The Jerusalem Question: Part 3
By Habib Siddiqui
The British Mandate Period:
With the defeat of the Turkish Army during the
World War I (1914-18), British General Edmund Allenby took control over
Jerusalem. Upon entering the city on 11 December 1917, he declared, "Now
the Crusades come to an end." As a matter of fact, it was the beginning of
the end, i.e., marshalling of a neo-crusade against Muslims by using Israel as
a ‘rampart’ in the Muslim heartland.
In 1917, Britain issued the infamous Balfour
Declaration promising the Zionists establishment of a Jewish national homeland
in Palestine. The Declaration was criminal to the core as historian Arthur
Koestler so aptly described: “One nation solemnly promised to give to a second
nation the country of a third nation.” [30] With that goal in mind, during the
devious British Mandate (1917-47), Jews were pumped into Palestine from all
over Europe. Despite such Jewish influx, according to a census taken by the
British on 31 December 1922, there were altogether 83,000 Jews in Palestine out
of a total population of 757,000 of which 663,000 were Muslims. [31] That is,
the Jewish population was only 11%.
In 1935, when the Palestinian Arabs rose in revolt
against further Jewish immigration, there were 370,000 Jews out of a total
population of 1,366,670, i.e., 3 out of 4 were Arabs. [32] During partition,
the Jewish population owned less than 6% of the total land in Palestine. [33]
Yet when on November 29, 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish
and Arab states, with Jerusalem in an international zone, 56% of the total area
was allotted to the Jewish state. As was expected, Arabs (except for King
Abdullah of Transjordan) rejected the plan and a fight for territories broke
out in which armed Jewish terrorist gangs massacred unarmed Palestinians in
several villages. [34] At that time, in Old (East) Jerusalem Jews owned less
than 1% of land. Their ownership of properties in the New (West) city was 26%.
[35]
In recent years, the issue surrounding
pre-1948 demographics of Jerusalem has become a hot item. Zionist
historiographers (e.g., Ben Arieh, Gilbert and others) have been trying to
prove a Jewish majority in Jerusalem before the partition. This myth has no
support and is debunked by the available late Ottoman-era statistics and (for
the later period) by examining the boundaries of the Jerusalem Municipality as
drawn by the British Mandatory authorities. [36]
In this regard, it is worth quoting what
pre-eminent demographer Justin McCarthy had clearly pointed out, “Ottoman
statistics are the best source on Ottoman population.” [37] The Ottoman data on
Jerusalem show that in 1871-2, the Jewish population of Jerusalem was a quarter
of the total population living in Jerusalem. In 1895, when the city’s
population was about 43,000, the entire Jewish population could not have been
more than a third (i.e., 14,500). In 1912 – the last Ottoman statistics – show
that Jerusalem had a total population of 60,000 of which nearly 25,000 were
Jews. [38]
According to Professor Walid Khalidi the
international zone comprising “Mandatory municipal Jerusalem” in addition to
some 20 surrounding Arab villages had a slight majority of Arab population who
numbered 105,000 while the Jewish population was just under 100,000. [39]
Academic research works by Salim Tamari (director of the Institute of Jerusalem
Studies and a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Birzeit University) and others present a similar picture. They point out how
Zionist historiographers deliberately avoided accounting for Arab neighborhoods
in their demographic studies of Jerusalem while concentrating mostly on Jewish
suburbs.
Upon reviewing the literature on the selective
demographics of Mandate Jerusalem, British historian Michael Dumper attributes
two major reasons for these population discrepancies. [40] First, estimates
counted Jewish migrants who arrived in Jerusalem before 1946 and later moved to
Tel Aviv and other localities. Second, while excluding Palestinians who were
working in the city but living in its rural periphery (the daytime population
such as the commuting workers from Lifta and Deir Yasin), they included Jewish
residents living in suburban areas such as Beit Vegan, Ramat Rahel, and Meqor
Hayim. The latter were incorporated within the municipal population through a
process he refers to as "demographic gerrymandering.” [41]
Professor Tamari’s studies on Jerusalem’s
western villages, for instance, show that once the rural neighborhoods are
introduced, the picture regarding demographics and land composition change
dramatically. “Extrapolations from 1945 Mandatory statistics,” Professor Tamari
says, “show that the Jerusalem sub-district contained slightly over a quarter
of a million inhabitants of whom 59.6% were Arabs and 40.4% were Jewish. In the
western Jerusalem areas that came under Israeli control after the war (251,945
dunums) 91.8% (231,446) dunums were Arab owned, 2.7% were Jewish owned, and the
rest were public lands.” [42]
The Israeli Period:
The conspiracy of the Western powers in
collusion with the Zionists, the terrorism inflicted upon the Arab inhabitants,
the foolishness of the local leaders, and the incompetence or indifference of
others – all these led to the establishment of the state of Israel on May 15,
1948 when on that day the Jewish settlers declared independence. The massacre
of Arab residents of Deir Yasin, Qibya and Kafr al-Qasim that followed were
only the preludes to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatilla,
Tyre and Sidon, Nablus, Jenin and of ongoing atrocities in Gaza, West Bank and
Southern Lebanon. [43]
Soon after the unilateral declaration, in a
subsequent war with neighboring Arab states, Israel captured 78% of the
original Palestine by annexing territories set for the Arab Palestinian state,
leaving only East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in Arab hands.
This cataclysmic event forced 750,000 Palestinians to seek refuge elsewhere.
As to its impact on Jerusalem, Professor
Tamari writes, “During the war of 1948, particularly during the months of
April-May, about 25-30,000 Palestinians were displaced from the urban suburbs
of Jerusalem. In addition, the bulk of the village population (23,649 rural
inhabitants) were also expelled. These included the population of the two
largest villages in the Jerusalem sub-district, Ain Karim and Lifta, and
virtually all the rural habitations west of the city (except for Abu Ghosh and
Beit Safafa). Altogether 36 villages and hamlets were destroyed, or – as was
the case with Lifta and Ain Karim – were physically left intact but their
Palestinian inhabitants removed. Most of the displaced persons eventually found
refuge in the Old City and its northern Arab suburbs (Shu’fat, Beit Hanina,
Ram), and in the refugee camps of Ramallah and Bethlehem. Today the refugee
population originating from the Jerusalem district is estimated to be 380,000.”
[44]
In July 1949, the Israeli government declared
West Jerusalem "territory occupied by the State of Israel", and all
Arab lands and businesses were confiscated under the Absentee Property
Regulations of 1948. Most of the urban refugee property in Jerusalem was sold
to Israelis and squatters. Refugee-lands outside the urban center were mostly
sold to a specially established Government Development Authority which in turn
sold them to the Jewish National Fund or to cooperative agricultural
settlements. Soon, Israel began to transfer its government offices to Jerusalem
from Tel Aviv. Government employees were housed in abandoned refugee property.
[45]
On 13 December 1949, the Israeli government
declared Jerusalem as its capital, which was later passed as a resolution in
the Knesset on January 23, 1950.
On June 5-10, 1967 Israel launched an
offensive against neighboring Arab states and captured East Jerusalem, West
Bank and Gaza, plus the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Most Jews celebrated the
event as a liberation of the city; a new Israeli holiday was created, Jerusalem
Day (Yom Yerushalayim), and the popular Hebrew song, "Jerusalem of
Gold" (Yerushalayim shel zahav), became popular in celebration.
Between 1949 and 1967 scores of Palestinian
towns and more than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Israel. In the
first flush of victory in the 1967 war, Ben Gurion wanted the magnificent walls
built by the Ottomans that surround the “Old City” destroyed because they were
such a powerful reminder of the Islamic character of the city. Most of the
Israeli government buildings in Jerusalem including the Knesset are built on
Palestinian-owned land.
In
defiance of the international community,
Israel wasted no time in declaring the city of Jerusalem as its
"eternal, undivided" capital. This meant that it extended its law to East
Jerusalem and claimed it as part of
Israel, a move that no country in the world recognized, including up until
recently the US, citing international law which states that an occupying power
does not have sovereignty in the territory it occupies.
Teddy Kollek, the mayor of the
contested city, said in 1968: "The object is to ensure that all of
Jerusalem remains forever a part of Israel. If this city is to be our capital,
then we have to make it an integral part of our country, and we need Jewish
inhabitants to do that."
In 1980, Israel formalized its
annexation of the eastern half of the city when it passed the Jerusalem Law,
claiming that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of
Israel".
In the 1967 census, the
Israeli authorities registered 66,000 Palestinian residents (44,000 residing in
the area known before the 1967 war as East Jerusalem; and 22,000, in the West
Bank area annexed to Jerusalem after the war). Only a few hundred Jews were
living in East Jerusalem at that time.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), since annexation of East
Jerusalem, have embarked on a “Judaization” policy that entails constricting
building permits to local Arabs to build houses on their ancestral land,
withdrawing residency permits, demolishing Palestinian homes and mosques, and
building illegal settlements. One of the first moves was to demolish the
Maghariba quarter in order to enlarge the prayer area next to the Wailing Wall.
One hundred and twenty-five Arab houses were destroyed in the process.
Jerusalem Palestinians are considered as foreign residents.
Jerusalem Palestinians are
considered as foreign residents. As non-citizens, they can
participate in municipal elections, but have no voting rights to the
Knesset, under whose jurisdiction the whole of Jerusalem falls. If they stay
out of Jerusalem for too long, they lose even their residence
status and be thrown out of the city altogether, as happened to
thousands of them. The policy of the Interior Ministry towards them – endorsed on
30 December 1996 by the Israeli Supreme Court – is too severe and arbitrary
(especially since 1994). In 30 years (1967-97), an estimated 50,000 to 100,000
Arab residents in Jerusalem lost their right of residency in the city. These
include, for example, Jerusalem Palestinians who lived for over seven years
outside the city limits. During the first two weeks of January 1997 alone, 233
Palestinian residents in Jerusalem were issued with expulsion orders.
Palestinian refugees from camps located within the limits of Greater Jerusalem
(the Shufat and Kalandia camps) have absolutely no political rights. [46]
Since its occupation, Israel has demolished hundreds of
Palestinian-owned homes. Last year, some 88 homes were
destroyed, leaving 295 people without shelter. Over the past decade, more than
2,600 people have been rendered homeless after their houses were demolished. Since 1967, Israel has
revoked the residency status of 14,595 Palestinians in Jerusalem. Palestinian
holders of the Jerusalem IDs live under the constant threat of residency
revocation.
This "policy of Judaization," which
has been conducted openly by the Israeli government to reduce the Arab presence
in Jerusalem, is starting to bear fruit. While in 1990, there was still a
majority of 150,000 Palestinians against 120,000 Jews in the eastern part of
the city, the ratio has been reversed to the benefit of the latter. In 1993,
East Jerusalem counted 155,000 Palestinian Arabs against 160,000 Israeli Jews.
Some 250,000 Israelis lived in West Jerusalem. [47]
On 19 April 1999, an inter-ministerial
committee on Jerusalem recommended that Israel needs to build 116,000 new
housing units in the city for Jews by 2020 to maintain a 70/30 percent Jewish
majority in Jerusalem. This would signify an annual rate of 5,500. Figures
published on 28 May 2003 by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics showed that
Jerusalem’s population reached 683,000, of which sixty-six percent was Jewish.
Of the 32 percent of the population who were Arabs, 94% were Muslim and 6% were
Christians. [48] In 2004, the Jewish population in Jerusalem was estimated at
464,000 out of a total population of 692,000. [49]
The illegal Israeli settlements in and around
occupied East Jerusalem have expanded rapidly, in violation of all
international laws. Between 1967 and 2003, 35% of the land in East Jerusalem
was expropriated for the construction of Jewish neighborhoods and attendant
facilities. Of the more than 38,500 houses built on expropriated land, as of
2003, none was constructed for Arabs. As a result of such settlement policies, by 2003, there were over 43,000 homes in Jewish
neighborhoods and only 28,000 in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.
[53]
The Jewish settler population in East
Jerusalem has also multiplied accordingly. In 2000, it was estimated to be
close to 180,000. [50] In 2003, 217,000 Palestinians shared East Jerusalem with
200,000 Jewish settlers. Of these, 66,500 were in the Greater Jerusalem area of
Ma’aleh Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Betar Elite, Har Adar, Efrat and part of the
Etzion Bloc. [52] Today, 86 percent of East
Jerusalem is under direct control of the Israeli authorities and Jewish
settlers. Around 200,000 settlers live in settlements that have been mostly built either entirely
or partially on private Palestinian property.
Worse still, Israel has constructed a wall to
separate Jewish illegal settlements from Palestinian neighborhoods. This apartheid wall, which Israel started building in 2002,
snakes through the West Bank territory, dividing villages, encircling towns and
splitting families from each other.
It has also
impacted Palestinian Jerusalemites: more than 140,000 residents living in
Jerusalem neighborhoods are disconnected from the rest of the city and as a
result, suffer from a severe lack of basic services and infrastructure. [For
instance, more than 40% of Palestinians living inside Jerusalem are not
connected to city’s official water grid.]
Moreover,
Israeli lawmakers are now making moves to annex three large settlement blocs in
the occupied West Bank to the Israeli-defined boundaries of Jerusalem.
The so-called
"Greater Jerusalem bill" would see the addition of 140,000 Jewish
Israelis who live in these settlements to the population of Jerusalem, to
ensure a Jewish majority in the city. With the approval of new construction permits for Jewish settlements, the demography of Jerusalem in its 50th anniversary
of statehood and beyond is bound to change steadily.
The Israeli government has succeeded in
applying Jerusalem’s religious symbolism to vast areas that have nothing to do
with historic Jerusalem. So, e.g., over half of what we call Jerusalem today
was not part of the city pre-1967, but were parts of Bethlehem and 28 other
West Bank towns.
In today’s Israel, even the dead are not safe
from desecration. For example, during Olmert’s tenure as the mayor of
Jerusalem, Islamic burial places in West Jerusalem ‘Ma’man Allah’ (or
colloquially Mamilla), measuring some 250,000 square meters, were turned into
building plots. The Sheraton Plaza Hotel, Supersol supermarket, Beit Argon
building and the adjacent car parking lot are all built on this Islamic Waqf
owned land which was used by Muslims as their burial place in Jerusalem until
1948. What remains of this Muslim cemetery is being used as an open park,
courtesy of Jerusalem mayors.
Moreover,
Palestinians in Jerusalem are required to pay taxes, such as the national
insurance tax, for services
they barely receive. This is in contravention of international law, which
considers East Jerusalem as occupied territory and thus, Israeli law should not
be applied to the area. The Arnona municipal tax has been imposed on residents
of the city since 1967. It is widely seen as a form of discrimination as it
affects Palestinians disproportionally. With the rates highest for East
Jerusalem, Arnona taxes can exceed the annual rent of low-income families. Businesses
are also subject to Arnona taxes. The rate applicable to each business
correlates with the size of the property and not its economic revenue. The system has strenuously placed pressure on Palestinians,
forcing many to relocate to the occupied West Bank.
The 1993 Oslo Accord left the future of
Jerusalem to be determined later through serious negotiation. At Camp David in
July 2000 and later at Taba, Israeli negotiators considered allowing some
sovereignty to the Palestinian state over Arab areas of East Jerusalem but no
agreement was reached. The Palestinian side was ready to concede Israel’s claim
to West Jerusalem of which Palestinians had privately owned 40 per cent in
1948. The final negotiation fell flat on the status of Haram al-Sharif. [54]
But more problematic was the apparent arm-twisting of the Palestinian
negotiators by their US counterparts to appease the Israelis. It failed to give
importance to the legal arguments, i.e., who owned/owns what property. Just
because Barak “conceded” more than any other Israeli government does not mean
that it was just or fair.
In the post-Clinton era, nothing significant
has been done to settle Jerusalem’s long-standing problem except President
Bush’s announcement of the so-called “Roadmap” for the creation of a
Palestinian state, which aimed more at getting the necessary cooperation from
his Arab client states before toppling Saddam than establishing the groundwork
for real peace or a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. As
subsequent events had proved, Bush Jr. administration gave a Carte Blanche endorsing Israel’s war crimes
inside Gaza. Between 2001 and 2008, the US vetoed 9 times in the UNSC on resolutions critical of Israel on the Palestine question.
During Obama’s presidency, no substantive
initiative was undertaken either to stop Israel’s excesses and to find a
solution to the crisis. His administration cast its
first negative vote in the UN General Assembly in 2009 on a resolution that
called for an end to the 22-day Israeli attack on Gaza. It cast its first veto in the Security Council on 18 February 2011 to block a
resolution denouncing Israel’s settlement policy as an illegal obstacle to
peace efforts in the Middle East. Not only that, the US voted against a UNGA
resolution that called on
Israel to cease obstructing the movement and access of personnel, vehicles and
assets of the Agency of the United Nations Relief and Works for Palestine
Refugees (UNRWA). In
2012, it also opposed
and attempted to block Palestine's upgraded UN status at every step. Susan Rice,
the US Ambassador to the UN, described all efforts to hold Israel accountable
for its criminal actions and to abide by the international treaties, charters
and conventions to which it is bound as "anti-Israel crap."
In 2014, the world witnessed the murder of
more than a thousand unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. The Obama administration once
again allowed Netanyahu’s war crimes to go unpunished. The shortly lived ad on metro buses of Boston's
transit authority, the MBTA
(before it was removed under pressure from pro-Israel groups and in an apparent
violation of its own policies) summed up the US complicity: "Since
September, 2000 Israel's Military has killed one Palestinian child every four
days, using U.S. tax dollars. End U.S. support for Israeli apartheid."
Instead of disciplining Israel for its plethora of crimes, the
Obama administration in September 2016 rewarded the pariah state with a
whopping $38 billion military aid package,
the largest given to any state anytime in US history. It was a criminal gesture, which only emboldened Israel to expand its
settlement activities. The Obama administration in its last days, as if out of
some moral bite of conscience, stood by as the U.N. Security Council voted in
December 2016 to adopt a resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the West
Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem illegal and demanding a halt to their
expansion. The abstention was the first time the Obama administration stepped
aside and allowed the Security Council to censure Israel. Speaking after the
vote, Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, defended the
abstention, comparing it to policies of Republican and Democratic
administrations dating back to the Reagan administration. “Israeli settlement
activity in territories occupied in 1967 undermine Israel’s security, harm the
viability of a negotiated two-state outcome, and erode prospects for peace and
security,” Power told the council after the vote. “We could not in good
conscience veto the resolution,” Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national
security advisor for strategic communications, added.
The president-elect Donald
Trump blasted the U.N. and the Obama administration after the vote. Trump tweeted, “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan.
20th,” after the UN vote.
Surely, with Trump in the
White House now, Netanyahu has a narcissist, delusional and psychopath to lean
on to! On December 17, 2017, a UN security council resolution calling for the
withdrawal of Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has
been backed by every council member except the US, which used its veto.
As can be seen the US support
inside and outside the UN has been crucial for Israel to defying world opinion,
and maintaining its apartheid character.
Some readers in Ovi Magazine did not like my piece. They may like to read the book "The General’s Son" or listen the speech of Miko Peled, son of Israel’s celebrated General by clicking the link here to understand the hoax or myth created by Zionists. Truth shall make them free!
ReplyDeleteLink to Miko Peled's youtube piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_OcCXvT6Y
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