museum-of-tolerance-special-report/museum-of-tolerance-special-report-part-i-holes-holiness-and-hollywood-1.290924 On the connection between the California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, run by one of America’s most famous rabbis, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and a feverish excavation at what is probably Israel’s most secret civilian building site.

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‘Removal of nuisances’

Aftermath of an excavation: one of many boxes of bones, a skull and a grave in which several bodies were buried. Now all that is left is a large lot with a huge open pit. Aftermath of an excavation: one of many boxes of bones, a skull and a grave in which several bodies were buried. Now all that is left is a large lot with a huge open pit. Sometimes a lack of sensitivity or even an innocent mistake exposes a major truth. On the Web site of Moriah, a public company for infrastructure work that belongs to the Jerusalem municipality, one can find descriptions of various projects in which the company is involved. Among them is the Museum of Tolerance: “The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the entrepreneur for the construction of the Museum of Tolerance in central Jerusalem, asked Moriah to carry out preparatory and infrastructure work for the project,” says the site. Immediately afterward, under the heading “Objective,” it says: “Carrying out infrastructure work, removal of nuisances in the area of the project ...” What the site calls “nuisances” are in fact skeletons, bones and skulls. Hundreds of skeletons that were buried in Jerusalem’s central Muslim cemetery over a period of some 1,000 years. A Haaretz investigation indicates that the “nuisances” were cleared away from the site swiftly and clandestinely during five grueling months of non-stop work. Testimonies of participants who worked at the site, which were obtained by Haaretz, indicate that the skeletons were removed as quickly as possible to enable the start of construction on the museum. “That wasn’t archaeology, it was contract work,” claimed one of the workers. The story of the Museum of Tolerance is one of a clash between worlds, between the concealed subterranean world of dead bodies − members of the Muslim community who were buried in the soil of Jerusalem − and an American Jewish institution in Los Angeles with Hollywood-style panache, the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The institution is headed by Marvin Hier, an American Jew who has an open door to U.S. presidents, and the man who brought California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Israel for the museum’s groundbreaking ceremony in 2004. Opposing him is the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who has tried to block the project, it has been claimed, out of cynical and political motives. The High Court of Justice was also involved in the story, with several petitions placed on its desk in an effort to prevent the realization of the ambitious and controversial project. The permission finally granted by the High Court to go forward was based on a controversial opinion submitted to it by the Antiquities Authority, and on the fact that the project was supposed to be designed by pre-eminent architect Frank Gehry, who has since withdrawn from the assignment. Also involved in the affair are two prominent former members of the Jerusalem municipality, who are currently suspected of criminal offenses in other real estate projects: former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was mayor of Jerusalem, and former municipal engineer Uri Sheetrit. Also involved in the story are Tel Aviv University and an archaeologist who works for the university, Alon Shavit. Shavit is a key figure in this story, who has held many

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jobs related to moving the graves located beneath the land on which the museum is slated to be built. Among other things, he was the expert responsible for the removal work and the contractor in charge of carrying it out, and the company he established paid the excavators’ salaries. There are also arguments among archaeologists. Now all that is left in the long and complex unfolding of events is a large lot with a huge open pit, in the heart of the city of Jerusalem. To this day, for most Jerusalemites, the Museum of Tolerance is the six-meter-high metal fence that surrounds a construction site that has been off-limits for the past six years. Unlike most other building sites − here it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a slit through which to peek inside. Along the top of the fence are security cameras and spotlights; parts of it are edged with barbed wire. During the months of excavation the site was probably the most secret civilian construction site in Israel. Today it is quite deserted. But if we could go back to the period from about November 2008 to April 2009, we would see a place bustling with hundreds of workers employed in the excavations in three shifts around the clock. The five months of excavation are documented in a series of exclusive pictures that are published here for the first time. In one picture a worn cardboard box takes up most of the photograph. Someone drew a schematic bone on the box as in a child’s drawing and wrote “scattered items,” and afterward erased the words. Other words are also erased. The number L4316 marks the “locus” − a sequential serial number in archaeological jargon. The box is far too small to contain the bones that stick out from both sides; the cover doesn’t close and is torn. Another photograph depicts an ancient skull that was apparently exposed to the light hundreds of years after its owner was buried in the Jerusalem soil. In the area of the crown one can see new fractures, perhaps from an imprecise blow from a hoe. Above it there is still a large rock, and to its right a cardboard box. In the top half of the picture one can sees it is broad daylight and young Israelis, the excavators, are engaged in their work. Anyone who so wishes can perhaps find in the hollow eyes of the skull a look of amazement at what it is seeing. In the past two weeks, in the open parts of the site that still constitute a cemetery, workers have suddenly begun to show up among the graves: As with a huge puzzle, the workers are reassembling the tombstones and more or less restoring the graves. The workers are emissaries, not of the government, but of the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement. Mohammed’s companions

The Ma’am Allah cemetery (the name would eventually be distorted to “Mamilla” and expanded in meaning to describe the entire area ) originated in medieval Jerusalem, at the start of the last millennium. Burial at the site continued until the early 20th century. Muslim tradition has it that Prophet Mohammed’s companions were also buried here. Another tradition mentions the burial of 70,000 of Saladin’s soldiers in the same place. At its peak the cemetery covered an area of about 200

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dunams (some 50 acres ), so that in effect today large parts of downtown Jerusalem are built over graves. According to estimates, the cemetery included most of Independence Park, the Experimental School, Agron Street, Beit Agron, Kikar Hahatulot (Cats’ Square ) and other areas. The change in the situation of the cemetery began with the process by which Jerusalem expanded outside the walls of the Old City, in the mid-19th century: By then it was no longer in a distant, peripheral area, but rather in the heart of a growing, modern city. That was also the start of tensions between respect for the dead and tradition on the one hand, and the value of the land, which was worth its weight in gold, on the other. Like many other Muslim cemeteries in Israel, this one was also neglected for many decades, and today is overgrown with weeds and full of broken tombstones. It is hard to think of anything further from the old and crumbling cemetery than the life of Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and one of the most important and influential rabbis in the United States. A series of pictures of Hier afford us a small glimpse into his world; among the pictures he is seen in the company of two presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton; one pope, John Paul II; and a large number of actors: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Kingsley and others. The first Museum of Tolerance that was built by Hier, and opened in 1993 in Los Angeles, became amazingly successful, with a quarter of a million visitors a year who come to view the exhibits and to participate in the interactive displays in which the museum specializes. One of Hier’s great achievements was the passage of a law in the state requiring students and members of the security forces in California to visit his museum. That same year, toward the end of Teddy Kollek’s final term as mayor of Jerusalem, the idea of building a Jerusalem branch of the Museum of Tolerance − a “Center for Human Dignity − Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem,” by its full name − was considered. The concept was promoted enthusiastically during the tenure of Kollek’s successor, Ehud Olmert. “A glorious project that in addition to its cultural and educational objective will also constitute a work of art in itself and a site that will attract tourists to Jerusalem and contribute to the tourism industry in Israel as well ...” − thus the museum is described in the Wiesenthal Center’s reply, submitted to the High Court, to the Islamic Movement’s petition for a ban on work at the site. The initiators of the project say it was Kollek who first suggested creating a Museum of Tolerance in his city, after a visit to the original institution in Los Angeles. Kollek’s associate Ruth Cheshin, president of the Jerusalem Foundation, which the late mayor founded, remembers things differently: “He was in favor of a museum of tolerance, but didn’t like the idea proposed by the Wiesenthal Center. He said that this was not Los Angeles, and a museum for tolerance should grow out of the place rather than being ‘imported.’” Kollek’s successor, Olmert, was also opposed to the idea at first. Also among the opponents were Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, which feared the competition.

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“Building the museum is unnecessary. It is totally unacceptable and irregular for the government to put land at the disposal of foreign citizens who do not represent any group among the Jewish people,” said the spokeswoman of Yad Vashem at the time, Iris Rosenberg. As a result of the pressure, the initiators of the museum promised not to deal with the Holocaust, and Yad Vashem removed its opposition, as did Olmert, who subsequently became an enthusiastic supporter of the museum. Mayor Olmert designated the site for the Museum of Tolerance, and later, as minister of Indutry and Trade, in charge of the Israel Lands Authority, he signed the agreement awarding the Wiesenthal Center the site. The paths of the Wiesenthal Center and Ehud Olmert also cross in the indictment now being deliberated on in the Jerusalem District Court in the so-called “Rishontours” case. According to the charges, at the end of April 2003, Olmert traveled to Paris and New York, with his expenses being covered by three organizations. One of them was the Wiesenthal Center, which paid $5,765 for the trip. Hier’s son Abe is one of the witnesses for the prosecution. Two Olmert associates − his attorney Eli Zohar, and his spokesman from years in the Jerusalem municipality, Haggai Elias, were also employed by the project entrepreneurs. The museum’s site, at the corner of Independence Park in downtown Jerusalem, was chosen after a number of other locations were rejected − among them plots near the museums on Givat Ram, the old nature museum in the German Colony and even property in East Jerusalem. The site chosen was familiar to everyone as a parking lot, which had been serving those who visit the city center since the 1960s. Apparently nobody remembered that people were buried there. “Am Yisrael chai (the people of Israel live ),” declared California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his American-Austrian accent at the museum’s groundbreaking ceremony, in May 2004. It was Schwarzenegger’s first visit outside the U.S. as governor. Next to him on the dais was Moshe Katsav, then the Israeli president. During his meeting with then-foreign minister Silvan Shalom, Schwarzenegger said that building museums of tolerance would promote tolerance just as building fitness clubs promoted health. It was a meeting of two worlds: Hollywood and the subterranean. Produced with the assistance of Natasha Mozgovaya, Esther Zandberg, Maya Zinshtein, Yarden Skoop and Aviv Shmider. For further information on the three part report, comments and analysis see: http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/museum-of-tolerance-special-report

24. Police Kill Palestinian Driver in East Jerusalem

By Isabel Kershner, NYT, 11/06/2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/world/middleeast/12mideast.html

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JERUSALEM — Israeli border police officers fatally shot a Palestinian man in the contested East Jerusalem area on Friday after he hit them with his car, the Israeli police said, although the exact circumstances remained unclear. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said that two border police officers were lightly injured after being hit by the car in the predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood of Wadi Joz and that the police were studying whether the driver had hit them deliberately. The driver was shot after he fled the car on foot and ignored calls by the police to stop. Dr. Amin Abu Ghazaleh, chief of the emergency department of the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Jerusalem, said the driver, Ziyad al-Joulani, 42, later died in hospital of his wounds. Dr. Abu Ghazaleh said another man, Mahmoud al-Joulani, had a head injury and that a child was also wounded and taken to hospital. The Israeli police said that the other man had not been shot, but had possibly been wounded earlier by stones thrown at cars in the area. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, but the move was not recognized internationally. The police were on heightened alert in Jerusalem on Friday, fearing disturbances after the Muslim noon prayers. Tensions have been raised in the region since Israel’s commando raid last month on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza led to clashes that left nine activists dead.