Separating `J'lem' from the `West Bank'

[IndianaGreen]

Wed., January 26, 2005 Shvat 16, 5765

Separating `J'lem' from the `West Bank'

By Amira Hass

The U.S. and Europe gave Israel good marks for easing travel through the checkpoints and allowing East Jerusalemites to vote on the Palestinians' election day. Their respective spokesmen again are speaking of a window of opportunity that has opened with the election of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. So please, don't bother us with the petty details of what is taking place on the ground meanwhile.

Those countries have many representatives who reside here and are sufficiently involved with life in this area to experience the depth of changes Israel is creating in the occupied territories and the Palestinians' natural social fabric. They know there is no real significance to one day's partial relief at one or another checkpoint when the rest of the year the checkpoint system becomes only more sophisticated. They know that the "disengagement from Gaza" accompanying the deepening of Israeli control over the occupied West Bank is not "a step in the direction of peace."

They need to know that giving Palestinians the right to take part in an election process in the PA is nothing more than a symbolic gesture when in the same breath, a secret decision by Israel enables it to steal private property, within the area annexed by the country in 1967, from Palestinian West Bank residents, as Meron Rapoport exposed last week in Haaretz.

With a systematic methodology that raises the possibility that there is some conscious, organized master plan, Israel continues the trend it began more than a decade ago: By denying the Palestinians freedom of movement and the right of residency in Jerusalem based on various excuses, Israel is striving to disconnect the West Bank from East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Jerusalem, and its surrounding neighborhoods and villages that, like it, were annexed to Israel.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/531937.html