Q&A: 'Ignore Jerusalem, At Everyone's Peril'

• by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler interview DANIEL SEIDEMANN, founder of Ir Amim (jerusalem)
• Monday, April 13, 2009
• Inter Press Service

IPS speaks to Daniel Seidemann, founder of Ir Amim, an Israeli watchdog group on settlement expansion and other Israeli policies in occupied East Jerusalem. Many international agencies rely on the information and analysis provided by Seidemann as a base for shaping their policy positions on Jerusalem.

Direct from an extensive visit to the U.S. where he met with leading policymakers in the new Obama Administration and prominent Washington- based diplomats, he talks about what is needed to prevent Israeli policies in the city from derailing international peace efforts.

IPS: How far could Israel's current activities in East Jerusalem impede efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

Daniel Seidemann: A debate is still hovering within the Obama Administration - whether to fully engage the conflict, or go just for low-maintenance management of the conflict. There are very compelling arguments telling the President, 'don't go there - the U.S. can't afford another failure in the Middle East, put it on the back burner'.

But, the U.S. simply does not have that as an option.

Firstly, the possibility of a two-state solution is literally hanging on by its finger-nails. It's still possible for the two states to be formed with sustainable borders that are both viable and secure, but we're very, very close to losing that: left unattended, Jewish settlement expansion within the eastern part of the city will reach a critical mass that will create a Balkanised stalemate, geographically and demographically, that would make the two- state solution impossible.

After eight years of the Bush Administration's 'scorched earth' policy there's definitely a need for a period of reconstruction or convalescence. But the more time the U.S. feels it needs for constructing a conflict-resolution programme, the more forceful they will need to be in the period of conflict management. Ignore Jerusalem and the two-state solution will be lost within one or two years, three at the utmost.

Secondly, serious trends have been unleashed in Israel policies both at the national and municipal level - the turning over of the public domain, in terms of demography, history, culture, archaeology, the religious sites, to Jewish extremist religious and nationalist settler organisations with the active support and consent of the Israeli government. These have far-reaching implications not only for the status of Jerusalem but also for the nature of the entire conflict.

We have a nasty conflict, but it's still political, and therefore the crisis is still manageable by mere mortals. Untended, it will move into a different realm - into Jihadism, into holy war, into Armageddon - in sum, making it a religious conflict. In that case, we can all simply pack up and go home, which is fine for everyone else except for Israelis and Palestinians for whom this is home.

What's more, if ignored, Jerusalem will seek the Obama Administration out, hunt it down and undermine not only peace-making efforts between Palestinians and Israelis, but also undercut all efforts to create an interface between the West and Islam and to achieve what the U.S. wants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By not acting in Jerusalem, instead of administering preventive medicine, the Administration will find itself in the trauma room; for that, an exorbitant price will have to be paid with a high mortality rate.

Q. Don't you think the Administration has diagnosed the potentially lethal symptoms?

DS: It's important to note how (U.S. Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton, during her recent visit to the region, felt compelled to challenge pronounced Jerusalem municipal policies of house demolitions in the area of the Holy Basin - though she's originally had no intention of getting into a confrontation on her inaugural visit. That suggests the Americans are getting it. They ignore the symptoms at their peril.

Early into the Palestinian Intifadah uprising, a senior U.S. diplomat, who's still engaged in constructing Washington's Mid-East policies, was urged by the Bush Administration to 'put the conflict into parking gear'. He told the White House that the conflict has either 'drive or reverse, no neutral gear'. Ignored, Jewish settlement expansion and radical tendencies will continue apace, even if the Israeli government decides not to accelerate them.

The test of the pudding will be in the eating - the debate within the Administration as to just how far to be engaged will be put to a test on a daily basis.

It's widely reported that by the end of the month President Obama will lay out his Middle East strategy and delineate clear rules of U.S. engagement. All indications are that the President is resolved to engage both the new Israeli prime minister and the new Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat. On paper, their positions certainly appear to put them at loggerheads with the Administration.

IPS: Where do you see the main flashpoints?

DS: As a whole, Israeli settlement activity in and around East Jerusalem - the applicability of a settlement freeze is clearly on the U.S. agenda. The area known as 'E1' is the most emblematic - that's the area where Israel wants to build a major new settlement that would effectively link the outskirts of East Jerusalem with the big settlement town of Ma'ale Adumim, thus severing Palestinians within the city from neighbouring Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and also cut off from one another Palestinian towns like Ramallah and Bethlehem, to Jerusalem's north and south. The Bush Administration managed to pressure the previous Israeli government to put E1 on hold, but only at the expense of settlement activity elsewhere in the city.

Then, there are Israel's plans for what's called the Holy Basin, including the walled Old City and the whole area adjacent to it where most of the holy sites of all three monotheistic religions are located. It has, in effect, become a domain of the settlers. There is definitely government collusion with the ultra-nationalist religious settlers who have been given total control of the delicate ecosystem there. The immediate concern is for 88 Palestinian homes in the Silwan neighbourhood against which demolition orders have been issued.

IPS: Does this reflect the way the new Israeli mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat, (elected last November) who ordered the demolitions, means to go?

DS: The demolition of Palestinian homes, ostensibly because they were put up without building permits, is not so much a case of Israeli malice against Palestinians - it's that Israel is busy establishing an ersatz Biblical domain in this area, and the Palestinians who live there are getting underfoot. What happens to them is just regarded as collateral damage. With the religious extremists, the mayor is planning to turn the Holy Basin into a Biblical Disneyland whereas, in fact, he's turning Jerusalem into Never-Never Land.

IPS: Where is Barkat coming from?

DS: He's a technocrat, not an ideologue, and he has unmitigated confidence in his own ability to do what he believes he has to do. He has certainly grafted the settlement ideology into his operating system. Nothing he has done in the past has prepared him for the complexity of becoming the major of a volcano.

IPS: And what of the Palestinians who live in east Jerusalem, in essence, people in limbo?

DS: It's an incontrovertible fact that only 5-10 percent of the city budget goes to 35 percent of the population, the Palestinians. Some call it racism - I prefer to qualify it as discrimination. Politicians never allocate resources to people who don't vote and, because they don't recognise the Israeli occupation, only 2,200 out of 128,000 eligible Palestinians voters (1.7 percent) turned out for the November elections. Barkat pursues the empty slogan of 'United Jerusalem' but everything points to the fact that the Palestinians have no real share in the city - they are entirely disenfranchised.

IPS: What of Prime Minister (Binyamin) Netanyahu?

DS: I'm not sure which direction he will go in practice, but it may very well be that if the Administration comes down on him, he'll take the same approach he adopted when he was in power between 1996 and 1999 - namely, anything conciliatory towards the Palestinians was immediately compensated by a policy against the Palestinians in Jerusalem. One of the real dangers is that he might summon (foreign minister Avigdor) Liberman and tell him that he plans only to do the E1 housing project 'when the circumstances are right' but that he means to tell the President that he's ready for a trade-off - to forestall implantation of E1, 'provided you lay off me with respect to the Holy Basin'.

IPS: Surely the Americans wouldn't be taken in by that?

DS: There are some good signs. When the Secretary of State says that the demolishing of houses in Silwan is not a municipal issue but a policy issue, you have to be deaf not to hear that message. Washington seems to understand the situation in a way that clearly it did not 'get it' during the last eight years. The Obama Administration certainly has a very good Middle East team: they're well informed and they've learnt from past mistakes, which is encouraging. Whether or not there will be a coherent policy is still, however, too early to say.

IPS: Surely this goes beyond Washington...

DS: Absolutely, this Administration has already indicated plainly - whether in regard to the G20 or NATO (north Atlantic Treaty Organisation), or the deployment in Afghanistan - that it will be far more multilateral than the Bush Administration, not that that's too difficult. There may well be a new division of labour with respect to the Arab world and to the Arab League peace initiative. There could also be new life breathed into the Quartet (the EU, the U.S., Russia and the UN) and a newly defined role for the Quartet's special envoy, Tony Blair. All indications are that while the U.S. will take the lead on Israeli-Palestinian moves, they envisage a much broader role for the EU and for the Arab world as well.

IPS: So will Washington get it right this time, do you believe?

DS: Solving Jerusalem is a bit like the global economic crisis. This Administration can do all the right things and still fail. But one thing's for sure - they don't have the time, and Jerusalem cannot be left on the sidelines. Jerusalem can be very wise and very forgiving to those who understand her complexities. But it's one nasty bitch of a place to those oblivious to the complexities: it's very unforgiving for those who treat its complexities in a cavalier manner.

East Jerusalem Fact File:

* The eastern part of the city, including the walled Old City and its holy places, was annexed by Israel and incorporated by Israel as part of its 'unified capital' immediately after its conquest during the 1967 Middle East War.

* The annexation has never been recognised by the international community which does, however, support the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem as the capital of the projected Palestinian state.

* There are 270,000 Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem who constitute 30 percent of the city's overall population. They have the status of residents, ostensibly with full rights and including the right to vote in municipal elections. Unless they have opted specifically for Israeli citizenship (only some 2,000 have), they are not eligible to vote in Israeli parliamentary elections.

* Over the 42 years of occupation, Israel has appropriated some 35 percent of the land within East Jerusalem to build new housing projects for the Jewish population. During the same period only 600 apartments have been built with government support for Palestinians, and no new Palestinian neighbourhoods have been created.

* About 2,500 Israeli settlers have moved in recent years to live in the area of East Jerusalem called the Holy Basin.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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