january 2005

Because of Israeli imposed conditions, only 6,000 of the 124,000 Palestinians from East Jerusalem who hold Israeli-issued Jerusalem IDs are eligible to vote within East Jerusalem near their homes.  Those 6,000 must vote for their President in six Israeli government controlled post offices. The remaining 118,000 East Jerusalem residents must travel to surrounding towns and villages to vote, often passing through Israeli checkpoints or around Israel's Apartheid Wall.

Only 4.8% of East Jerusalemites will actually find their names on the East Jerusalem voting lists at the six Israeli post offices near their homes.  The vast majority are being turned away and told to travel on to the surrounding towns and villages to vote.  The Jaffa Gate post office seems to represent an extreme example of this problem.  By 12:30 PM, ISM volunteers were told by an Israeli post office employee there that only one of approximately 40 Palestinians who came to vote there had been allowed to vote so far.  Similarly, ISM volunteers have been told that only 34 few East Jerusalemites succeeded in voting at the Israeli post office in Shufat, and 56 voted in Beit Hanina so far.

On top of restricting the vote to 4.8% of the eligible Palestinian population in East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities have imposed numerous other constraints on East Jerusalem residents' right to vote.  The requirement that Palestinians cast ballots in Israeli post offices allows Israeli authorities to maintain a façade that Jerusalem residents are casting absentee ballots, and mailing their votes back to their homeland.  Already worried about voting in Israeli post offices, East Jerusalemites also fear traveling to vote in the towns and villages outside of East Jerusalem.  Israeli authorities could claim that as evidence that they are not residents of Jerusalem, and strip them of their Jerusalem IDs and their rights and benefits.


Other major violations in East Jerusalem include Israeli restrictions on registering voters and campaigning in East Jerusalem.  Israeli authorities closed down Palestinian voter registration centers in East Jerusalem. While they eventually allowed door-to-door registration, staff conducting the registration told ISM volunteers that they were prohibited from carrying any documents identifying them with the Palestinian Central election Commission, and from displaying the Palestinian flag or colors.  Israeli authorities have also limited the posting of candidate and voter education posters to a few designated public locations.  Presidential candidates have also been arrested and harassed by Israeli police on the few occasions when they attempted to campaign in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli government's effort to deny Palestinians' right to vote in East Jerusalem serves as one example of the impossibility of conducting free and fair elections under Israeli military occupation.9TH JUNE 2005

HERE IS THE "LEGAL" EXPLANATION IN HA'ARETZ,20TH JUNE 2005israeli's new land grab discovered:Gov't decision strips Palestinians of their East J'lem property
By Meron Rappaport, Ha'aretz.
Thu., January 20, 2005 Shvat 10, 5765
The government decision in July confirms a decision reached in the ministerial committee for Jerusalem affairs a month earlier. The decision was presented to the prime minister and attorney general and met with their approval, but the decision was not publicized until now and is not listed on the Web site of the Prime Minister's Office.

The Sharon government implemented the Absentee Property Law in East Jerusalem last July, contrary to Israeli government policy since Israeli law was extended to East Jerusalem after the Six Day War. The law means that thousands of Palestinians who live in the West Bank will lose ownership of their property in East Jerusalem.

Government officials estimate the assets total thousands of dunam, while other estimates say they could add up to half of all East Jerusalem property.


LAW MODELLED ON ENGLISH COLONIAL LAW:
The Absentee Property Law of 1950 stipulates, among other things, that an absentee is someone who at the time of the War of Independence "was in any part of the land of Israel that is outside the area of Israel" - that is, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

According to the law, absentee assets are transfered to the authority of the Custodian for Absentee Property, without the absentee being eligible for any compensation. When East Jerusalem came under Israeli law, then-attorney general Meir Shamgar directed that the law not be applied to West Bank residents who have property in the parts of East Jerusalem that became part of the State of Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reissued that directive in 1993.

With the recent construction of the fence in the Jerusalem region, Palestinian landholders from Bethlehem and Beit Jala requested permission to continue working their fields, which are within Jerusalem's municipal jurisdiction. The state's response stated that the lands "no longer belong to them, but have been handed over to the Custodian for Absentee Property." At stake are thousands of dunam of agricultural land on which the Palestinians grew olives and grapes throughout the years.

"These people's property was always considered absentee assets, but so long as no fence existed, these people could get to their property and everything was fine from their standpoint," said a senior judicial official involved in the case. "The fence is the result of terrorism. It's not fair that a man becomes an absentee because his tie to his land has been cut without his doing. But morality is one thing, and what is written in our laws another."

The Palestinian landholders and their Israeli lawyers term it a "land grab," and also worry that nascent Housing Ministry plans will build on part of absentees' land.

This information co-ordinates with the recent Election rule in East Jerusalem that confused hundreds of people, and especially the candidates for election and the foreign monitors: