East Jerusalem: How Israel is building a “time bomb”
The separation wall between West Jerusalem from East Jerusalem. Picture by MICK TSIKAS/AAP/PA Images. All rights reserved.Memories
of the Jewish people´s suffering throughout history and the fear of
Israel´s destruction have created an Israeli nation where
Palestinians, at best, are treated as second-class citizens. The
societal exclusion of Palestinians may very well have fatal
consequences, as it leads to alienation and radicalization. Nowhere
is this more evident than in East Jerusalem´s Palestinian
neighborhoods. Last summer´s Palestinian uprising could very well
have developed into a third intifada.
As
I enter Isawiya, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the
soldiers have just left the area. In their wake medics from the
Palestine Red Crescent Society are searching the surroundings for
people in need of assistance. Children are playing football while
trying to avoid the sewage and the garbage piling up on the sides of
the streets. It is the middle of July and the Israeli government has
recently decided to install metal detectors around the Muslim Quarter
in Jerusalem´s Old City due to an attack killing
two Israeli police officers.
The fact that the assailants were Palestinian-Israeli citizens has
led to a disturbed state of mind within the whole country. Although
Jerusalem is on the verge of eruption and riots have ravaged Isawiya
for days, life for residents in the neighborhood does not seem to
differ significantly from the ordinary.
“This
happens from time to time. Hopefully people will notice how we
struggle for a better life”, Faraj*, a shopkeeper.
I
visit the neighborhood daily. Having my morning coffee in a café
next to a mosque, which is said to have the tallest minaret in the
city. A
minaret built without a permit
and therefore in defiance of the Israeli state. I seem to be the only
non-Palestinian coming here and when I talk to Jewish-Israelis just a
few hundred meters away they warn me not to enter the area, referring
to it as a “no-go zone.” Most Jewish-Israelis who have lived all
their life in Jerusalem have never set foot here.
Discrimination
of East Jerusalem´s Palestinian-Israeli minority
When
I talk to Nisreen Alyan from the Association for Civil Rights in
Israel who has worked as an attorney in East Jerusalem for nine
years, she argues that the quality of life for Palestinians in East
Jerusalem is deteriorating and is much worse compared to Palestinians
living in the West Bank.
“Even
refugee camps in the West Bank have better conditions compared to the
Palestinian areas in East Jerusalem. In the West bank people can
generally feel safe when they are walking the streets, but in East
Jerusalem there is no law, only chaos”, she says.
The discriminatory structure constitutes a permanent state of insecurity and anguish for the residents of East Jerusalem
Haaretz
journalist Amira Hass
goes one step further. She claims that living conditions for
Palestinians in Isawiya can be compared to life in the Gaza Strip.
Both the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem have a poverty rate of over
80%. People in Gaza experience isolation, unemployment and lack of
electricity, clean water and proper healthcare, while the people of
Isawiya hold Israeli residency and in some cases even citizenship.
Even so, close to 40%, of Jerusalem´s residents have an unsettled
citizenship status and live in constant limbo. Nisreen points out the
bureaucracy residents have to endure only to keep their residency.
“Your
residency status in East Jerusalem can be revoked very easily. Every
five to eight years you have to prove that you are spending the
majority of your time in East Jerusalem, even if you are born here
and have lived here all your life. The process is very complicated
and you need paperwork for everything. Your birth certificate, tax
records, where your children are going to school, details about your
health care and so on. If you do not have your paperwork for the
several years you risk losing your residency. A lot of people have
family and property in the West Bank but if you spend too much time
there, the authorities can argue that your center of life is not in
East Jerusalem any more”.
The
discriminatory structure constitutes a permanent state of insecurity
and anguish for the residents of East Jerusalem. The Israeli police
often use collective punishment in order to control civil unrest.
Closing down shops and businesses for days in entire areas is not an
uncommon strategy. But in many regards both the police and
municipality neglect the Palestinian neighborhoods and only engage if
the violence risks spreading to the Jewish-Israeli part of the city.
The
lack of municipal investment
has lead to a collapse of the education system. According to Nisreen
there is a lack of approximately two thousand classrooms and every
year between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand children are not
attending school at al. Organized crime has replaced the police and
lead to increased violence. Prostitution, drugs and weapons have
become much more common.
Nisreen
believes the reason for the increasing crime rate is a consequence of
the Israeli authorities´ mismanagement of East Jerusalem, and
a general feeling of hopelessness over the failure of the Oslo
accords over twenty years ago.
“Palestinians
feel that nobody cares about them. When people had Oslo there was
hope. Many Palestinians thought that East Jerusalem would become the
capital of Palestine and that all their problems would soon be over.
But now people here feel like they have been abandoned. The families
who control these areas are a part of an organized crime syndicate.
There are about 120.000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem who are living
in areas controlled by these people. That is a third of all
Palestinians in East Jerusalem”, she says.
Since
the annexation in 1967 East
Jerusalem is gradually taken over by Jewish-Israeli settlers,
while the Palestinian residents seldom are allowed any building
permits. Quddus* has tried to obtain a building permit for seven
years.
79% of Jewish-Israeli citizens are of the opinion that Jews should be given preferential treatment“So
far we have not received a permit from the municipality. We know
people who have built houses without a permit but many have been
forced to destroy their own homes. You also get a fine and it can get
really expensive. Me and my family still live at my brother’s
house”, he says.
The
risk of larger societal instability
Palestinian-Israelis
make up approximately a fifth of Israel´s population and in
Jerusalem the corresponding figure constitutes about a third of all
residents. But Palestinian-Israelis are often viewed with distrust in
Israel due to their assumed
lack of loyalty.
Israel´s
constitution discriminates
between ethnic groups and a survey
from 2016
indicates that 79%
of Jewish-Israeli citizens are of the opinion that Jews should be
given preferential treatment
in Israeli society. This seriously contradicts the notion of a
democratic nation state. Palestinian-Israeli citizens are generally
excluded from the political, social, economic and military centers of
power, where they rarely hold significant positions. Consequently,
Israel constitutes an ethnic state, a political structure where
ethnicity and not citizenship determines your status.
The
terror attack at the al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem in July this
year, carried out by three Palestinian-Israeli citizens, illustrates
that ignoring the need of a fifth of Israel´s citizens will continue
to lead to societal instability. According to Dr. As'ad
Ghanem at Haifa University, who himself belongs to the
Palestinian-Israeli minority, the systematic oppression has generated
in a unification between Palestinians inside and outside Israel.
Dehumanizing the Palestinian other
There
is a clear rationale for many Jewish-Israelis to passively accept the
injustice towards the Palestinian minority. Politically the Jewish
essence of Israel continues to be presented as the backbone of
Israel´s national security and the right of the Jewish people. The
feeling of antagonism towards Palestinians is most likely a product
of Jewish suffering throughout history, where the holocaust
undoubtedly has had most impact. Today there are only around 200,000
Holocaust survivors
living in Israel but a major
proportion of Israel´s population are descendants of Holocaust
survivors. Consequently it is no surprise that
vulnerability
constitutes a profound element in Israeli national consciousness.
Although,
the Holocaust is long gone and Israel has one of the strongest
militaries
in the world, the collective memory of the past lives on and affects
Israeli society.
There has been a proneness among Israeli politicians to repeatedly use the anguish of the Holocaust to further their own political agenda
The
Holocaust and its severity should never be forgotten or belittled.
Currently however, Israel is not threatened by extermination.
Although anti-Semitism is widespread in Europe and the Middle East,
and Israel has a hostile relationship with several of its neighbors,
these concerns need to be distinctly separated from the horrors of
the past. Failing to make the differentiation is an insult to every
victim of Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, there has been a proneness among
Israeli politicians to repeatedly use the anguish of the Holocaust to
further their own political agenda. Perhaps one of the most frequent
users when it comes to evoking images of the Holocaust in the Israeli
public discourse is Benjamin Netanyahu. In May this year Benjamin
Netanyahu
accused Jerusalem´s Palestinian Grand Mufti of convincing Hitler to
exterminate Jews when they met in 1941. Although the Grand Mufti
supported Hitler, Holocaust scholars classified the claim as false.
The political desire to depict Palestinians as threatening
constitutes a serious hindrance for future reconciliation. One would
presume that it is the responsibility of Israel´s political
leadership to ease and overcome the agony of the past rather than to
fuel it.
Remodeling
the Zionist essence of Israel
But
the issue is more immersed than relating merely just to the political
level. Nurit Peled-Elhanan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
the author of the book Palestine
in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education
has publicly stated that the explanation for indifference towards
Palestinians among many Israeli soldiers is most likely a direct
consequence of indoctrination
in Israeli education,
which poses a concrete hindrance to reconciliation. In a study from
2013, the Israeli scholar Daniel Bar Tal and the Palestinian scholar
Sami Adwan outline the issue of misrepresentation in Israeli and
Palestinian education. One Israeli textbook states that a
former Palestinian village "had
always been a nest of murderers."
49% of textbooks in Israeli state schools have a negative depiction
of Palestinians, while textbooks used in ultra-Orthodox schools
portray Palestinians negatively in 73% of all cases. 65% of
Israeli state schools do have maps without any borders between Israel
and the Occupied Territories and in ultra-Orthodox schools the figure
is 95%.
In
East Jerusalem most Palestinian schools teach the Palestinian
curriculum. However, the Israeli Ministry of Education has recently
invested in schools in East Jerusalem where the Israeli curriculum is
taught. If parents chose to put their children in one of these
schools their children´s prospects for the future are suddenly much
more promising.
“The
Israeli authorities only help a small group who are following their
curriculum. Sometimes this is not really a choice when you have to
think about the future of your child”, says Nisreen.
Some
may say my writing is a criticism of Israel´s right to exist. Some
may go further and equal my criticism to anti-Semitism. My writing is
not meant to be either. It is a criticism of the unequal power
structures making Israel an ethnic state, oppressing a fifth of its
residents. It is a criticism of the Israeli government´s lack of
accountability for Jewish-Israeli settlers who use their status to
exploit their Palestinian-Israeli neighbors. It is a criticism
towards the fact that valid criticism towards an unjust system so
often are sidestepped and labeled anti-Semitic propaganda.
Nevertheless there is an urgent need to come forward and criticize
the current state of affairs. Either the Zionist essence of Israel
will need to be remodeled from its very foundation, opening up for a
society where ethnicity does not determine a person´s value, or
Israel will gradually recess into such an observable state of
Apartheid that nobody will be able to deny it. Right now Israel is
building a “time bomb” and I do not want to be there when it
detonates.
*Names have been changed.