Israel, since its occupation of Jerusalem, has pursued various policies to integrate East Jerusalem into Israel proper by 
augmenting the legal status of the city, annexing land and expanding Jewish settlements within and around the city. Since East Jerusalem is an occupied territory, such Israeli practices formidably violate international law, in particular the Geneva Convention, which clearly emphasizes the illegality of transferring the citizens of the occupier to the territory it occupies.
However, Israel has managed to confiscate land around and within Jerusalem by issuing military orders that modify past Ottoman, British and Jordanian laws, i.e. by putting their settlement activities in a legal framework. A primary Military Order used to “legitimate” the confiscation of Palestinian land is Military Order 58 of 1967, known as the Absentee Property Law. According to this military order, land and properties of absentee Palestinians is transferred to the Israeli Civil Administration.
Any Palestinian who left the West Bank before or after June 7, 1967, is defined as an absentee. Military Order 321, issued in 1969, gives the Israeli military the authority to confiscate land for public purposes. However, Jewish settlers are the only beneficiaries of these public services. The construction of by-pass roads falls under this order.
Security is an often-used alibi to confiscate Palestinian land. In the 1970’s the Israeli High Court of Justice granted approval to the construction of settlements that are temporary and serve security purposes. Such areas are first designated as ‘closed military areas’, which often develop into a whole settlement. Settlement activity in Jerusalem is part of a broader settlement policy exercised in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the employment of military orders described above and the application of de facto politics, Israel has succeeded in imposing its hegemony over Jerusalem; thus, undermining Palestinian presence in the city. Besides building settlements, Israel’s discriminatory policies against Palestinian Jerusalemites have exacerbated Palestinian subjugation and ability to develop. Such is evidenced by the extreme difficulties faced by Palestinian residents to obtain building permits, whose many homes have been systematically demolished for that reason.
Israeli existing and planned settlement activities in and around Metropolitan Jerusalem will have debilitating impacts on the development of Palestinian neighborhoods in the city disconnecting them from each other and from other Palestinian urban centers in the West Bank. Such Israeli geopolitical arrangements, as described in the report, create a superimposed grid of roads and settlement blocks with total disregard to the impact of such infrastructure on Palestinian spatial delineations and viability. In other words, Israeli settlements and complementary roads will turn Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhoods into fractured slums without open space for future population growth.
The construction of settlement blocks around the city and the building of by-pass roads together cause a forced reconversion of the features of the city in a way that limits Palestinian access to land and hampers Palestinian building activity. In fact, as mentioned in the report, Palestinians are granted only 8% of the municipal area for construction. The resulted cantonization of Palestinian neighborhoods in the city will further complicate Palestinian urban development and exacerbate population congestion, which is already ubiquitous in various Palestinian areas in East Jerusalem.
One could imagine the socioeconomic implications of such Israeli settlement policies in the city. A growing population will be competing for a decreasing amount of land, physical infrastructure and services stifling any prospects for development.
Overcrowded areas will become breeding grounds for epidemics and poverty. Now, due to Israel’s closure policies, Palestinian Jerusalemites are totally separated from trading centers in other centers of the West Bank further deteriorating the economic standing of the city.
Besides the economic strangulation imposed by the settlement blocks around East Jerusalem, the Israeli Cabinet in its early sessions approved a plan, which envisions the building of electric fences, stonewalls, trenches, and roadblocks in areas outside city limits- at the end of March 2002. The plan also includes the installation of video cameras and observations posts, which will be manned by 500 border policemen stationed on the city’s outskirts. This plan is currently being implemented.
Israel has also been following a policy of closing down and transferring many Palestinian institutions out of East Jerusalem since the early nineties. The biggest jolt was the closure of the Orient House, the heart and soul of the PLO in East Jerusalem. The number of people who are able to come to Jerusalem for visiting, services, schools or work has steeply declined since the inception of the second Intifada. Therefore, closure and separation policies exercised by Israel have direct impact on the Palestinian social fabric, religion and education per se.
Unfortunately, the economic impact of settlement belts and closures are difficult to accurately assess, as data is still not available for East Jerusalem. One could speculate that tourism, which is a key economic sector in Jerusalem comprising 58% of Jerusalem’s economic activity, has been severely hit since the beginning of the Intifada, depriving many Jerusalemites of their main source of income.
On the political front, existing and envisioned Israeli spatial arrangements in the city will result in the total annexation of 15% of the West Bank into Israel proper. Thus, it becomes geographically and politically impossible for Palestinians to have sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Palestinian neighborhoods in the city will be totally separated from the West Bank by three settlement blocks surrounding Metropolitan Jerusalem in the North, East and South. Moreover, by-pass roads and the light rail will further carve up Palestinian physical existence in the city.
Ultimately, such Israeli spatial arrangements cause detrimental political mplications for they counteract the option of having Jerusalem as an “open city” for the following reasons:
- There will not be free movement of people and goods into and within the borders of the Open City because the roads linking settlements are built exclusively for Jewish use. Moreover, borders will be controlled by Israel only as evidenced by the construction of a “security wall” to envelope Jerusalem.
- The internal demarcation between the Israeli and Palestinian parts of the city will not be invisible, as defined for an open city option, since by-pass roads will make such demarcations and divisions concrete and almost irreversible. In fact, such spatial arrangements create physical barriers between Palestinian neighborhoods and Israeli ones.
It is also worth mentioning that this spatial plan for Jerusalem hinders a model for a divided city that will be ruled by separate sovereignties. Such is evidenced by Israeli plans made in connecting settlements in Eastern Jerusalem, which will cause the division of East Jerusalem into cantons as well as its separation and discontinuity with the West Bank.
The only possible vision is that Palestinians will be totally assimilated within an Israeli-dominated city in underdeveloped areas without any capacity for expanding or urban planning. The same systematic policy is also implemented elsewhere in the West Bank, where some Israeli plans in progress aim at creating two blocks of settlements, one in the east of the West Bank, and the other in the west, so as Israel can delineate the borders that it can annex in the future into the Israeli state. Such an arrangement will shrink the territory left for a potential Palestinian state that is also discontinuous because of the settlements and by-pass roads that divide up its districts.
The Palestinians will thus be left without a geographically contiguous piece of land.
The Palestinians will not have the option of forming a real viable state. The only other option is for Palestinians to accept a one-state, two-nation solution. However, such an option will not be accepted by Israel because of Palestinian demographic superiority that threatens the foundations of a Jewish state.
As a final note, by implementing such spatial and infrastructural arrangements in the city, Sharon’s government is not only consolidating an Israeli political control over the city, but is also making it highly costly for future Israeli negotiators to reverse such geopolitical realities to accommodate a Palestinian sovereign existence in the city. Hence, as a political strategy, the Palestinian negotiating team should publicly advocate, by garnering support from the international community, the return to the Camp David II and Taba peace talks. The only viable option is to reconsider the Open City concept with land swap, as a mechanism to circumvent the “creeping annexation” of Palestinian land in and around the city boundaries of East Jerusalem. The other option is to gear Palestinian objective towards one-state solution with all its ramifications on the national identity and ethos of the Palestinians. Definitely, as mentioned before, the Israelis will totally object to this idea of incorporating demographic in corporation of the Palestinians and this strategy might “push” the Israelis to reconsider their settlement policies and may be under pressure accept division of the city. These options are open and it depends on the Palestinians in how to deal with the issue at state.
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