Opinion // The Mantra of 'United' Jerusalem Is a Macabre Joke

Palestinians walk through a security fence to an Israeli checkpoint in the Shoafat refugee camp, May 17, 2017. Ariel Schalit/AP

The Jewish brain has invented another novel idea: How to change the address of 140,000 people without their having to leaving home. This is peanuts for us. In our unbridled chutzpah we have imposed the Entry into Israel laws on the Palestinians of Jerusalem, as though they chose to live in Israel of their own free will. We have sentenced them to conditional residency, with the dangling sword of isolation, impoverishment and expulsion hanging over them. So why shouldn’t we be able to change the definition? We can always find the researcher, the planner and the legal scholar who will think up and pen the latest trick to make another group of human beings disappear from our eyes and our responsibility.

It’s almost certain that our Knesset will accept the change in the Basic Law on Jerusalem, thereby removing two Palestinian neighborhoods, Kafr Aqab and the Shoafat refugee camp, from the municipal boundaries of the capital and declaring them an Arab local council. Nobody is asking their residents. The two don’t have territorial contiguity. They are separated by military checkpoints, a long wait, barbed wire fences, a winding wall, settlements and hostile police and army patrols. They have no additional land to enable development and expansion because the planners left most of it for the Jews.

So what? That’s how you establish a new Arab local council in the Jewish state. It’s disingenuous to say that the budget that wasn’t found for them as neighborhoods of Jerusalem will be found for them as a separate council.

In Israel, every administrative decision related to land and Palestinians encompasses a great deal of long-range vision and planning skills and not an iota of benign intention. It contains only a desire to harm, to create a new absurd situation with a new solution that was considered entirely unacceptable just a short time before.

The seemingly innocent division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C drew the boundaries of the territorial pockets that we designated for the Palestinians. The four years allotted for this division have been so prolonged that to Israelis, the annexation of Area C will seem like the most logical step. Israeli roads divide Palestinian neighborhoods and surround Palestinian homes, the wall was built adjacent to A-Ram and Shoafat and the area it left for expansion is only for the settlements. Everything is based on “professional considerations,” of course. And the small proportions allocated for construction in Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods – after 35 percent of their land was expropriated for Jews – was also initially explained by the altruistic reason of preserving the areas' rural character.

Israel’s great talent is wrapping everything in “security.” In Jerusalem they also used the mantra of the “united city” – but it’s a macabre joke. Show me one Jew from Jerusalem who objects to Kafr Aqab and Shoafat being within the city’s boundaries. If Beit Hanina and Sur Baher interest Jews, it’s because they have unused tracts of land that can still be stolen from the Palestinians to build a Zionist fortress.

Surrounding Kafr Aqab and Shoafat with the wall has created islands of no government and no responsibility – another sub-classification among the many bureaucratic classifications with which we define, sort and split the Palestinian population on both sides of the Green Line. It’s the first step before tossing them over to the Palestinian Authority.

And then comes the twist of the logical solution: Unlike the Jerusalem municipality, the new Arab council will be permitted to get help from the PA to collect the garbage and to approve, after the fact, the huge, dangerous and unlicensed housing projects that were built there. Nobody will punish the council if it summons the Palestinian police from the station across street to handle the drug problem.

First comes the de facto. And even if the de jure is delayed, the result is the same as outlined by the sophisticated Oslo Accords: The PA is responsible for dealing with the social, economic, health and problems created by Israel, only without freedom of choice, without resources and without sovereign powers.