Jerusalem, unholy fault lines

[ConsAreLiars]

From AJE http://blogs.aljazeera.net/imperium/2010/03/01/jerusalem-unholy-fault-lines

It pretty much describes what everyone here knows is going on, even those who get all defensive and nit-picky and begin tossing red herrings when this fact is revealed. I've never seen it described as accurately and clearly as in this article.

Playing with fire

Israel could not have been more aggressive or provocative in its 'Judaisation' of the city since its occupation in 1967. Paradoxically, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is counting on the commitment of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to prevent another Intifada.

Likewise, Israel banks on its success in separating Jerusalem from its Palestinian hinterland leaving the quarter of a million Palestinian Jerusalemites isolated from their national socio-economic and political landscape through military means.

However, as with previous upheavals, a new one will be shocking, but hardly surprising if the Israeli escalation continues with impunity.

Annexed East Jerusalem might not be militarily occupied like the rest of the Palestinian territories, but Israel's systematic takeover and its diminishing Palestinian/Arab identity is leading to increased desperation and humiliation.

Paradox

The city Israel calls its 'eternal capital' is made up of two parts, the western part was taken over in 1948, and the eastern part was occupied in 1967, neither of which are recognised by the international community, including the US and Europe. This explains why there are no foreign embassies there that are worth mentioning.

Paradoxically, recent US pressures on the Israeli government to freeze all illegal settlements have instead worsened the situation in East Jerusalem.

When the Netanyahu government finally agreed to temporarily freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, it accelerated its takeover of Al Quds.

And in order to dispel any notion of dividing or sharing the city with the Palestinians as wished by Barack Obama, the US president, the Israeli government took additional provocative steps in and around the holy sites that ended in confrontation around the al-Aqsa mosque over the last couple of days.

'Ethnic cleansing'

Israel's systematic transformation of Jerusalem by widening its Jewish identity and squeezing its Palestinian side is the most open and embarrassing secret in the Middle East.

The Arabs have accused Israel of ethnically cleansing the city of its indigenous people.

Israel tries to keep a one to three ratio between Palestinians and Jews in city, while its 'development' is controlled by the Jewish municipality and Israeli ministries.

Israel expropriated lands in and around Jerusalem to develope new neighbourhoods for Jews (called settlements by the UN), while choking Arab neighbourhoods and preventing their inhabitants from building new housing.

Much of the Palestinian housing has been completed without Israeli "permits" and hence awaits demolition. According to a recent UN report, Israel considers 28 per cent of all Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem to be illegal, leaving 60,000 Palestinians at risk of having their homes demolished.

Published last year, the UN report states that only 13 per cent of East Jerusalem land is zoned by the Israeli authorities for Palestinian construction, and much of that is already built up, severely restricting the possibility of obtaining a permit.

Meanwhile, more than a third of Al Quds has been expropriated for Israeli construction while 22 per cent is zoned for green areas and public infrastructure and 30 per cent remains "unplanned".

All of which prompted the Obama administration to ask Israel to freeze all demolition of Palestinian homes so as not to exacerbate tensions in the city.

Fear of reconsacration

Israel's unilateral dealings with religious sites have been most provoking to Palestinians, both Muslim and Christians. Frequent confrontations in and around al-Aqsa mosque in the past have been quite bloody and politically unsettling.

While this has been standard Israeli policy since its founding, the diplomatic void, political frustration and pent-up violence places Muslim sites in East Jerusalem in the eye of the storm.

Meron Benvinisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, in his book Sacred Landscape, says reconsacration of religious sites in Palestine has been unparalleled since medieval times. Israel, he claims, has replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, ruins in Palestine after taking it over.

Mindful of Israeli intentions, Unesco's 1968 General Conference issued a strong condemnation of Israeli archaeological excavations in the old city of Jerusalem (despite Western reservations), and condemned any attempt to alter the "occupied" city's features or its cultural and historical character, particularly with regard to Christian and Islamic religious sites.



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