According to a classified EU report, the Israeli government is engaging in an “illegal annexation” of East Jerusalem, considered to be the capital of any future Palestinian state. The Guardian (UK) quotes the confidential document as stating:

Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Such “facts on the ground” are usually associated with Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank meant to undermine Palestinian demands for a return to the pre-1967, internationally recognized borders.  As is well known much of Israel’s actions in the occupied territory are justified by the state as security measures enacted to protect illegal settlements.  But so often in the mainstream (and alternative) media East Jerusalem is overlooked and rarely seen as subject to similar policies.  That is why The Guardian report should be noted, and while this is important news – and EU criticism, though at the moment not publicly stated, is something to be welcomed – annexation of the city is merely an expansion of long-running policies.

Jerusalem was divided after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, with a small eastern portion coming under Jordanian control.  In 1967 Israel took over East Jerusalem and occupied the West Bank and Gaza.  According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem this act already constituted an illegal annexation. Israel’s original appropriation of East Jerusalem incorporated not only the original 6 sq. km controlled by Jordan, but also an additional 64 sq. km, all in an effort to institute a permanent Jewish majority in the city.  As B’Tselem states:

In order to ensure a significant Jewish majority, the primary consideration [of the 1967 annexation] was to prevent the inclusion of heavily-populated Palestinian areas within Jerusalem. Whereas several Palestinian villages were placed outside the city, some of their lands were included within the city’s new borders, examples being Beit Iksa and Beit Hanina in the north, and detached areas lying in the municipalities of Bethlehem and Beit Sahur in the south. Villages and neighborhoods were, therefore, divided; one part remained in the West Bank, and the other part was annexed by Israel.

East Jerusalem has since remained under Israeli municipal authority.  Israel’s supporters are quick to point out that Arabs living in the city were offered – and largely rejected – Israeli citizenship, but fail to mention that the conditions to doing so made it almost impossible for Palestinians to accept.  In addition to the politically untenable step of swearing allegiance to the state of Israel, Palestinians would also have to display knowledge of Hebrew and prove they are not citizens of any other country.  B’Tselem paints their resulting legal status as follows:

Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right. The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city, and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967.

This brief background is essential to understanding the current actions taken by Israel in East Jerusalem as reported in The Guardian.  As a result of their historically determined legal situation, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are constantly under threat of home demolition and confiscation of their property.  Israel justifies such actions by claiming these homes were built without proper permits.  But according to The Guardian, “Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use.”  Since late 2007 Israel has also been expanding its own settlements in East Jerusalem, with 3,000 units out of 5,500 approved so far, bringing the number of Israeli settlers in city to more than 190,000.

To get a further grasp on the increasing degree of home demolitions in East Jerusalem we have to look at the numbers.  B’Tselem’s most recently published figures cover the years 2004-2008:

While startling, these statistics do not include 2009.  According to a report by the Research and Documentation Unit at the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, January and February 2009 saw more than 200 notifications for demolition, with 30 so far destroyed.  The Palestine News Network, reporting on the study, states “most of the demolitions took place in neighborhoods surrounding the Old City and on the fringes of the ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements near neighborhoods and towns surrounding the city’s holy sites in the eastern border and the north-east.”  They estimate that about 20,000 Palestinian homes are under threat while settlements continue to strangle the Arab population.

Israel’s policy in East Jerusalem is straight-forward, and as we have seen consistent with its policies in the occupied territories: establish “facts on the ground” while making life unbearable for Palestinians.  This is part of what has become known in international relations as the “peace process,” used in an effort to undermine any chance for peace.  Orwell would be proud.

The following video is of a home demolition in East Jerusalem taken in July 2008 and published by B’Tselem:

Here’s an excellent analysis by Richard Seymour of the Israeli government’s shifting propaganda line regarding the recent bombing of a UN-run school which killed 43 refugees.  It’s a typical example of Israel’s Big Lie in this brutal assault on the Palestinian people, which, repeated so often, becomes officially-sanctioned truth: those evil Hamas fighters hide among the civilian population and are therefore ultimately to blame for the resulting civilian casualties.

The IDF’s initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel’s brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its ‘infrastructure of terror’ among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel’s excuse: Israel’s killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.

–More–

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel-Palestinian conflict, propaganda

Israeli-American journalist Nir Rosen has an excellent piece in The Guardian on the continuing, vicious Israeli attack on Gaza.  In addition to providing a better understanding of the overall conflict, he skillfully deconstructs the entire notion of the word “terrorism.”

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Technorati Tags: colonialism, Gaza, Israel