Israel’s administrative punishment against Jerusalemites

East Jerusalem stands out as a tough nut to crack despite the many challenges and difficulties it faces. The 300,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem have been prevented from participating in the political process that began with the Oslo Accords and have not been allowed to create their own leadership.

As Palestinians in all other West Bank communities have slowly moved towards statehood Jerusalem has stood still. While Palestinians in all but Jerusalem have received Palestinian passports and been able to participate in political life, the situation for Jerusalemites remains stagnant and in many ways has worsened.

Efforts to separate East Jerusalem from its natural hinterland include an eight-metre high cement wall and strict orders were issued banning any engagement by Palestinians with their legitimate leadership in Ramallah. Housing permits within Jerusalem continue to be rare and economic development received a big blow when the natural population that came to the city from nearby towns and villages suddenly needed Israeli army-issued permits to enter.

Perhaps the single biggest problem facing the population of East Jerusalem was, and continues to be, the lack of guarantees for the right to live in one’s own birthplace. Ever since its occupation and unilateral (and illegal) annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has set up an arbitrary racist requirement that the Palestinian Arab population must not pass the 28 per cent mark for the whole city.

The vast majority of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents are considered mere residents and not citizens. They continue to be allowed to live in their own city as long as they do not violate the residency rights. A leading reason for losing your residency is the issue of where you live. If, for any reason, you decide to live outside the city for a long time you risk losing your right to reside within it. Over 14,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem lost their residency rights in this way between 1967 and 2011. Since then, hundreds more have been added to the list.

Two years ago, the Israelis added a few more political and other reasons for losing residency rights. Four Palestinians from East Jerusalem who won seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 are now fighting for their right to live in the city because of the electoral list they joined. The elections were conducted under international supervision and sanctioned by Israel. But because the pro-Islamic list is seen to be affiliated to Hamas, when the war between Israel and Hamas took place in Gaza these elected parliamentarians were punished by being deported and their residency rights were revoked.

This attempt to empty Jerusalem of its residents slowly is referred to by Israelis as the transfer scheme. Palestinians are routinely denied housing permits because they are not part of a discriminatory zoning plan that ignores East Jerusalem’s Arab neighbourhoods while settlement housing complexes in the occupied side of Jerusalem are approved quickly.

The fact that Arab neighbourhoods are purposely not planned has meant that local communities are forced to build illegally. In response, many such homeowners suffer regular house demolitions for violating city laws. All of this takes place while Israel builds settlements in East Jerusalem in violation of international law.

Meanwhile, a nine-storey building named Jonathan House, built illegally (according to Israeli law) in Silwan, a predominantly Arab neighbourhood just outside the Old City, continues to house rowdy Jewish settlers without any attempt to implement any form of justice in anywhere near equal measure.

In 1978, the Israeli High Court denied a Palestinian, Mohammad Burqan, the right to repurchase his own house in the Mughrabi Quarter, adjacent to the Jewish Quarter, because the now expanded latter area has “special historical significance” to Jews. “This,” said the court in its clearly discriminatory judgement, “supersedes all other claims by non-Jews.”

While Israel regularly denies it, these Judaisation attempts are synchronised by the Israeli government, police, courts, Jewish settlers, radical groups and Knesset members, with each group doing its part. Palestinian institutions like the Orient House and the Chamber of Commerce have been closed by order of the minister of internal security since 2001, despite the international community‘s opposition.

Now the Israeli government is mulling a new form of collective punishment against East Jerusalem’s Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Jerusalem residents living beyond the arbitrarily-built wall might lose their residency rights. The separation barrier divided many of Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods, leaving nearly 80,000 born Jerusalemites living on the “wrong” side of it.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which has been following up on issues of East Jerusalem, complained to Netanyahu. “Not only is denying residents’ status unacceptable, immoral and without legal basis,” ACRI wrote, “but it is also a further intervention into the lives of people living beyond the wall.” In its letter to the prime minister, the Israeli rights organisation noted that the wall imprisoned many Palestinians and was only approved by the Israeli high court after the state committed to providing proper services to this segment of the population.

It is not clear if Israel’s retaliatory punishment of the people of Jerusalem will achieve the desired results. The 1995 guidelines about the need for Jerusalemites to prove their connection to the city in order to retain their rights resulted in a mass movement of people returning to the city. If the current Israeli intentions become policy, it is expected that a large number of Jerusalemites living beyond the wall will move back into the city, even at high personal cost. Families will double- and triple-up in homes of relatives and friends rather than lose their right to live in their city. Such a move would certainly be the opposite of the perceived Israeli intention of finding administrative ways to reduce the Palestinian Arab population of Jerusalem. The attachment of Jerusalemites to their birthright continues to be seen and felt in every aspect of Palestinian life and housing decisions.

Daoud Kuttab is an award winning Palestinian journalist and a columnist with Al-Monitor. He is a former Ferris professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Follow him on twitter.com/Daoudkuttab

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.