Nadia W. Awad

Israel has managed to do it again. Somehow, they have twisted a distressing event around completely and made themselves look like saints in the process. They have come out looking like the good Samaritans, while making life even more unbearable for about 60,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. You may wonder what I’m talking about. I’m referring to a Jerusalem Post article along the lines of: ‘Israel removes checkpoint to make travel to Jerusalem easier for Palestinians.’ If only they would, but of course they won’t.

Imagine a wide, main road connecting two cities – Jerusalem and Ramallah. Now imagine somebody builds a large cement wall straight down the middle of it, so that on one side, you’re driving in Jerusalem, when on the other side, you’re driving in the West Bank. Obviously you can’t cross the road, unless you actually want to smash your car into cement. Confused? In an attempt to explain it more clearly, imagine you live in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Dahiyet Al Barid, just north of the city center, but your house happens to be confusingly on the West Bank side of the street and behind the gate. Now, intuitively, to get to the city center, you would drive south. Not according to Israel. If you drive south, you’ll just hit the wall or the iron gate. Instead, what you have to do is drive further north, go through the Qalandia checkpoint, turn around and drive back south again. Still confused? Probably – I still am. It’s one of those situations where you have to see it to believe (and understand) it.

Yes, a checkpoint was removed, but the Jerusalem Post didn’t bother to highlight the fact that a gate was closed too. This gate, when it was open, was only for Dahiyet Al Barid residents. With the gate closed, the checkpoint was removed for the simple reason that the road, for all intents and purposes, is now non-existent - one less road for the Palestinians to drive on. We are all being forced to go through the Qalandia checkpoint instead, a bottleneck about to explode. In addition to the West Bankers who are lucky enough to get a permit to Jerusalem, the Qalandia checkpoint now has to deal with about 60,000 more Jerusalem residents of Dahiyet Al Barid, numbers it is by no means equipped to deal with.

Qalandia is our mini-hell on earth, especially at rush hour. The place stinks of sewage and car exhaust fumes. It’s noisy, with people shouting, car horns beeping, and Israeli soldiers yelling orders in Hebrew on loud speakers to Palestinians wondering if they should edge their cars forward or not. Going through on foot is even worse. If you’re even the slightest bit claustrophobic, avoid it like the plague. After you’ve squeezed through a narrow passage enclosed by steel bars (prison-like), you have to wait in a queue until it’s your turn to squeeze through an iron turnstile, take off all clothing that has metal on it, put your belongings through an x-ray machine, walk through a metal detector, flash your ID or permit, and hope they don’t yell anything else at you in Hebrew because you don’t understand a word anyway.. If you get through all that, you’re free (relatively speaking)! The whole process of crossing a couple of hundred yards of ground takes anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, depending on the time of day and the mood your designated Israeli soldier is in.

This event is what Israeli newspapers and politicians are heralding as a sort of good will gesture, made from the bottom of their hearts. If that is the case, I’d hate to see what their version of peace looks like. Actually, we can see what Israel wants Jerusalem to look like by, say, 2020. They haven’t really hidden their ambitions, which they announced when the Jerusalem Municipality unveiled its 2020 Jerusalem master plan. This master plan does not in any way take into account a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital. Here are a few statistics that indicate what they are planning.

In Jerusalem, a vast network of tunnels is being dug underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque, threatening its very foundations. Just a few weeks ago, a UN-run school near the Mosque suffered structural damage from the tunnel excavations, causing a classroom floor to collapse, injuring 17 Palestinian schoolgirls. I doubt Israeli authorities would be too upset if the same thing happened to Al-Aqsa. Nearby, the Jerusalem Municipality is considering voluntarily relocating some 1,500 Palestinian residents from the city’s Silwan neighborhood to alternative lots elsewhere. Eighty-eight houses are slated for demolition there, because they are apparently located in an area known as the King’s Garden, defined as being of great Jewish archaeological importance by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The whole area will be transformed into a public park, as the current residents who have lived there for generations are clearly of secondary importance. People are not exaggerating when they use the phrase Judaization. It’s happening before our very eyes. And by cutting out large Palestinian neighborhoods, Israel is hoping to maximize and preserve a Jewish majority presence in the city.

Muslim sites and individuals are not the only ones subject to abuse. Jerusalem’s Islamic-Christian Panel, a panel of prominent Muslim and Christian leaders, called for Arab and international actors to “stand firm” against Israel and “rescue the holy city.” The secretary-general, Hassan Khater, revealed that Christian clerics are subject to mockery and harassment by radical Jewish residents on their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and that settlers often spit on the cross and on clerics while passing through the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City.

Elsewhere in the West Bank, settlement expansion is by no means slowing down. On the contrary, while Operation Cast Lead was ongoing in Gaza, Israeli authorities appropriated hundreds of acres of land. For example, the Efrat settlement near Bethlehem is to be expanded by the appropriation of around 420 acres deemed "state land". According to Efrat's mayor, the plan is to triple the number of residents in the settlement. Another three thousand dunums of land was confiscated in Yatta, a village south of Hebron, also for the purpose of illegal settlement expansion.

You have to hand it to Israel – they certainly do think long-term and know how to pick their moments. For the past decade, they have been making a two-state solution look more and more impossible while simultaneously engaging in peace negotiations aimed at just that. Now it looks like they won’t even bother with the illusion of peace talks. Israel’s Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted that he would accept coalition guidelines that do not refer to a Palestinian state, the road map peace plan or the Annapolis diplomatic process. The separate and unequal rule looks to be Israel’s only version of the future for Palestinians – a few cantons surrounded by the mighty state of Israel.

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Source: http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=18919&CategoryId=13