Posted on: 2002
By Naseer Aruri
Having consolidated its control of West Jerusalem after 1948, Israel used its 1967 conquest as an opportunity to extend its jurisdiction to the Jordanian-ruled East Jerusalem, and to enlarge the boundaries yet another time to add numerous new Arab villages and neighborhoods. 
More than 25 percent of the area known as the West Bank was expropriated and incorporated into a newly- created greater Jerusalem. The physical barriers between East and West Jerusalem were removed.
The Moghrabi section of the Old City was totally razed with its 350 homes for more than 1500 residents, who were subsequently expelled in order to accommodate a new plaza in front of the Western Wall.
Defying U.N. resolutions the Israeli Knesset adopted three legislative acts on June 27, 28 and 29, 1967, extending Israeli law to the occupied Eastern sector of the city and enlarging the municipal boundaries of “united” Jerusalem, which had suddenly grown from 44,000 donums to 108,000 donums (approximately 29,000 acres). According to Sarah Kaminker, an Israeli town planner in the Jerusalem municipality, the new land grab constituted 70,500 donums (about 17,500 acres), which had almost doubled what had been quadrupled in 1948. Israel managed to avoid adding about 80,000 Arabs to the population of the expanded city by not applying its amendment to the Law and Administration Ordinance to the Arab villages of Abu-Dis, Anata, Hizma, Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, and al-Ram, as well as the Qalandia refugee camp and the neighborhood of Bethany. To bolster the Zionist dictum of acquiring the land without the people, Israel carried out a general census of the entire newly occupied territory, including Jerusalem on July 25, 1967.
All residents who were away working, visiting relatives or touring were considered absentees and thus denied their right to reside in the City. That was also applied to the Palestinian civilians who either fledthe fighting or were persuaded to board the Israeli buses waiting to take them to the Allenby Bridge. An estimated number of 100,000 lost their international right to belong totheir national patrimony. The process of dispossession, displacement, dismemberment, disenfranchisement and dispersal, which was savagely applied to the Palestinians in 1948, was reenacted systematically after 1967. For Jerusalem and its surroundings, the objective objective was to create a huge Jewish metropolis that would disrupt the territorial continuity of the West Bank, keep the Arab population to no more than a manageable 30 percent and preempt any sovereign existence for the Palestinians there.
To operationalize that imperative, Israel mobilized varied resources and utilized legal gimmickry that would facilitate the passing of Arab land into Jewish ownership, and then making it off limits to Arabs. During the past 25 years, more than 33 percent, or about 16 square miles of the expanded Arab East Jerusalem areas were confiscated. East Jerusalem, which was a mere 4.3 square miles or 4% of all of Jerusalem prior to 1967, is now 48 square miles or 63% of the newly redefined Jerusalem-expanding eleven fold. The land confiscated from the West Bank is now part of non-negotiable Jerusalem, and is not therefore an issue for discussion until the so-called final status negotiations. Netanyahu’s so-called “umbrela municipality” adopted on June 25, 1998 had simply formalized what is now “greater Jerusalem”.
It extended Jerusalem’s jurisdiction from a territory of 48 square miles to 72 square miles, by incorporating the illegal settlements of Givat Ze`ev to the North, Ma`ale Adumim to the East and Betar and Efrata to the South. The new Jewish population thus added plus the 142,000 apartments built for Jews only, will accomplish Israel’s demographic balance of 70 Jewish majority and a tolerated Arab minority of less than 30%.
Such an enterprise, which flies in the face of numerous U.N. resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention (1949) and even the Oslo Accords, may last 20, 30 or even 50 years; but it will not last forever. For it is being driven by the engine of power and hegemony.
Ethnic cleansing and apartheid-style living, which have already been discredited in the world, will ultimately crash head on with the norms of universalist humanism. How long can the Jewish ideals of tolerance and conciliation remain alienated from the Israeli political agenda? How long can the Palestinian people remain reticent in the face of steady conquest proceeding under no-war conditions? The future of Palestine/Israel will be more secure when all the inhabitants of that land, Muslims, Christians and Jews, can feel equal under the law and can co-exist in a society free of population quotas, by-pass roads, and discriminatory legislation-a society which can give dignity to every single human being. The widely publicized “compromise” offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David II in July, 2000 is very distant from these ideals in that it expects the Palestinian and Arab people to acquiesce in Israeli sovereignty over a city that has been unilaterally expanded twelve fold since 1967.
The Palestine Authority would be given civil control in the surrounding villages and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. The Muslim and Christian Holy Places would be effectively under Israeli sovereignty, but The Palestinians would be offered a formula that would allow them to claim that they have control over the Holy Places. In fact, under the dying Oslo formula Arafat would be able to establish his government in the village of Abu-Dis, but it could be called Jerusalem. The uprising which began on September 28th of this year after Israel’s General Sharon made his provocative and unwelcome visit to the Haram al-Sharif, served notice that the gap is wide not only between the Palestinians and Israel but also between the Palestinians and Mr. Arafat.
