Turning Holy
City Into A fortress
By Chris McGreal
The Guardian
23 October, 2003
Jerusalem
came to the unsuspecting people of Nu'man in 1967 as an imaginary line
across their hamlet's parched, rock-studded hills far beyond the city.
In the wake of Israel's drubbing of the Arab armies in the Six Day war
and occupation of the West Bank, the conquerors drew a wide arc deep
into Palestinian territory and declared it the new boundary of the Jewish
state's "eternal and indivisible capital".
It hardly mattered
to the bemused villagers even when Israeli bureaucrats, out of incompetence
or malice, declared Nu'man's houses inside this new greater Jerusalem,
but said its people were residents of the West Bank.
As the years passed,
the 200 or so people living in Nu'man did wonder about the Jewish settlements
creeping ever closer but the hamlet's ties were with the West Bank and
that was just a short walk to the larger village of Al-Khas where most
people shopped, worshipped or worked. Jerusalem's boundary was for the
Israelis to worry about.
As work on Ariel
Sharon's controversial "security fence" through the West Bank
stalled while the Israelis and Washington wrangled over how deep it
can cut into Palestinian territory, the government stepped up the pace
of construction. What was once an invisible line is rapidly rising as
a monolithic partition for many communities and a looming disaster for
some such as Nu'man.
Altogether, almost
50 miles of fence and wall will carve through the city's Arab neighbourhoods
and the occupied territories declared to be part of Jerusalem. It will
force children from about 30 schools to find new ones, divide families
that used to live just a couple of minutes' walk apart and separate
tens of thousands of people from their work.
"This is the
greatest change to Jerusalem, and the way it will function, since Israel
occupied the east of the city in 1967," said Daniel Seidemann,
an Israeli lawyer fighting a legal action against the Jerusalem section
of the barrier. "East Jerusalem is a living organism that relies
on its connections to the West Bank to survive. The wall is severing
those arteries."
To the north of
the city, about 24,000 Palestinians will be ghettoised as the fence
surrounds a neighbourhood that will be on the Jerusalem side of the
barrier but whose residents do not have permission to enter the city.
To the south, the barrier already divides Jerusalem from Bethlehem,
and part of Bethlehem from itself.
International pressure
forced the government to alter the route of the fence where it was to
slice through Al Quds university land, but it was a rare concession.
"The official
policy is to maintain a 'demographic balance' of 70% Jews to 30% Palestinians
in Jerusalem," said Jessica Montell, head of the respected Israeli
human rights group, B'Tselem. "It sounds very innocuous for what
is a policy to drive people from their homes. There has been an explicit
policy to use residency rights and building permits to make life difficult
for Palestinians so they leave the city. To that we can now add the
security fence."
"People who
go two metres down the road to take their kids to school were crossing
an arbitrary line in the sand that is now becoming a massive structure."
So far, almost 11
miles of the fence has been completed with one section grinding to a
halt just a few hundred metres from Nu'man.
The Israelis say
the villagers are living there illegally because they only moved to
the area during the 1980s.
The claim infuriates
Yusuf Dirawi. He says his family has lived there for generations, first
in caves with their sheep and then in tents before the first solid houses
were built around 50 years ago. He gestures to stone housing with construction
dates in the 1950s carved above the door. Aerial pictures of the area
show that the village was well established by 1967.
"How can they
say we haven't lived here all these years?" Mr Dirawi asked. "They
only have to look around. It's obvious. But they don't want to see."
The first problems
came before the fence. In 1995, the Israeli authorities barred the children
of Nu'man from attending their nearest school, in a neighbouring Arab
village, saying that it was reserved for Jerusalem residents.
Harassment
"Then they destroyed the road connecting us to Jerusalem,"
said Mr Dirawi. "We received water from a village in the West Bank.
They say because we are in Jerusalem we are not allowed to get our water
from the West Bank."
The harassment escalated
in July as construction of the fence approached. Police came at night
and arrested all the men they could find, Mr Dirawi among them.
"I was arrested
at 1.15am. We were taken to the Bethlehem checkpoint. We were asked
to sign a document saying that we would not return to Israel, meaning
Jerusalem. I refused," he said.
The police returned
five times over the following month, until human rights lawyers won
a high court order preventing the detentions while a legal battle over
Nu'man's legal status is resolved.
Israeli officials
decline to discuss the case, saying it is still before the courts. But
Jerusalem's chief administrative officer, Eitan Meir, has written to
B'Tselem saying that Nu'man's residents belong to a clan from Bethlehem
and therefore their homes in Nu'man were only "temporary".
The arc drawn in
1967 annexed 40 square miles of Palestinian territory into Jerusalem.
Since then, Israel has built 12 large Jewish settlements on Palestinian
land inside the boundary that are home to about 170,000 Jews. But almost
every Palestinian application for planning permission in the same area
is refused.
"What should
be a neutral planning tool to protect a green area is used to impose
this 'demographic balance'," said Ms Montell. "No Palestinian
has been able to get a building permit in Jerusalem, only Jews get them.
Israel says it is just enforcing laws that any other city in the world
has, but it enforces them according to this 'demographic balance'."
When the fence around
Jerusalem is finally put into operation in the coming months, the people
of Nu'man will be trapped. Already barred from travelling into the heart
of Jerusalem they will also find themselves cut off from the West Bank.
Once they leave their village they will not be allowed to return. There
will be nowhere for them to work or shop, or for the children to go
to school.
"An official
came here and told us this would be a 'sterile area' (free of Palestinians)
or used for settlement expansion," Mr Dirawi said. "At first
we didn't see how they could do it. Now we know."