jerusalem | The group of Jerusalemites tumbles off the tour bus onto streets and hilltops where most of them have never before set foot. They are in Eastern Jerusalem, home to some 150,000 Arabs and, for most on the tour, an entirely new world.
They take in views of Israel’s security barrier, here a hulking concrete wall that divides neighborhoods, and walk the narrow cracked roads lined with piles of uncollected trash. They marvel that this, too, is Jerusalem.
They also make their way through the contrasting scene of paved roads and tidy, stone-faced apartment blocs that make up the wide swath of Jewish neighborhoods in the east of the city, neighborhoods built between Arab ones since 1967, the fruit of efforts by successive Israeli governments to ensure that the city is never again divided.
As Israel prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem, this group of students and professionals came to see for themselves the Arab neighborhoods of the city where Jews rarely venture.
“I see regression, not progress,” said a psychologist who has lived in the Jerusalem area for 30 years but had not been to the eastern part of the city for nearly as long. “Jerusalem never seemed united for me. The idea that it is is a fiction.”
She’s not alone: A poll of Jerusalem residents by the Dahaf Institute found that 62 percent do not consider the city united.
“They have good reason,” Motti Elmaliah, of the Jerusalem newspaper Yerushalayim, wrote of the poll. “When was the last time you enjoyed a stroll on Saladin Street, one of the major arteries in East Jerusalem, and felt at home? Except for a quick trip to eat hummus on Saturday morning in the Old City, and getting a tune-up in Wadi Joz, the Jewish residents of the city try not to go to East Jerusalem. That way they also don’t have to see the dirt and the neglect there.”
The 40th anniversary has brought new attention to the question of what Jerusalem’s unity means beyond political sloganeering and what might lie ahead for the city. New statistics show that the city’s Arab population is growing faster than its Jewish one.
According to figures from the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem today is 66 percent Jewish and 34 percent Arab. While the Arab growth rate continues to climb each year, an increasing number of Jews, mainly secular ones, are leaving the city, fleeing what they say is an increasingly Orthodox, politically tense and poor city with few economic opportunities.
Jerusalem, these Jews say, is a place that feels less and less like home.
On May 13, Mayor Uri Lupolianski warned the government that the capital could lose its Jewish majority within a decade.
“We won’t be satisfied with crumbs,” he said. “We need a comprehensive plan.”
The vast majority of the public, 92 percent, said it is important or very important to maintain a Jewish majority in the city, the Jerusalem Institute found in a survey published this week. However, studies also have found that most Israelis would not choose to live in Jerusalem, which they view as dangerous and impoverished.
“If this trend continues, by 2025 about 50 percent of the city will be Palestinian, and that means Jerusalem will be a binational city,” Hebrew University geographer Shlomo Hasson said. “The capital of a Jewish and democratic state would be a binational city. This is the first step toward a binational state, so the question is: ‘What needs to be done?’
“You can say every city is divided when you look at the deeper issues such as religion and economy. Some are more divided than others,” Hasson added. “We don’t live in a divided city. We live in a polarized city.”
Just as educated, secular Jews are fleeing Jerusalem, many of the city’s Arab elite are leaving for the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah, which in recent years has replaced Eastern Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ economic and cultural hub, because of the economic and logistical difficulties of life in Jerusalem.
Steeped in history and religious significance, Jerusalem is among the most difficult issues in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Palestinians claim the eastern part of the city as their future capital, a claim most Israelis continue to reject, although it reportedly was part of the Israeli government’s offer to Palestinian negotiators during peace talks in 2000.
The group on the recent tour of Eastern Jerusalem was guided by Amos Gil, executive director of Ir Amim, an Israeli organization that promotes Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in the city.
Gil distributed maps of Jerusalem, full of color-coded lines marking the course of the city’s boundaries, including the municipal line along which the security barrier has been built and the border of the Old City. He said his goal was not political but to point out the city’s complexity.
Much to Ir Amim’s surprise, there has been a huge demand for information and tours. Some 4,000 people have taken its tours of Eastern Jerusalem since Ir Amim began offering them three years ago. Among those they have escorted are Israeli army intelligence officers, delegations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and diplomats.
Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think tank, said the essence of the conflict over Jerusalem is more religious than economic or political, but Israeli authorities do have to address the problems of the eastern part of the city.
“We have to invest a lot more in Jerusalem if we want to strengthen our claim,” he said.
Infrastructure is something of a disaster. There is a shortfall of some 1,000 school classrooms, shortages in most public services and other infrastructure needs ranging from water to sewage lines, proper roads and public transportation.
Living conditions are overcrowded, as the municipality rarely gives building permits to Eastern Jerusalem residents. Some say that is part of a policy to restrict development and planning in Arab parts of the city.
Some observers see a policy of deliberate neglect by authorities who want to push Palestinians out of the city. Others say it’s simply a problem of representation: Arab residents of Eastern Jerusalem who were brought under Israel control in 1967 do not recognize Israeli sovereignty and, in protest, have elected not to vote in municipal elections.
Arab Jerusalemites have a peculiar political identity — they are neither citizens of Israel nor subjects of the Palestinian Authority. Some say that despite the economic and other discrimination they may face, they are reluctant to relinquish their status as Jerusalem residents, since it entitles them to Israeli medical insurance and social security payments.
Despite their physical separation from other Palestinians, especially since the security barrier went up, most Eastern Jerusalem Arabs identify strongly as part of the Palestinian people.
Gold, author of the recent book “The Battle for Jerusalem,” says the idea that Palestinians might be satisfied with an Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood as their future capital is an “Israeli illusion.”
“The real issue in Jerusalem comes down to access to holy sites,” he said. The Palestinians “want the Old City. If you simply pull back from East Jerusalem neighborhoods, the Palestinians will demand the Old City, which is their real goal.”
Rami Nasrallah, an urban planner who heads the board of the International Peace and Cooperation Center in eastern Jerusalem, said efforts were never made to truly unite the city, with equal resources given to the Jewish and Arab sectors.
Meanwhile, he said, as the security barrier makes life increasingly restrictive for Jerusalem Arabs and as an entire generation of Palestinians living outside the city limits grows up without being able to visit the city and its holy sites, the situation becomes increasingly volatile.
“Symbols become more important, and it becomes more of a religious conflict than a national conflict,” Nasrallah said. “This is a situation that you cannot control.”