[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]
This reality is rooted in the fact that Israel does not really want to rule over the people of East Jerusalem or be responsible for their needs, and the Palestinians of East Jerusalem do not accept the legitimacy of Israeli governance. As a result, today Israel’s flimsy rule in East Jerusalem is collapsing under the weight of its own fictions: by pursuing the fictitious vision of an undivided Jerusalem, Israel has created an impoverished, disgruntled, strife-ridden city.
Israel pays another price for the unsettled status of Jerusalem: while Israelis view Jerusalem as their nation’s capital, it is not recognised as such by any other country. There are no embassies in Jerusalem, and no state, not even Israel’s staunchest allies, recognises the legitimacy of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. Doggedly clinging to the mantra of an “undivided Jerusalem” has not altered this reality and, if anything, has only driven Israel into an ever- increasing isolation.
Israeli policies in Jerusalem: Existential threats to Israel’s vital interests
These are the hard realities of Jerusalem. And alongside these realities, the current trajectory of Jerusalem’s development poses grave existential challenges to Israel and its equities in this most precious of cities. Today, Israeli rule over Palestinian East Jerusalem is creating four existential challenges to Israel; these are threats that go well beyond the periodic, customary crises and, over time, cut to the core of the very viability of the state of Israel.
Firstly, Jerusalem is fast becoming the arena where the only plausible resolution of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world – the two-state solution – is being lost. Israel’s policies in East Jerusalem threaten to destroy any possibility of a two-state solution. Palestinians will never accept a two-state solution that does not include a capital in East Jerusalem. This is reality. To believe anything else is delusion. Alongside this reality is the fact that Israeli settlement activities in East Jerusalem are creating such a balkanised geography and demography in the city that the day will come soon when the two-state/two-capital solution will no longer be possible. The destruction of the two-state solution is an existential threat to the Israel – to its security and to its viability as a Jewish state and a democracy.
Israeli policies in East Jerusalem today are recklessly re-opening 1948-era grievances. They are doing so by allowing extremist settlers to take over property in the heart of East Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods by arguing that these properties belonged to Jews before 1948. By implanting extreme settlers in existing Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, Israel is laying the seeds for permanent conflict in the heart of city. By supporting a Jewish “right of return” to East Jerusalem, Israel is fanning the flames of Palestinian demands for their own right of return to Israel and undermining Palestinian support for a two-state solution.
[/wpcol_1half]
[wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]
Secondly, Jerusalem is morphing into a site where the tectonic plates of exclusionary religious movements — Jewish, Christian and Muslim – are crashing together, with the potential of embroiling Israel in endless holy war. Israeli policies in East Jerusalem today threaten to transform the nature of the conflict. Under current trends, the pursuit of an exclusively-Israeli Jerusalem contributes to the metamorphosis of a bitter, but solvable national conflict into a hemorrhaging, unsolvable religious war. Israel’s pursuit of an exclusionary Israeli- Jewish Jerusalem – via displacement of Palestinians, demolitions, politicised archeology – is putting it on a collision course with even moderate forces in the Arab and Christian worlds, which sense that Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian equities are being marginalised, and emboldening the forces of radical Islam and Christianity, who, for their own reasons, aspire to holy war.
Thirdly, the anomalies of Israeli rule over a functionally-disenfranchised Palestinian national collective are contributing to the transformation of Israel from a flawed-but-feisty democracy into a society whose democratic institutions and values are under perilous assault. This assault can be seen in Silwan, where Palestinian minors are being subjected to arrest under conditions that contravene Israeli law, and where Palestinian civil society leaders are finding themselves subjected to harassment, arrest, detention, house arrest, and even deportation from the city. The broader contours of this assault relate not only to Israeli policy in East Jerusalem but also to the policies required to maintain the occupation overall: the ongoing attacks from the Israeli Knesset on civil society organisations and its efforts to pass laws to quash peaceful protest.
And lastly, with its inflammatory policies in East Jerusalem, Israel is alienating even her staunchest allies and inexorably sliding into unprecedented isolation. Rather than enlisting the support of friendly governments and constituencies to assist Israel charter the complex waters of a changing Middle East, support of Israel is being left in the hands of those who sacrifice judgment and empirical evidence regarding Israel on the altars of sundry apocalyptic, end-of-days ideologies. These include American representatives of the Tea Party and their ilk – from Mike Huckabee to Joe Lieberman to Glenn Beck – alongside right-wing evangelical Christian leaders like Rev. John Hagee. They also include European Islamophobics like Geert Wilders. These are the painful, undeniable realities of modern-day Jerusalem.
The way forward: Securing Israel’s genuine equities in Jerusalem
These realities also illuminate the way forward, starting with the fact that freeing Israel of its dysfunctional rule over the Palestinians in East Jerusalem will enable Israeli Jerusalem to become a robust capital city. In many ways, the end of Israeli rule over Palestinian East Jerusalem will also be the liberation of Israeli Jerusalem. A truly free and robust Yerushalayim requires a national capital whose residents freely share and believe in the Israeli national ethos and values, without imposing these alien narratives on a rival Palestinian national collective who can never share those beliefs.
[/wpcol_1half_end]