Posted on: January 1, 2012
By Emily Schaeffer
The report analyzes Israeli policy and practice in East Jerusalem under law and international humanitarian law. 
The report concludes that Israel is perpetrating serious violations of these laws by denying the right to adequate housing, development, and self-determination, as well as violating the prohibition on residency revocation.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Jerusalem is known as one of the holiest sites in the world to three major religions:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What is less well known is that while members of all three religions reside in the city today, the city is divided both geographically (East and West Jerusalem) and demographically. Likewise, far fewer are aware of the assertive efforts made on the part of the Israeli authorities for over four decades to ensure that the Palestinian population – both Christian and Muslim – remains small in numbers and weak as a society. In order to accomplish this goal, a sophisticated set of policies and practices have been put into place, whose implementation has become increasingly aggressive and widespread over the years. The result is the daily struggle for over 300,000 Palestinian East Jerusalem residents between securing authorized housing and adequate infrastructure, maintaining residency, health care and education benefits, and generally remaining financially afloat. Indeed, as this report will show, many of these hardships are the result of Israel’s violation of several norms and obligations under international law.
This report first provides in Chapter II a general overview of these policies and practices by presenting a summary of the dedicated work and research of many of the region’s most established human rights organizations. Following this summary, in Chapter III we present a visual representation – in the form of a flow chart – of the current situation in East Jerusalem, which we view not as the tragic accumulation of various unrelated circumstances, but rather a cause-result set of policies and practices that ultimately accomplish a very specific goal. With these policies and practices as a backdrop, we then propose in Chapter IV a new normative framework – or legal “language” – for examining and critiquing administrative home demolitions in East Jerusalem. This framework outlines five major areas of international law to which Israel is subject and applies them to the set of policies and practices applied in East Jerusalem, forming conclusions about Israel’s failure to adhere to these norms.
Lastly, this report offers its overall conclusions.
A note on the home demolitions data provided in this report
Throughout the report data is presented regarding the situation in Jerusalem, including figures on home demolitions. It must be noted that there is no uniform data on the number and frequency of home demolitions. Administrative home demolitions in the city of Jerusalem are conducted by two different authorities – the Municipality and the Ministry of Interior – and only the former regularly publishes data on demolitions. The total numbers of home demolitions provided by the authorities therefore differ from those collected by human rights organizations based on their observations and reports from the field. What is more, these numbers alone cannot express the type of building, the percentage of the structure that was demolished, or how many families’ homes were affected: for instance, regardless of whether an unlicensed section (such as a balcony or room) of a building (residential or commercial) was demolished, or an entire multi-story residential building, the incident will almost always be recorded by the authorities as one demolition. From what we know about demolition patterns in East versus West Jerusalem, we can assume that the majority of demolitions in East Jerusalem are demolitions of whole structures and often entire homes owned by Palestinians, whereas demolitions in West Jerusalem are most often partial demolitions, or of businesses rather than homes. Additionally, the practice of “self-demolition” – whereby a building owner, rather than the authorities, demolishes a building under demolition order – is not comprehensively documented in any official government data; the unofficial data that is available is included here.
In this report, we are clear about the source of all figures, and we indicate where figures vary. It should be noted, however, that despite the variance in the data on home demolitions over the last decade, all figures reflect a significant disparity in demolition frequency between East and West Jerusalem, disproportionate to the incidence of building violations in each sector, and therefore are telling of the selective implementation of the law and the deliberately different policies toward the Jewish sector versus the Palestinian sector of Jerusalem.
