Jerusalem Undivided
A changing mind-set among the city's Palestinians
JERUSALEM—In his small grocery store just off Sultan Suleiman Street, which runs past the Old City's Damascus Gate and through the Arab side of downtown Jerusalem, a Palestinian merchant grumbles about the hardships and indignities under Israeli rule. His complaints are long-standing among Palestinians here, yet the reality for him and others is shifting in response to the violence and economic hopelessness of Palestinian Authority rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "There is no safety there," he says.
As a result, the merchant has given up on what has long been the dream and demand of Jerusalem's Palestinians: to see the city redivided, with the Arab side—which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War—becoming the capital of a Palestinian state. "Gaza should be for Palestine, the West Bank should be for Palestine," he says, "but Jerusalem should stay like it is." On this, he is not alone.
Local Palestinians, by deed if not by declaration, are increasingly opting for the status quo, for life under Israeli sovereignty. Jerusalem is by no means happily unified, but it is becoming grudgingly unified. "It's not that the Palestinians here have become Zionists; it's not that they've fallen in love with the State of Israel. They haven't," says an Arab attorney in Jerusalem who, like the merchant, requests anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue. "They just want to live normal lives, with security, with a little money in their wallets. They want their kids to be able to go to school. They want what everybody wants."
Distinct. It is now 40 years since Israel tore down the walls and fences that had divided Jerusalem since the country's 1948 War of Independence. International conventional wisdom holds that, despite Israel's strenuous claims, the city is still effectively divided. And, on the surface, it is. Jerusalem's 480,000 Israelis and 250,000 Palestinians each live in their own distinct neighborhoods. Aside from Palestinians who do mainly low-wage jobs on the Jewish side of town and Israelis who have business on the Arab side, the two populations don't mix. The Israelis hold Israeli passports, while 98 percent of the Palestinians hold only Israeli-issue travel documents listing them as Jordanian nationals. Jews in Jerusalem vote in national and municipal elections; Palestinians don't. The Jews identify with Israel; the Palestinians, or certainly the Muslim majority among them, identify with the Palestinians and the greater Arab world.
Yet while the city's Palestinians remain spatially and nationally divided from the Israelis, the relative security of life in Arab Jerusalem has deflated their nationalist spirit. Only 15 percent of them voted in last year's PA elections—compared with 78 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, notes Hillel Cohen of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Except for aging members of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the locals no longer clamor publicly for al-Quds—the Arabic name for Jerusalem—to be recognized as the Palestinian capital.
Since the 2001 death of Faisal Husseini, head of Arab Jerusalem's most illustrious family, the city's Palestinians, for the first time in modern history, have had no recognized political leader. This is partly because Israel has cracked down on Jerusalem Arab political activity since the intifada uprising in 2000, and partly because the city's Arabs have become deeply disillusioned by the PA's dismal performance. "Let's be honest—we've lost the battle for Jerusalem," admitted a locally elected Palestinian legislator. "Frankly, when I see what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza, I can understand why."
To be sure, the Arabs of Jerusalem have a litany of complaints against Israel, which has never treated them equally with the city's Jewish citizens and which is growing increasingly alarmed by the so-called demographic threat to the capital's Jewish majority. City Hall has made it virtually impossible for local Palestinians to get building permits, leading many of them to illegally build houses that the city, in turn, frequently demolishes. Arabs in the capital lost the right to bring in their spouses from the PA territories or abroad after a few West Bank Palestinians used the pretext of "family unification" to gain residence and commit acts of terrorism. Many of the city's Arabs lost access to jobs, school, and family in the West Bank, cut off by Israel's security fence and military checkpoints.
Better off. Still, Jerusalem Palestinians are voting with their feet. Thousands who had left for West Bank jobs have moved back to the city out of fear of being denied re-entry, causing rents on the capital's Arab side to nearly triple in the past few years. While the population, overall, is certainly poor by Israeli standards, it is far better off economically than Palestinians in the West Bank, not to mention those in Gaza, whose economy is a humanitarian disaster. Furthermore, in return for the taxes they pay to Israel, Arabs in Jerusalem receive healthcare and social benefits. And if Israeli police tend to be overly suspicious or worse toward Jerusalem's Arab population, they also tend to know their limits. A Palestinian bystander in Gaza is liable to be killed by a Fatah gunman, a Hamas gunman or an Israeli-fired missile; a Palestinian bystander in Jerusalem is extremely unlikely to be killed by anyone. Notes the local attorney: "The saying you hear [from Arabs] in the city now is 'Give me hell in Jerusalem over paradise in the PA.'"
Despite their abiding Palestinian national identity and resentment of Israel, many local Arabs are coming to terms with Israeli sovereignty. They are reporting crimes to Israeli police in greater numbers. There is also a big shift in the schools away from the PA-approved curriculum to the one approved by Israel—at the insistence of Jerusalem Arab parents. Ayman Gbara, an Arab high school principal in Beit Safafa, a neighborhood just across the security fence from Bethlehem, says the shift is happening at his school because parents see that their children are physically barred from going to the West Bank to attend college, so they want their kids to have a high school diploma that can get them into an Israeli college in Jerusalem. "Twelve, 15 years ago, this was considered to be like treason," says Gbara. "Today, it's considered to be acceptable, even advisable."
For 40 years, conventional wisdom has held that, for Israeli-Palestinian peace, Jerusalem has to be redivided roughly along the border that existed before the Six-Day War. For all this time, Israel has been hard at work trying to change that perception. Now, on the other side of that old prewar border, Israel has gained untold numbers of silent, resigned supporters for its cause.
With Khaled Abu Toameh
This story appears in the June 11, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.