The recently published Jerusalem master plan is an instructive
document of some historical importance, seemingly setting out to
introduce a degree of order and justice in a city that till now was
managed on the basis of an outdated and irrelevant plan from 1959.
However, the chapter dealing with East Jerusalem unfortunately
bears witness to the manner in which prejudice, stereotypes and
erroneous assumptions so easily take over and penetrate the
thinking of professional elites in their work.
While the document makes a sincere effort to grapple with the
difficulties of planning and construction in East Jerusalem, it
suffers from a "closed circle" syndrome, within which it is
subordinate to those very same basic concepts that have created the
current planning chaos. The document suggests a variety of cosmetic
solutions and recycles worn out ideas that are totally impractical,
returning us to those paradigms that created the impasse the
document sets out to undo. It can be assumed that these ideas,
which led East Jerusalem to its present dead end, will be unable to
provide it with a way out in the future
'The Jews Know Better'
Where do the problems of treating the subject of East Jerusalem
start? First, the 39 professional workers who put the plan
together, and 31 members of the steering committee, include only
one Arab, and that only following strong public pressure. Second,
not only do the East Jerusalem Arabs receive negligible
representation in the body whose task was to plan their lives, the
planners didn't deem it necessary to hear the views of alternative
bodies that held different opinions from the Jerusalem
municipality.
This paternalistic and arrogant approach is the core of the
municipality's policy in the eastern part of the city. The Jews
know what is good for the Arabs and are more capable of running
their lives. This approach is characteristic of colonial regimes
everywhere, which believe that the "natives" are neither worthy of
suitable representation nor of being masters of their own fate. The
planning team apparently assumed that, in any case, one is dealing
with a Jewish city and therefore there is no reason to ask the
opinion of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people. This is
the logic of a repair contractor who believes that he should confer
about repairs with the owner of the house, and not with the tenant
who is living there.
Thus, once again, the East Jerusalem Palestinians are not partners
in decision-making, neither at the political level (which is said
to be largely their own fault because of their refusal to
participate in municipal elections) nor at the professional level.
This approach, which is contrary to every professional standard in
community work and urban planning, would never have been accepted
if it were to be applied to the Jewish public. While the style of
life of the Arab community is dictated, regardless of their real
needs, by the overwhelmingly Jewish planners, basic principles in
work with communities, like strengthening the status of the
residents and encouraging their independence are altogether missing
in the East Jerusalem. Since this is the approach of the planners,
the document is inevitably replete with unfounded and defective
operational proposals.
What Lies behind Illegal Construction?
The chapter called "The Existing Situation" asserts that the
present planning chaos in East Jerusalem is the result of the
growing illegal construction that is directed by "both political
and economic factors." In other words, it is the Palestinian
Authority, Hamas and criminals or businessmen without a conscience
out for easy profits that stand behind the illegal construction. It
is as if East Jerusalem has no legitimate needs, no real distress,
no ordinary families seeking to acquire a roof over their heads who
are compelled to build without permits because, having tried
everything, they come against a wall of bureaucratic
imperviousness. The politicians and businessmen in East Jerusalem
are presented as building only to undermine Israeli rule or to make
easy money.
This is a theory of conspiracy like "The protocols of the elders of
East Jerusalem." Every additional house built without a permit is
considered another brick in the wall of struggle over the control
of Jerusalem. Like it or not, every room, every balcony, every tree
becomes part of a worldwide plot. Money from the Palestinian
Authority, Saudi Arabia or Hamas supports the building of every
house, and every tile on the floor is comparable to a terrorist
bomb. Every householder is viewed as a saboteur waging a war of
attrition against Israeli rule. In the eyes of the planning team,
in East Jerusalem there is not a building without political
motivation in a reality of land grabbers and cunning
politicians.
Such a superficial approach is surprising in light of the criticism
expressed, not without hesitation, in the document itself on the
prevalent statutory situation in East Jerusalem. The document
explicitly states that a resident requesting a building permit
faces many difficulties because of the lack of a suitable
engineering infrastructure, problems of registering land, almost
insoluble difficulties in joining and dividing lands, and the lack
both of reasonable budgets and of any agreed planning policy
between the planning authorities. But none of these appear in the
planners' eyes to provide sufficient justification for illegal
construction. In spite of the difficulties noted in the document,
the planning team still thinks that the central problem is to be
found in "the disregard by the residents of the planning and
construction law on the one hand, and on the other hand, in the
major weakness of the enforcement mechanism."
The authors of the document seem convinced that the Arabs are a mob
that is not prepared to honor the law since they are known from
birth to be lawbreakers. It is significant that those responsible
for the document did not consider the possibility that
Palestinians are forced to build illegally for those very reasons
enumerated by the authors in the same document, namely all those
difficulties and obstacles which make it absolutely impossible to
receive a permit. At the same time, the authorities are said to
have "failed in their task" because they did not enforce the law
with a heavier hand, i.e., did not demolish more houses or impose
more severe punishment on transgressors. This fits the prevalent
assumption that the Arabs understand only the language of force,
and what can't be achieved by force can only be achieved by more
force.
A Jewish Majority
The fundamental defect of the document stands out in the chapter
dealing with the goals of the new master plan, which remain, as
before "preserving a firm Jewish majority in the city": 70 percent
Jews and 30 percent Arabs. The team is indeed aware that the goal
is unattainable and that present demographic trends will result
within years in a 60 - 40 percent ratio. Nevertheless the document
makes a considerable effort to preserve the Jewish majority through
a series of plans designed to attract Jews to the city and stem the
negative emigration from it. A series of seemingly positive
proposals regarding the Jews deal with improvements necessary to
encourage them to remain in the city. Not a single sentence in the
document suggests getting rid of the Arabs in order to preserve the
demographic balance.
However, anyone reading between the lines observes a concealed
message. In what is called "the future picture desired by the City
Fathers," one receives an impression that behind the document is an
attempt to restrict the natural increase of the Arabs in East
Jerusalem. With its historical experience, the planning team
understands that this cannot be achieved by doing away with all the
first-born sons, but the plan assumes that by restricting the
Arabs' living space, they will be compelled to leave the city and
move into places in the periphery where they will be able to build
without restriction.
This was the premise behind the Interior Ministry's previous
attempts to deny residency rights and confiscate blue identity
cards from Arabs who could not prove that Jerusalem was "the center
of their lives" (the required amount of documentary proof was
deliberately made unattainable). This policy of restricting the
Arab presence in Jerusalem acted like a boomerang. If the
policy-makers had been familiar with Arab tradition, they would
have known that the Arabs would not leave their land so easily.
When the state refuses a building permit, they simply build without
a permit. In the end, those who wanted to solve the demographic
problem were left with two problems: the demographic and the
urban.
Freedom of Movement, Family Reunion and Demographic
Balance
There is another shocking clause in the document that restricts
Arab demographic growth: a proposal to prevent Palestinians from
the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) from entering Jerusalem.
An apparently naïve formulation which lacks any trace of
racism, in effect denies the Arabs freedom of movement, one of the
central values of a democratic regime. An even more elementary
right - family reunion - is likewise denied. The state already
refuses to grant residency rights in Jerusalem to an Arab
Jerusalemite married to a man or woman from the OPT, compelling
them to live without rights in the city, under the threat of arrest
or deportation. There can be no doubt that the planning team,
composed of intelligent people who may well read Haaretz, is aware
that it is legitimizing a grave denial of elementary human
rights
Moreover, the team provides professional authorization for this,
one of the main injustices existing in East Jerusalem. A
Jerusalemite marrying a woman from the OPT is prevented from living
with her in his own home. The state generously allows him to move
to the OPT if he wishes to live with her, but this involves the
loss of his Jerusalem residency status and the accompanying rights.
The state is not concerned that in Arab tradition the woman lives
in her husband's house because she is considered to be a ticking
demographic bomb. Her womb would appear to threaten the sacred
demographic balance and to endanger Jewish sovereignty in the
city.
Once again, the policy-makers did not correctly evaluate the
strength of tradition and failed to appreciate that it is stronger
than the Interior Ministry's regulations. These families live in
the city regardless of the policy of the authorities. The state has
found an original way of facing this demographic threat.
Ostrich-like, it simply ignores the existence of such families and
excludes them from the population registry. About 20,000 men and
women live in East Jerusalem without their names appearing in the
registry. Mainly women and their children, the latter do not even
appear in the identity cards of their mothers, which would enable
them to receive children's allowances. Thus the state can deceive
the statistics - if these people are not registered they do not
exist. What is amazing is that the planning team is aware of the
real numbers but prefer to overlook them. When, through demographic
considerations, there is a failure to recognize the situation on
the ground, all the accompanying statistics are erroneous and
misleading.
The embarrassing chapter dealing with the so-called demographic
balance is an absolute disgrace. While one can understand why
politicians signed it, it is hard to grasp how cultured
professional men from whom one might expect an objective approach,
could sign such a racist and discriminatory document. Were such a
document to be written in a European state on the need to preserve
a demographic balance between Christians and Jews, the whole State
of Israel would accuse it of anti-Semitism. Here, the demographic
bug overcomes any sense of reason so that liberal and progressive
academics lend their hand to a document that openly and unashamedly
discriminates against part of the population because of their
national affiliation. In any civilized country this would be called
racism. In Israel, however, it is not nice to call a Jew a racist
for are we ourselves not the ultimate victims of racism? Yet the
insufferable ease with which we harp on the demographic argument as
a central goal in city planning proves that something has gone
wrong in our own application of human values toward others.
Some Correct Recommendations
It should be noted that alongside the basic defects appearing in
the document, there is also a series of correct recommendations,
though the degree of their implementation is doubtful. It is
rightly recommended to preserve the set-up of regional separation,
not to mix populations. This would maintain the multicultural
character of the city and would serve to restrict potential foci of
friction. Here the team correctly condemns Jewish settlement in
East Jerusalem, for rather than the Arabs penetrating into West
Jerusalem, the opposite is true. Yet the planners lacked the
courage to state who is at fault. Day by day this recommendation is
crudely countered by rightist bodies, through the massive
acquisition of private property over which the municipality has
apparently no control, and through the establishment of whole new
Jewish areas in the heart of Arab neighborhoods, that are almost
automatically authorized by the local committee for planning and
construction.
There is a series of positive recommendations rooted in the reality
of the city, such as the welcome proposal to permit a percentage of
additional construction so as to allow Arab residents to add
further building units on their land. This sort of denser building
will cheapen infrastructure costs and facilitate a more correct
exploitation of land resources. There is also a positive
recommendation to simplify the process of proving ownership to make
it easier to receive building permits. Actually, to overcome
problems of land registration in the city, the committee recommends
returning to the system adopted until recently by the municipality;
based on combining traditional forms of proof - the signature of
the village muchtar and of neighbors - with judicial proofs: a
lawyer's declaration and payment of property tax.
There is, however, a general feeling that the chapter on East
Jerusalem in the document is intended more to meet formal
obligations than to deal with actual implementation. When the
planners write that any change depends on the direction of adequate
resources to East Jerusalem, they know that the state is incapable
of doing so, and has no real interest in assuring the necessary
budgets for carrying out their plans. In the light of budgetary
cuts for health, education and welfare, there is no prospect of
finding the hundreds of millions needed to establish the
engineering infrastructure imperative for planned construction. The
recommendation to rehabilitate the Shu'fat refugee camp is good for
the professional conscience but nobody believes that it can be
implemented. This is a problem not only of budget but also of land.
Rehabilitating the camp with its 15,000 residents requires finding
alternative land in order to destroy the existing set-up and build
anew. Funds can be forthcoming from international foundations but
there is simply no alternative land on which to rebuild.
<