Jerusalem: Never been ISRAEL’S “ETERNAL AND INDIVISIBLE CAPITAL”

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 passed on November 29, 1947 provided for the full territorial internationalization of Jerusalem.

“The City of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations.”

Jerusalem holds unique spiritual and religious significance for the world’s Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Following WWI, the victorious Principal Allied Powers recognized these as “a sacred trust of civilization,” and stipulated that the existing rights and claims connected to them should be safeguarded in perpetuity under international guarantee.

The United Nations General Assembly, therefore, does not recognize Israel’s proclamation of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

U.N. general Assembly Resolution 623/30 of 2009 states that “any actions taken by Israel, the occupying power, to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem are illegal and therefore null and void and have no validity whatsoever, and calls upon Israel to cease all such illegal and unilateral measures.”

Although the General Assembly cannot pass legally binding resolutions over international issues, the U.N. Security Council, which has the authority to do so, has passed a total of six Security Council resolutions on Israel on the matter, including UNSC resolution 478 which affirmed that the enactment of the 1980 Basic Jerusalem Law declaring unified Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal and indivisible” capital, was a violation of international law.

The Security Council, as well as the U.N. has consistently affirmed the position that East Jerusalem is occupied territory subject to the provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The International Court of Justice in its 2004 Advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Territory” described East Jerusalem as “occupied Palestinian territory.”

This bizarre situation exists, in part, because most Palestinians in “undivided Jerusalem” are legally classified (by Israel) as “permanent residents,” rather than citizens of Israel, despite the de- facto annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel in 1967, deemed illegal by international law.

As such, they do not enjoy the right to vote in national elections. Only an estimated 3,500 Palestinians of all ages, out of a total of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian population of 320,000 (37% of Jerusalem’s total population, have received Israeli citizenship between 2002 and 2012.

On every social, economic and legal indicator there is a huge, purposeful disparity between Jewish West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem: Education, health, opportunities for professional employment, resource allocation from the municipality, the right to build, welfare spending (just 4.4% of Jerusalem Municipality welfare spending is allocated and spent in East Jerusalem yet Palestinians bear a heavier tax burden.) More on these issues can be found in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides.

Thus, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the indigenous population under illegal Israeli control, are treated as non-Jewish immigrants to Israel. And why aren’t these Palestinian residents given Israeli citizenship? To do so would weaken the Jewish majority and the carefully gerrymandered political constituency of the state, and make them harder to expel.

The only place where Jerusalem is “the undivided capital of Israel” is in the fertile imaginations of ideologues like Netanyahu and his ilk. Nowhere else is there a prime minister so utterly detached from the realities of a city that he claims to be his nation’s “exclusive” capital. And when Netanyahu says he supports the two-state solution, but opposes anything less than an undivided Jerusalem under sole Israeli sovereignty, he is really saying: “I reject the two-state solution” (which as a solution is already dead in the water because of the extensive settlement expansion in both East Jerusalem and the West Bank making a contiguous Palestinian state now impossible.

But just when the myth of “undivided Jerusalem” was collapsing under the weight of its own fiction, President Donald Trump has stepped into the fray by announcing that his administration will move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

That this move would effectively contravene the recent UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemns all measures aimed at altering the status of the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is apparently of no concern to President Trump.

It seems unlikely that Donald Trump’s new pro-settlement ambassador to Israel has explained the catastrophic implications that will be seen as deliberately inflammatory by the Palestinians and by the Islamic world, this making Trump’s chances of brokering the “ultimate deal” as he’s called it, impossible to achieve. Rather than endorse a united Jerusalem, his policy will only serve to intensity gargantuan divides and make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

Primer on how to create Fear?

It isn’t often that I post an article by someone else but Amira Hass who writes for the Israeli daily Haaretz  is always an exception. 

Much of what you’ll read below can be found in my book Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, but I think it has more of a punch when it comes from one of Israel’s premier journalists.

Amira Hass Aug 30, 2016 3:17 AM

A list of the people’s daily fears under “democratic Jewish military rule” in the West Bank:

* That soldiers will descend from a pillbox armed to the teeth and fire at me. Or at my daughter, or my husband.
This happened in Silwad late last week. Ultra-Orthodox soldiers from the Kfir Battalion in the Nahal Brigade were extremely fearful for their lives and shot Iyad Hamed, 38, who was walking in his village – in his home – in the fields he knew from childhood. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t throwing stones.

He was running, said the soldiers in their defense. After all, everyone knows that a running Palestinian is a suspicious Palestinian. And a suspicious Palestinian is a Palestinian who should be killed. And an armed soldier who killed a Palestinian walking on his land isn’t a murderer.

* That a soldier will fire at children coming home at night from a swimming pool and kill one and wound four. This happened at Beit Ur al-Tahta.

A couple from Ramallah and their teenage children were traveling via the Atara checkpoint north of Birzeit for a family visit. S. tells what happened: “The soldier stood at a distance and aimed his weapon at us. Once they would just approach and peer into the car.

“But here I was afraid of his ignorance and fear, and what these would make him do. From a distance, with his weapon aimed, he ordered us to get out of the car and sit on the ground. He called my son to come to him.

“The rifle was aimed, and I was scared. My son’s phone could ring and he’d put his hand in his pocket automatically, and the soldier could invent the excuse that he was afraid my son was pulling out a knife, so he killed him in self-defense. I moved, started to get up, and the soldier shouted: ‘Stay where you are, don’t move,’ with his rifled aimed.”
Blindfolded and bound

* That my nephew will go outside to exercise his right to protest when soldiers raid our refugee camp or our village, and a soldier armed to the teeth will fire at him and kill or cripple him (as happened in places including al-Fawwar and Kafr Qaddum).

* That they’ll confiscate more of our land for another security road to a settlement.

* That my son will drive my SUV to bring a friend back home, and on the way he’ll encounter a soldier who’ll fire at him and wound him. After all, they can report a lie to their commanders. (Daheisheh)

* That soldiers in a jeep will slap my son, still a minor, whom they’ve detained and blindfolded and bound his arms and legs. Then they’ll kick him. (Beit Omar)

* That they’re torturing my brother right now during an interrogation, his hands behind his back that has been bent for hours, preventing sleep in a filthy cell amid curses. (the Shin Bet security services facilities in Petah Tikva or Kishon Prison)

* That they’ll declare our land state land, and soon a settlement will be built there.

* That my daughter will be the only one in her class who won’t receive an Israeli permit to go on a trip to the beach because I’m a released prisoner, as happened to A. from the Nablus area.

* That at the Allenby crossing the Israelis will send me back and won’t let me travel with my friends on a trip to Kazakhstan, as happened to N. in her 50s.

* That at the Allenby crossing they won’t be satisfied with denying my husband permission to leave but will also put me in administrative detention – detention without trial – without an explanation, without a search and without an interrogation, as happened to Omar Nezal.

* That I’ll lose my job in Israel because they’ll take away my Israeli exit permit in an attempt to recruit me to the Shin Bet as an informer.

* That they won’t allow my 60-year-old father to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque because I was wounded. (Daheisheh)

* That a bulldozer will come escorted by soldiers, the Border Police and Civil Administration inspectors in a white jeep. Together they will destroy the tabun oven, the family tent, the trailer home donated by the European Union and the toilet donated by an aid organization. (Umm al-Khair)

The rifle scope and the bullet

* That a surveyor will come in preparation to expand a settlement, because of which they’ve already destroyed my tabun and now they’ll destroy the goat pen. (the Carmel settlement)
* That they’ll build another pillbox in order to guard the expanding outpost that was built on village land.
* That we’ll take the sheep to graze, and settlers will descend from the mountain and beat us, and the soldiers will stand aside. (the Maon Farm)
* That we’ll renovate the approach road to our fields and orchards, and the Civil Administration will stop the work in the middle. (Tekoa, Turmus Ayya, Duma)
* That we’ll be late to work again this morning because the soldiers at the checkpoint stopped the traffic from Ramallah so that the settlers heading from Ofra and Beit El can get to work on time. (Geva-Adam Junction)
* That my husband will have an appointment for an operation in East Jerusalem, because he suffers from heart disease, but we won’t get a permit to leave Gaza. (As happened to my friend A., or as our mutual friend F. in his mid-50s says: “My greatest fear is that one of us will fall ill and I won’t be able to give him or her the best possible treatment, because we won’t get an exit permit from Gaza.”)

* That a soldier on a surprise patrol in the neighborhood will say he was afraid and killed me. And that all the other soldiers think that the cure for fear is the rifle scope and the bullet; a finger on the trigger and bingo.

* That the world won’t be interested in all this, and only when a Palestinian kills a Jew and a rocket is launched from Gaza will Angela Merkel and Barack Obama denounce terror.
Amira Hass

Click here to view or purchase Israeli and Palestinian Voices.

Note: Blacks in USA are also subjugate to fear of instant death at any moment by police forces or supremacists. At least, there is an investigation and media comment on the tragedy. Nothing of the sort in Israel.