THE HANDSTAND
june 2005
By Genevieve Cora Fraser
As the Jerusalem Municipality prepares the largest home demolitions in Occupied East Jerusalem since the Six Day War in 1967, former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres called for the complete ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinians population from their homes in Jerusalem. Current plans call for the demolition of 88 buildings housing approximately 1,000 residents in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem which is recognized as part of Palestine under the 1949 Armistice Agreement.
According to the Palestinian National Authority s International Press Center, Peres who currently serves as the deputy of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, has called for an exodus to the Palestinian population in occupied Jerusalem, which estimated about 240,000, under a pretext to secure keeping Jerusalem as undivided capital of Israel.
Peres, the current leader of the Labor party said in a Cabinet meeting that it is misperception to believe that it is possible to keep Jerusalem as a capital for the Jewish people at a time 240,000 Palestinians live in it, the IPC reports.
Ironically Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were the twin architects of the Oslo Peace Accord, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Palestinian President Yassir Arafat in 1994. In September 1995, Rabin and Arafat signed the Second Israeli-PLO Accord, popularly called the Oslo II Accord, at the White House in the presence of President Clinton - amidst strong opposition from the Israeli right wing. Shortly afterward Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli religious extremist and Peres formed a new government, serving both as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. In the general elections the following year, Peres was defeated by Shamir's Likud successor, Binyamin Netanyahu
Peres call for complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem was echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon during Israel s so-called Jerusalem Day on June 6, which is the anniversary of Israel's capture of the Old City and Arab East Jerusalem in 1967. Sharon pledged that Jerusalem will remain undivided. Jerusalem is ours for eternity and will never pass into foreign hands," Sharon said.
Jerusalem Day was also marked by violence. As Israeli police escorted a group of Jewish visitors to the al-Aqsa Mosque, police used stun grenades against stone throwing Palestinians. The al-Aqsa Mosque compound, one of the holiest sites to Muslim worshippers, is known to Jews as the Temple Mount. To Muslims it is the place where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven. For Jews it is the site of ancient biblical temples. In the past year, right-wing Jewish extremists have made repeated attempts to derail the Gaza disengagement plan by instigating violence. Some have expressed plans to blow up the site and build the 3rd Temple of Jerusalem to replace the 1st built by Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians and the 2nd which was destroyed by the Romans around the time of Christ.
CBC News Canada reports that after the morning's clashes members of a Jewish fringe group known as the Temple Mount Faithful marched towards the al-Aqsa compound, chanting and singing the Israeli national anthem. They carried a coffin with the word disengagement on it and banners that read We will liberate the Temple Mount.
In Ramallah, Palestinian President Abbas said the decision by Israeli police to allow Jewish visitors was a provocation. Palestinian plans call for East Jerusalem to serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. In March controversy surrounded Israel s allocation of $2 million to demolish approximately 26,000 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. Under international law, the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. Ethnic cleansing and mass deportation are designated as crimes against humanity and also prohibited under international law.
The original United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, a.k.a. Resolution 181 on which Israel bases its legitimacy - called for a future Government of Palestine, the creation of Independent Arab and Jewish States within Palestine, and a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. In addition there was to be freedom of movement for both sides and no unnecessary transfers of populations. In cases where eminent domain was necessary, those transferred were to be compensated.
Instead, following the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, eighty percent of the Palestinian population was ethnically cleaned from historic Palestine, with Israel staking claim to seventy-eight percent of their land. The fledgling government then passed Absentee Property Laws declaring all Palestinian Arabs absent from their property, even those who remained. At that time, Palestinian land, property, and bank accounts were transferred to the state of Israel. To this day, the Palestinian refugee population is the largest in the world, with only one right guaranteed, the Right of Return.
On May 5, 1949, at the time the application of Israel for admission to membership in the United Nations was under consideration, a meeting of the General Assembly was held at Lake Success, New York. The assembled rebuked Israeli actions by reiterating that the State of Israel, in its present form, directly contravened the previous recommendations of the United Nations in at least three important respects: in its attitude on the problem of Arab refugees, on the delimitation of its territorial boundaries, and on the question of Jerusalem."
The General Assembly statement continued, "The United Nations had certainly not intended that the Jewish State should rid itself of its Arab citizens. On the contrary, section C of part I of the Assembly's 1947 resolution had explicitly provided guarantees of minority rights in each of the two States. For example, it had prohibited the expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State except for public purposes, and then only upon payment of full compensation.
Yet the fact was that 90 per cent of the Arab population of Israel had been driven outside its boundaries by military operations, had been forced to seek refuge in neighboring Arab territories, had been reduced to misery and destitution, and had been prevented by Israel from returning to their homes. Their homes and property had been seized and were being used by thousands of European Jewish immigrants...
Surely the Jews, who claimed that they had always been an uprooted people whose homelessness had driven them to fight for their ancient home, could not in all justice and conscience seek to remedy that uprooting by inflicting it upon others," the United Nations documents affirms.
| The politics of Silwan, East Jerusalem, go
far beyond demographic considerations, however,
or even concerns over parks. Silwan - or
"The City of David" as it has been
rechristened by the Israeli authorities who
opened a visitors' center on the site -- is
considered the site where the city of Jerusalem
began, and thus it is coveted by Israeli settlers
who have conducted an aggressive campaign to
remove Palestinians from the place. In fact, a settler organization called El Ad focuses exclusively on the Silwan area, and does so with discreet help from the Israeli government. In 1992 Haim Klugman, then-Director General of the Ministry of Justice, issued what became known as the Klugman Report. It reported that tens of millions of dollars had been given to the settler groups, including El Ad, by government ministries; that false documents supplied by Arab collaborators had been used to classify Palestinian houses as "absentee property;" that the Israel Lands Authority and the Jewish National Fund had allotted much of Silwan to the settlers without offering it up for tender; and that public funds had been used to finance the settlers' legal expenses. "We break up Arab continuity and their claim to East Jerusalem by putting in isolated islands of Jewish presence in areas of Arab population," say Uri Bank, a leader of the pro-settlement Moledet party. "Then we definitely try to put these together to form our own continuity. It's just like Legos - you put the pieces out there and connect the dots. That is Zionism. That is the way the state of Israel was built. Our eventual goal is Jewish continuity in all of Jerusalem." In the past decade El Ad has taken over more than 50 houses in Silwan, displacing the Palestinian families (often in nighttime operations) and moving in Israeli Jewish families. Despite ongoing demolitions of Palestinian homes over the years, settlers just completed a seven-storey apartment building in Silwan which now stands over the village sporting a huge Israeli flag. The City Engineer's office claims it did not notice the construction. Needless to say, no demolition order has been issued, nor will be. By Jeff Halper, The Electronic Intifada http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3901.shtml |
