Haaretz
Shvat 16, 5765
The U.S. and Europe gave Israel good marks for
easing travel through the checkpoints and allowing East Jerusalemites to
vote on the Palestinians' election day. Their respective spokesmen again
are speaking of a window of opportunity that has opened with the election
of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. So please, don't bother us with the petty
details of what is taking place on the ground meanwhile.
Those
countries have many representatives who reside here and are sufficiently
involved with life in this area to experience the depth of changes Israel
is creating in the occupied territories and the Palestinians' natural
social fabric. They know there is no real significance to one day's
partial relief at one or another checkpoint when the rest of the year the
checkpoint system becomes only more sophisticated. They know that the
"disengagement from Gaza" accompanying the deepening of Israeli control
over the occupied West Bank is not "a step in the direction of
peace."
They need to know that giving Palestinians the right to
take part in an election process in the PA is nothing more than a symbolic
gesture when in the same breath, a secret decision by Israel enables it to
steal private property, within the area annexed by the country in 1967,
from Palestinian West Bank residents, as Meron Rapoport exposed last week
in Haaretz.
With a systematic methodology that raises the
possibility that there is some conscious, organized master plan, Israel
continues the trend it began more than a decade ago: By denying the
Palestinians freedom of movement and the right of residency in Jerusalem
based on various excuses, Israel is striving to disconnect the West Bank
from East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Jerusalem, and its surrounding
neighborhoods and villages that, like it, were annexed to
Israel.
By July, Israel plans to complete the procedure not only
with physical measures like constructing the wall, fence, obstacles and
barriers dividing neighborhoods, even houses in half and artificially,
finally separating "Jerusalem" from the "West Bank," but also with a
bureaucratic separation. As of July, Palestinian Jerusalemites will not be
allowed to go to Ramallah. That's when the wall in Jerusalem will be
completed, and the Qalandiya checkpoint will be turned into a form of a
"border terminal," even though it is far from the Green Line. Those who
want to go to Ramallah will have to ask for special permits, as has become
evident in recent days.
True, this is not new. In October 2000, the
Central Command's general issued an order prohibiting Israeli citizens and
residents from entering Palestinian controlled Area A. The explanation:
concern for their security. That order remains in effect to this day. In
principle, that also applies to Palestinian Jerusalemites, and is mostly
enforced on those who seek to enter besieged cities like Nablus today and
Jenin and Tul Karm at other times. It is not enforced for those going to
Ramallah, and usually not for those on their way to Bethlehem. Both
cities, together with Hebron, have deep family, economic and social ties
to Jerusalem. But Ramallah, in particular, and more so in recent years, is
intricately tied to Jerusalemites: They work in PA offices, NGOs, the
private sector. Many divide their lives between Ramallah and
Jerusalem.
The policy of disengagement is being applied slowly but
surely, just like the policy of breaking up the West Bank into
disconnected Palestinian enclaves. The Israelis raise security
explanations for far-reaching geographic changes and new bureaucratic
restrictions on Palestinians, adding more draconian rules and regulations.
It's not being done all at once, creating the illusion that it is
reversible, anaesthetizing the attention to what is being done. And when
they see there is no vehement reaction, they continue: enforcing the
latest regulation on a new group of people, in other
places.
Experience shows that "asking for an entry permit" is not
as simple as it sounds. Asking does not mean getting automatically. Asking
means the Shin Bet will try to enlist collaborators in exchange for a
permit, asking means waiting days and weeks for an answer, wasting days in
lines and on the telephone, and then hearing that you don't have the right
to go to Ramallah because you did not prove that your presence there is
vital. That's beyond the humiliation involved in the very need to ask for
an Israeli permit in order to do the most natural things in the world:
visiting a sister and friends, going to work or the doctor, buying cheaper
produce in the market, finding a book in a bookstore, or hearing poet
Mahmoud Darwish give a poetry reading at the theater.
Experience
shows that the humiliation and difficulties involved in getting a permit
reduces the number of those seeking one. Ramallah could gradually empty
itself of Jerusalemites the way Nablus and Jenin and Gaza have ceased
hearing the Jerusalem accent on their streets. Or alternatively, many
Jerusalemites won't be able to give up their ties to Ramallah, and they
will do what, for decades, Israeli governments have been openly hoping
for: They'll give up their residency in Jerusalem completely.