Judaising Jerusalem through terror

The Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, during a press conference last week admitted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had allocated nearly $1 billion to rejuvenate the old city. 

The idea is to make it attractive to the four billion tourists who would love to visit the sacred places.

Part of the five-year master plan is to impose a Jewish character to the old city, disregarding Islamic or Christian historical monuments or places of worship.

It was within this context that the Palestinian foreign ministry appealed to the international Quartet to stop Barkat from demolishing 20,000 houses belonging to Arabs, under the pretext that they had no building licence from his office.

It is common practice among Israeli officials not to issue building licences or permits for the building of an Arab home before 10 years of waiting, and the fees are normally $20,000, which deters many Palestinians from submitting their applications.

The Arab population in East Jerusalem stands at 375,000, which is roughly 40 per cent of the total city population.

Barkat’s move is one of the tactics aiming to coerce Palestinians to leave the city to facilitate the demographic Judaisation of the capital and encourage 200,000 settlers to take the place of the evicted Palestinians.

Such measures blatantly violate the Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power to build or demolish houses or structures in occupied territory.

It might be a dramatic irony that the Geneva conventions were drafted as an expression of solidarity with the sufferings of millions of Jews during the holocaust. Now, we see the second generation of survivors inflicting the same sufferings on Palestinians.

Such shortsighted policies breed violence among Palestinians. The four rabbis who were knifed to death in a Jerusalem synagogue on November 18, 2014 were victim of those Palestinians suffering from the humiliation of Jerusalem mayors.

The killing of three seminary students in Hebron led to the July-August Gaza war, which saw 2,100 Palestinians and 70 Israelis killed.

A continuation of Barkat’s policy of Judaisation in Jerusalem, demographically and geographically, will create more Arab reactions, like lone wolf operations, using construction vehicles to kill Israeli pedestrians or slaying hitchhikers.

A new culture of death is being forced on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation policies in the Holy City. A Jewish sage once said: “There are many types of terror, but the worst are the religious ones.”

It is Israeli practices in the Holy City which are the powder keg.