My work as a city councilor has brought me face to face with a wide
range of rather mundane topics: city taxes, sewage, potholes,
school-building budgets, and emergency repair work. None of them is
glamorous, and few would make the headlines. Yet it is these
mundane topics which determine the quality of urban life for the
citizens of the nation's capital. And, for the time being, these
topics form the arena where ideology and public policy are turned
into day-to-day reality.
In the endless onslaught of committee meetings, budgetary papers,
and personal complaints, I try to focus on three broad areas of
human rights. One of these concerns the religious rights on
non-Orthodox Jews who are beset by attempts of the Orthodox and
ultra-Orthodox to disenfranchise them. The rights of women are
another area of concern: boasts about the excellent legislation
guaranteeing women's rights do little to hide the fact that Israeli
women are deeply discriminated against in almost all walks of life.
This monologue is addressed to my activities in a third area of
ongoing concern: the rights of Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Ingrained Discrimination
Continuing discrimination against Arabs is ingrained in Jerusalem's
politi¬cal culture, a sort of accepted blemish we are trained
to see and overlook. It characterizes the workings of this city in
every walk of life, ranging from the macro to the minute. My file
cabinets are literally overflowing with exam¬ples in every
sphere: economics, housing, employment, taxation, education,
welfare, health, city planning, construction, roads, buses,
sewerage, street lights. Glance at any of the basic services to
which a Jerusalem resident is entitled as a fundamental civil
right, and the imbalances jump out at you.
Unfortunately, the immensity of the problem and its pervasive
history have blinded even the most liberal of Jerusalem's citizenry
to its existence. The virtual forest of problems has simply
disappeared into the landscape of broader pressing issues of
national rights and rhetoric. Globalize a prob¬lem enough and
it disappears from the city agenda. My job, by and large, has been
to find ways to make the Council members begin to see the
indi¬vidual facts and faces again.
My desk is strewn with files, each concerning a different facet of
the problem. In this monologue, I will take you through a random
sample of them. Wading through the minutiae, one gets a pretty good
view of the city's inner workings. Taken as a whole, these samples
comprise a damn¬ing indictment of discrimination so ingrained
that it is no longer conscious or deliberate. Yet its presence is
felt daily by the Palestinians who make up one-third of Jerusalem's
population.
Taxation Without Services
First, let's take a look at a brief report on tax collection and
expenditure. City governments live from "milking" the local
residents. Here, it must be admitted that the Palestinian sector
makes for a pretty lean cow. Palestinian neighborhoods are beset by
socioeconomic hardship and over¬crowding; families are large.
For these reasons, the Palestinian third of the population only
contributes about 20% of the income going into the munic¬ipal
coffers. In light of the clear economic disparities, this is
considered even by the city's tax collectors to be a pretty good
showing.
The city's success in tax collection from the Palestinian sector is
remark¬able for many reasons. Not the least of these is the
almost complete absence of street signs in the Palestinian
quarters. An inability to locate Arab _addresses is a frequent
justification offered by telephone repair people and city work
crews for their low performance rates in Palestinian
neighbor¬hoods. (Indeed, it has been said that if a fire
engine were to be called to Palestinian neighborhoods like Harat
el-Wusta, Midron Bashir, or Sa'dyia the fire fighters would have a
great deal of trouble locating the house with the emergency.)
Surprisingly, the city's tax collectors seem to get to houses and
collect the rates with relative ease.
The city's zeal in milking is not matched by equal energy when it
comes time to deliver the cream. Cities pay back in services, not
real dollars, and tagging the services which go exclusively to
Palestinian neighborhoods is a hazy business. Nonetheless, it
appears that about five percent to 10 per¬cent of the total
city budget goes back to the Palestinian sector. That means that
for every Palestinian dollar the city takes, it gives back 5 to 10
cents. Like any good dairy, the city feeds its leaner cows skim
milk, and ships the cream elsewhere.
The disparity between money taken out of the Palestinian
neighbor¬hoods and money placed back in them takes on a
greater significance if one recalls the background of poverty which
besets the Palestinian quarters. Poorer neighborhoods need
disproportionally more services and expendi¬tures, but the
Palestinian ones seem to get less. How much less is hard to say.
Even Jerusalem's most faithful servants recognize that it is by and
large a needy city, especially when it comes to services for
families, youth and children. A memo from the Social Services
Department laments that about 27 percent of the city's Jewish
children live below the poverty line (about $250 a month), making
Jerusalem one of Israel's poorest cities. But note: absolutely no
mention is given in the memo to the status of Palestinian
children!
The reason no statistics are available is that the situation in
East Jerusalem has never been surveyed. In general, any city
document about Jerusalem is actually referring to "Jewish"
Jerusalem: the other side is an area neither seen nor heard. The
Palestinian neighborhoods are simply invisible, and receive
services accordingly.
The lack of services is in many cases all too obvious. It doesn't
take long to count the parks, community centers, or swimming pools
in Palestinian neighborhoods, nor to count the functioning street
lights or drains. The number of child psychologists and family
social workers allocated, the number of available hospital beds,
the number of kindergarten classrooms, the number of baby clinics:
all fall woefully below their parallel in the Jewish neighborhoods.
The equation is simple: if you don't see the need, you don't have
to spend the money on services.
The syndrome of the invisible Palestinian minority reaches its
munici¬pal heights in Palestinian neighborhoods like Kfar
Akab, situated in the northern part of the city. Unfortunately,
this neighborhood seems to have fallen off the city maps of the
various departments in the city which are charged with their
welfare, although it remains on the maps of the tax
col¬lectors. In Kfar Akab, the residents enjoy the unenviable
"independence" of financing their own roads, their own garbage
disposal, and other basic services for which their city tax dollars
should have paid.
Fighting the Perilous and the Picayune
Trying to redress these imbalances is a relentless battle with the
beast, on a field that ranges from perilous to downright picayune.
Perilous may sound like a loaded word in light of the humdrum
nature of city services. And it is only when tragedy strikes that
we begin to remember the meaning of the city's public works and
preservation activities. Unfortunately, all too many tragedies have
arisen in Palestinian neighborhoods. In recent years, the rainy
seasons have seen the collapse of a number of cracked, but
untend¬ed, retaining walls, with major Palestinian
casualties.
Some of these incidents have made the headlines, but many go
unno¬ticed. Take the case of eight-year-old Samar, who went
out walking with her mother in Silwan just after the first rains of
1994. The flow of runoff waters dislodged soil and stone on the
slope above her, and she was killed by a rush of falling
stones.
Samar's death didn't make the news. In fact, the municipal
authorities at first were completely unaware of the event. Local
phones were out (tech¬nicians balk at going to work in
Palestinian neighborhoods), and besides, none of those involved
knew that the city makes emergency services available in cases like
this. The best that the city welfare could do when it was brought
in was to tell Samar's mother she could submit an appli¬cation
for family assistance.
And the other cracks in the wall where Samar fell? To this day,
they remain, along with hundreds of ominous cracks in public works
all over East Jerusalem. When the next rain or snow hits, another
group of name¬less Palestinian residents may find themselves
paying more than tax dol¬lars as the price for municipal
neglect.
Municipal Blindness
Dealing with some of the minor instances of municipal neglect can
help one to trace the outline of municipal blindness which stands
in part behind this sad state of affairs. For me, the awakening
took place during th,e "great toilet roll debate." One day during
Kollek's administration, I was sitting in a supervisory committee
which had the great honor of reviewing the sta¬tus of public
toilets. I had the temerity to ask how many rolls of toilet paper
the city dispensed. The official's answer intrigued me:
"Forty-eight rolls every 72 hours in the western part of town, but
none, of course, in the east¬ern quarters. "Why?" "It isn't
necessary, since the Arabs aren't used to modern flush
toilets."
A rowdy debate ensued; it had, I am gratified to report, positive
results.
Directives went out to install flush toilets with plastic seats,
and to insure the regular provision of toilet paper to all the
city's public toilets, regard¬less of the ethnic origin of
their users. But this is all besides the point.
The point is that among tens of participants in this debate, not
one was an Arab. Furthermore, not one of the participants had
really any first-hand information about the status of public
bathrooms in that sector, or the hygienic habits of their users.
None of the speakers was out to actively deny Palestinians toilet
paper. Rather, they were blind to the basic facts of life of the
Palestinian citizens. Indeed, the sole useful source of information
at the meeting was provided by the Palestinian who serves
councilors their tea. He thought the discussion was so funny that
he almost dropped his tray.
This anecdote suggests that part of the blindness could be
rectified by Palestinian members in the municipality's workforce.
The municipality, it should be recalled, is one of the city's
biggest employers. Nearly 7,000 workers are on its payroll. Simple
arithmetic suggests that if the city were to employ randomly,
nearly 2,300 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem would be city
employees. Yet the facts show that Palestinians make up fewer than
140 of the total staff, and 100 of the permanent city work force.
(Since the string of recent security closures which have separated
Jerusalem from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, even these
paltry numbers are declining.) Furthermore, these workers tend to
fall into the lowest paid and most menial jobs, with little access
to policy-making channels. As such, the city departments lack even
this simple source of insight.
Arabic the Unspoken Language
Another factor fueling the blindness is language. Although Arabic
is one of Israel's official languages, the Jerusalem municipality
views it as one of the unspoken tongues. Documents are rarely
printed in Arabic for the conve¬nience of non-Hebrew speakers.
City officials frequently overlook the need to publish notices of
services in the Arab press. Few city staff members can speak Arabic
when the need arises.
The difficulties that ensue from lack of language skills are
painful, if not absurd. The mayor of Jerusalem decided not long ago
that Jerusalem school children should receive free entrance passes
to the city's largest museum. The Hebrew passes were printed up
immediately. The organiza¬tional problems in printing Arabic
passes held up their distribution for no less than six months. And
then, when the Arabic-speaking children finally got to the museum
with their passes, they found that none of the guides could speak
Arabic.
The list of documents which do not appear in Arabic is extensive.
They include flyers describing citizens' rights, listings of
emergency service num¬bers, descriptions of city services, and
even the official city map. The city departments pride themselves
on their efforts at outreach, but do it in Hebrew and English.
Thus, Palestinian citizens often do not know their municipal
rights, where to get them, or where to lodge a complaint when they
don't.
Sometimes I can help them. But my partial success and all too
frequent failure have often led me to wonder what would happen if
residents in the Palestinian neighborhoods would help in tearing
down the cloaks of invis¬ibility. To date, Palestinians have
consistently refused to participate in Jerusalem elections and the
working of the municipality. Palestinians have argued that this
would be tantamount to recognizing the legitimacy of the
occupation. Though I understand the logic of this argument, I
compare it to similar arguments offered by feminists against
serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), an ultra-male
chauvinist organization. Here, we feminists have recognized that
only by serving in it do we, women, have a chance to help mold the
future face of our society.
The Politics of the Invisible
Numerous historical arguments can be made for the implicit bias and
dis¬crimination which I have met in my work as a city
councilor. One I fre¬quently hear is that, with the occupation
of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israelis found themselves dealing with a
backward area which had long been neglected under Jordanian rule,
and that these inequities were hard to root out. However, since the
barbed wire carne down, and the city was "unit¬cd," the
inequities have been exacerbated, not improved. Indeed, the
Palestinian residents seem to have become more invisible over
time.
As an opposition member of the City Council, I find myself losing
my voice over and over again in debates related to Palestinian
rights. Again and again, my colleagues and I try to show the powers
that be what goes on behind the curtains of their blindness. Our
call for accountability on the Council floor has evoked vicious
personal attacks: I have been called a trai¬tor, a PLO agent,
a liar, and a whore as I uncover the glaring disparity between
rhetoric and reality. Yet the call for accountability has, at
times, led those responsible for inequalities to alter some of
their most blaring dis¬criminatory practices.
In the 28 years of exclusive Jewish rule over Jerusalem, too much
has been done which is literally irreversible. The most current
example is the ongoing Jewish building in and around the city, a
trend which is convert¬ing Palestinians into a minority even
within East Jerusalem itself. I believe that anything which could
reverse the disastrous results of bias and dis¬crimination
should and must be tried.