JERUSALEM, 17 June 2006 — Down a steep hill behind Jerusalem’s Old City lies Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood that is within the city’s limits but where residents feel abandoned and isolated.

Since 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, Silwan has fallen under Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction.

The neighborhood’s 50,000 inhabitants, like the vast majority of the other 700,000 residents of the city, pay municipal taxes that should fund services like sewage, schooling, roadworks, garbage collection and street lighting. But a visit to Silwan suggests something is wrong.

While western districts of Jerusalem, which are overwhelmingly Jewish, generally have well-maintained roads with working street lamps, neat sidewalks and skips where rubbish is collected and recycling encouraged, Silwan is a mess.

The neighborhood is only about 1 km from some of Jerusalem’s smarter districts, but it looks like it belongs to an urban twilight zone. Roads are riddled with potholes, paths are smashed or non-existent, telephone and electricity cables hang limp and rubbish is piled in festering heaps on corners. There are so few schools that classes are sometimes held in homes. The stone houses piled almost on top of one another, many with extensions built without permits, seem poised to tumble down the hill behind the Old City’s Western or Wailing Wall.

“The people here have to pay taxes but they receive nothing in return,” says Silwan’s unofficial mayor, Lutfi Siam, 56, who has lived all his life in the neighborhood.

“Even the government knows there is no equality between east and west in Jerusalem. They give us none of their budget.”

Figures from 2003, the latest year available, show that Arab residents, who make up a third of Jerusalem’s population, received just 12 percent of the budget, according to Meir Margalit, an Israeli historian and former city councilor.

But the poverty rate among Arabs in the city is almost twice that of Jewish residents and unemployment is also higher.

City officials say they don’t have sufficient funds to carry out improvements in Silwan, or other areas, and point out that they do collect rubbish from the neighborhood.

“Once every six months,” retorts Siam, who has been mayor, or mukhtar, since 1982 but earns no income from the post and so runs a car wash service up the hill in a Jewish district. As well as feeling abandoned by city authorities, Silwan’s inhabitants say they are being driven out.

Nearly 200,000 Jews have moved into East Jerusalem since 1967 to cement Israel’s claim to the entire city as its historic capital. Palestinians envisage the city’s eastern half as capital of their own future state in Israeli-occupied territory.

Already 47 percent of Arab East Jerusalem is Jewish and more Jews are moving in as wealthy settler organizations seek to change the demographics of the city. Around 100 Ultra Orthodox Jews live in Silwan and more are buying property.

Jews have a strong affinity with Silwan, site of the ancient City of David, the location of Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.

Their arrival in the area has compounded the frustration of Arabs, who find it hard to get building permits from the authorities and end up extending their homes illegally.

Cranes knocked down an illegal extension to Siam’s house last year and two months ago he received a notice saying the rest of his home, built in the mid-1970s, would be destroyed. “They don’t want Palestinian people to stay in Silwan ... They want to take us off the map, but we are staying. No matter what they do,” he said.

Arab residents say there is no friction with their Jewish neighbors, but they are not happy about their presence. Stoking that unhappiness is the nearby presence of Israel’s steel and concrete barrier, which snakes through the occupied West Bank and cuts off Silwan’s residents from relatives, leaving them in a no man’s land — not fully part of Jerusalem and not part of the West Bank either.

Some fear the frustration could boil over into insurrection. “East Jerusalem is in turmoil, frustration and anger rule the street and the smell of an explosion hovers in the air,” Margalit wrote in an article last month.