Around 47 years after the fact, the colonization of Jerusalem continues to chafe at Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims around the world — and for good reason.
The latest example, of course, was Israel’s brazen actions recently at Al-Aqsa Mosque, which included provocative visits by Zionist politicians to the sacred Muslim site and the brutal treatment of Palestinian protesters. But that’s the least of it.
Today we speak of East Jerusalem, the Arab Old City, and West Jerusalem, the “Jewish” part, whose population of 80,000 Jews (mostly European illegal immigrants) in 1948 had jumped to 180,000 by June 9, 1967, the day after Israel’s conquest. But what few people recall — save Arab West Jerusalemites, like the late Edward Said who had had written extensively on the subject — is that most of the building projects there, that enabled the Jewish population to expand, were built on land abandoned by Palestinian refugees during the war. According to researchers, along with Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem in his book “City of Stone,” more than 60 percent of the western part of the city had belonged to Palestinian refugees whose land and homes, along with their movable and immovable property, were confiscated by the Zionist authorities under the so-called Absentee Property Law, the law under which Palestinian refugees, who had left Palestine to seek temporary refuge in the surrounding countries that year, were seized.
The expropriation policy that leaders of the Zionist entity in Palestine instituted in 1967, designed to create political “facts” on the ground, continues to this day, in the face of vigorous protests by Palestinians and the pressure, for all it’s worth, of world public opinion. All to no avail. The US response to these provocations has always been the tiresome mantra that new or expanded colonies are “unhelpful to the peace process.” Mighty threatening response!
Today, what the Israeli entity in Palestine calls its “undivided capital” is one of the most bitterly divided capitals in the world, ruled along lines that white South African leaders, during their country’s apartheid era, would have been proud of. Nathan Thrall, senior analyst with the Middle East and North Africa Program of the International Crisis Group, who lives in East Jerusalem, wrote in the London Review of Books last week: “(Palestinians) have separate buses, schools, health facilities, commercial centers ... In their neighborhoods, Israeli settlers and border police are frequently pelted with stones, while Palestinians have been beaten on several occasions recently by Jewish nationalist youths in the western half of the city. Balloons equipped with cameras hover above East Jerusalem, maintaining surveillance over the Palestinian population. Most Israelis have never visited and don’t even know the names of the Palestinian areas their government insists on calling its own. Municipal workers come to these neighborhoods with police escorts.”
Even beyond the recent encroachments on Haram El-Sharif, the lot of the 300,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem is painful indeed. Prevented from building new homes, let alone new neighborhoods, they are hemmed in, just as Jewish colonies have mushroomed all around them, with the municipal boundaries of the city having expanded threefold. Palestinians with growing families are forced to choose between living in cramped quarters and leaving their hometown for good — which they view as an act of national betrayal.
The nature of this supremacist form of discrimination is — well, you guessed it — blatant apartheid, making Israel, without a doubt, the most racist, and thus the most reviled, entity in the world today.
Meanwhile, outside Jerusalem, in the autonomous zones in the West Bank, Israel has outsourced much of its responsibility for keeping Palestinians under control to the Palestinian Authority, which indirectly has made Israel less answerable, and thus less vulnerable, to international pressure.
Leaders of the Israeli entity in Palestine feel that there is no reason for them to change a durable, albeit imperfect but manageable, status quo. History, however, has a way about it of changing, indeed punishing, even the most implacable occupier. The Crusaders, who were no less imbued with a messianic vision of their palace in Palestine than Israelis, established the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and went on to guard it for the next 88 years, before they were, literally, shown the door in 1187 by the indigenous peoples of the region.
The long and short of it is that the Israeli entity in Palestine has no future in Palestine. Just as the Crusaders, who like the Israelis depended on “outré- mer” (or lands overseas, mainly in Europe), for their survival, the Israelis have made their existence contingent on American support. But that support is not a constant, but a variable, in the historical equation. History, I say, has its own laws and imperatives, and these will catch up with Israel in time and in due course.
