JERUSALEM: The Weight of a City By Michael Khaled for MIFTAH

http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=22805&CategoryId=13The Weight of a City

Date posted: November 10, 2010
By Michael Khaled for MIFTAH

When I decided years ago to leave my home in America after graduating to come to Palestine and start my career here, my family was less than thrilled. Not only was I moving too far away, but to a place torn apart by generations of conflict. When one of my uncles heard the news, he asked me where I wanted to live, and I have to admit, I hadn’t given it much thought at the time so I just blurted the first city that came to mind: Jerusalem.

He smiled and told me that was a courageous idea, and though I knew about the tense and sometimes violent situation in the holy city, all I was thinking about was its central role in the conflict. The next time I saw him, he gave me a present, a framed picture of a Palestinian man carrying Jerusalem on his back symbolizing the difficulty of staying in Jerusalem for Palestinians. It’s a common painting and many Palestinians here and abroad hang it or similar ones up in their homes.

The image is very fitting since the role of Jerusalem in the conflict is similarly symbolic. Physically there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the city; it’s not more beautiful, resource rich, or strategic than many others. Yet, as the holy city of the three great Western religions, literally billions of people around the world have a stake in its future. With so much attention paid to such a small area, the lives of the city’s population are under the microscope and every action has consequences.

Within the ancient walls of the Old City, the status quo is rigidly maintained between the different sects which if violated, can cause even the humblest of priests to raise hell. Supposedly a feud broke out between neighboring priests over using a ladder to clean the Church of the Holy Sepulcher’s walls claiming the ladder trespassed on their neighbor’s grounds. The ladder has remained in place for the past century to serve as a reminder for priests to watch their tempers, yet I heard of a recent attempt to move it disintegrate to fisticuffs.

Outside the Old City, the stakes are much higher than fuming priests and an occasional fistfight. Israelis regularly announce new construction in east Jerusalem, which did not stop for the so-called settlement freeze. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that it did not pertain to east Jerusalem, which Israel illegally annexed after conquering it in 1967. All sides affirm the special status of Jerusalem: Jews who see it as their holiest temple site, Christians whose messianic story culminates here, and Muslims who believe it to be the site of Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven.

Yet Israel’s policies have been towards Judaizing the city and cutting off its ties to the rest of the Palestinians who have been almost entirely barred from visiting the city since the placement of checkpoints and especially the separation wall. Only with a special permit can a Palestinian with a West Bank ID card pass through, including children.

Politically, Israel seeks to separate Jerusalem from the West Bank where the settlement project has been most frenzied around the holy city. A string of settlements surround Jerusalem separating it from the rest of Palestinian population centers – settlements which Israel has invested billions to develop and subsidize and assumes it will retain in any final agreement with Palestinians.

Within the city though is where Palestinians face the brunt of Israeli attempts to erase Palestinian ties. Land confiscations, housing demolitions, revoked residency status, inflated cost of living, unresponsive municipal authorities, abusive police, and funding disparities are only some of the ways Israel’s stranglehold on Jerusalem attempts to make life so difficult for Palestinians they don’t want to stay.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel recently published a report, titled "Unsafe space: The Israeli authorities' failure to protect human rights amid settlements in East Jerusalem," detailing the lawlessness, and insecurity Jerusalemite Palestinians face daily at the hands of Israel’s often imposing and often violent Jerusalem settlers. Just last month a man was shot and killed by an Israeli private security guard, and two young boys under 15 were run over by a settler and subsequently arrested for throwing stones.

While today the efforts are usually under the guise of benignly serving the “public good”, the policies used to be more blatant; in 1973 a decision issued by the Israeli inter-ministerial committee on Jerusalem affairs set a goal to push the Palestinian population to below 22 percent. Today it still stands at about 30 percent according to Israeli census numbers. Combined Israeli efforts to Judiaze Jerusalem have deprived Palestinians of 86 percent of their private land according to the Civic Coalition for Defending Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem.

Palestinians are determined to hold on to their claim to Jerusalem, no matter the price. Jerusalemite Palestinians have told me of how revered they feel abroad when they tell other Middle Easterners where they are from. Most Muslims, especially Middle Eastern ones, never get the opportunity to see the holy city, yet hear constantly about it and the oppression facing its mostly Muslim Palestinians. My uncle was one of them, even though at the time I was still living in the States.

Now that I’m here, I see just how unique the city really is. Shaped by so many powerful forces throughout history, it seems like an act of hubris for any one people to lay exclusive claim to it. To the Muslims abroad who may never get the chance to come to Jerusalem, that picture my uncle gave me serves as a reminder of the weight the Palestinians who remain here carry so that some day the city may once again earn its original nickname: The city of peace.

Michael Khaled is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). He can be contacted at mid@miftah.org

Laws of the Street Reign in East Jerusalem Neighborhood By Michael Khaled for MIFTAH

MIFTAH VISION: An independent, democratic and sovereign Palestinian state, which grants Palestinians their basic rights, preserves their dignity, and enjoys international recognition and respect.

http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=22667&CategoryId=13

Laws of the Street Reign in East Jerusalem Neighborhood Date posted: October 06, 2010 By Michael Khaled for MIFTAH

Living in Jerusalem has been a rollercoaster. On one hand, its extraordinary history and status can make anyone’s time here surreal. On the other, since it’s the geographical and emotional center of the conflict, people have become hardened and suspicious. Palestinian-Arab neighborhoods exhibit this perhaps the worst of all, since every aspect of the city’s supposedly legitimate system seems to be against the Palestinians living there creating a vacuum of authority. Some of the avenues of oppression include tenuous residency status, evictions, house demolitions, lack of basic services like trash collection or land registry, discriminatory zoning, police brutality, and settler harassment. With no avenue to voice their concerns to the ‘proper’ authorities, the only vehicle to establish order is an array of social customs and the influence of strong arms who enforce them. The day before yesterday I became a victim of the Jerusalem mentality while visiting some friends in one of those neighborhoods: Al-Issawiya. Notorious for its closed society and frequent violence, I was told many times by residents that the people here don’t like outsiders. My friends live in a two-bedroom apartment near the edge of the neighborhood, thinking that would be the safest place for three college girls to live. At first there wasn’t a problem, they only had to deal with a few catcalls. As they got more comfortable and started inviting people to visit, including some males, the catcalls turned to cursing and pranks. These young men knew that in conservative Palestinian society, women who hang out with men are often looked down upon and no one would stop them if they upped the ante from being an irritation to harassment. Derogatory jokes turned to late night bangs on the door and vandalized cars and seemed to culminate one night when a rooftop prankster dumped a bucket of water on us outside their building. Then two nights ago, I met them at their apartment and brought my briefcase with my laptop and cell phones in so I could get some work done before we went out. Around 9 o’clock we locked up to go and when we returned two hours later, the whole two-bedroom apartment was torn apart. Three computers, cell phones and all their gold jewelry was gone. On the table the burglars left a lock of brown hair, a message that this wasn’t a random incident. We thought to call the Israeli police but the neighbors warned against it saying that even if the police did come (which was unlikely), the neighborhood would mobilize and protect their own from the authorities. What’s more, bringing the police may even put whoever called them in danger to set an example. They said the best thing was to leave it to the neighborhood leaders to find the culprit and reclaim the stolen items quietly. The thieves would likely get away with it but we may get our things back. Once news of the burglary spread, the whole street began filling with the men of the neighborhood shouting and arguing. Some were sympathetic to the burglars saying the girls had no business being in the neighborhood, while others were incensed that anyone would violate the safety of their neighborhood regardless of who the target was. They may not have known whether they could get away with it completely, but the burglars were certainly emboldened by the knowledge that even if the authorities came to investigate, no one in the neighborhood would cooperate. The only thing they had to fear was the court of the neighborhood’s opinion, and on that count, they already knew the girls' standing there would work against them. In the end, the judgment of the street seemed to have fallen with the thieves. Everyone claimed ignorance and our things are still missing. The next day the girls began packing their things and left the neighborhood behind looking to find a place less than a kilometer away on the Hebrew University campus which butts right up to the edge of the neighborhood. In the mainly Jewish areas at the top of the hill (on land that was confiscated from Al-Issawiya immediately after the 1967 war), order is kept by the Israeli-run municipal authorities which is responsive to the Jewish residents there. Just three kilometers northeast of Jerusalem’s center, the Issawiyeh neighborhood has been subject to years of abuse by the municipality. It is surrounded on all sides by the enveloping university campus and Hadassah Hospital to the west and south, Jewish settlements to the north the separation barrier to the east. It once took up more than 10,000 dunam (2,471 acres). Then when Israel annexed east Jerusalem it split 7,000 dunam (1,729 acres) away making it part of the occupied West Bank and leaving only 3,000 dunam (741 acres) within Jerusalem’s new boundaries. During the 2008-2009 war on Gaza, Israel closed the most convenient entrance for residents on the way to or from central Jerusalem in an effort to keep the residents separated and invisible to the nearby Jewish Israeli population. Authorities tore up the road and blocked it with cement and dirt piled high so only foot traffic could pass through. The stated reason was to quell unrest from demonstrators in the neighborhood and enhance “security”, yet all it did was make the residents coming and going take a longer rout, giving them another reason to be agitated. Perhaps the most unsettling, if not unexpected, tool Israel uses to keep the Palestinian residents of Al-Issawiya cowed is the overwhelming force used by riot police which I saw firsthand during the recent unrest that spread across the city after two Jerusalem Palestinians were killed by an Israeli security guard. More than a dozen police officers with full riot gear would descend on the main remaining entry to the neighborhood to square off with masked young men. In the first days, the demonstrators began the clashes by closing the entrance with stones and setting trash on fire to block passage. But after a few days the demonstrators stopped showing up and so when the police arrived to quell a non-existent riot, they began throwing dozens of stun grenades to wake up the neighborhood and start the clashes. Crowd control police were so liberal with their “non-lethal” weapons last week that they used so much tear gas within the dense neighborhood, a 14-month-old infant in his home actually suffocated from inhaling too much. As the subjects of so much authoritarian abuse it makes me understand a little about why the people in the neighborhood dislike outsiders. The police have no presence inside the neighborhood other than quelling the discontented outbursts that come every now and then when residents feel they must do something to voice their anger at the system. The authorities in charge in the neighborhood are the influential elders and tough guys who keep their own brand of order in place, and anyone who tries to bring anything new or alien is seen as a threat. If the people are left to find justice for themselves within this essentially lawless bubble, how can the community ever move beyond enforcing simple social taboos? Michael Khaled is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). He can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.