Peace plan an ‘insult’ to Palestinians
JERUSALEM ‘MUST BE DIVIDED EQUALLY’
>>ABU DIS: Like a monument to dashed hopes, an unfinished Palestinian parliament building stands derelict on a ridge in Abu Dis, an unimposing West Bank suburb of Jerusalem that the administration of President Donald Trump has proposed as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
A symbol of the possibilities of sovereignty when it was begun in the mid1990s, the parliament was supposed to have a clear line of sight to the domes of the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, barely 4 kilometres away as the crow flies. Today it backs onto a hulking, razor wire-topped concrete wall, a section of Israel’s security barrier that went up in 2005, isolating wingless creatures in Abu Dis from Jerusalem and its holy sites.
Days after the rollout of the longawaited Trump plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which strongly favoured Israel and disregarded Palestinian claims, there was little sense of gathering majesty or of Palestinian control here in Abu Dis.
US administrations have tried over decades to mediate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on far more evenhanded terms than the new proposal. But nothing epitomises the asymmetry more than how it addresses a Palestinian capital.
Palestinians have long aspired to an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital, but the proposal does away with the long-held notion that the two sides would negotiate Jerusalem’s future. Instead, it gives all the desirable parts of the city to Israel and proposes a group of obscure, outlying areas of the city as the closest thing to a capital in Jerusalem that the Palestinians should ever get. It offers Palestinians the tiny, crowded Abu Dis, along with troubled faraway neighbourhoods technically in East Jerusalem but also on the other side of the security barrier.
One of the neighbourhoods designated for the capital, the Shuafat refugee camp, is a gang-ridden slum where the Palestinian police have no jurisdiction and the Israeli police fear to tread. Another, Kufr Aqab, became a Wild West of unregulated and unsafe construction when Israeli policies and sky-high housing prices drove middle-class Arabs to seek homes beyond the security barrier but still inside the Jerusalem municipality.
And then there is Abu Dis, the home of Al-Quds University, which opened in the 1980s when the village was just a 10-minute drive from Damascus Gate
— one of the portals leading into Jerusalem’s Old City. Most of Abu Dis was never inside Jerusalem city limits.
“How can this be a capital?” asked Ahmed Bader, 25, incredulously. He had come in a small truck to collect garbage from a wasteland behind the parliament building. Children rode horses bareback in an adjacent alley.
“Jerusalem has the Aqsa mosque, the churches, business, places to work,” he continued. “What do we have here? If I stop my little Vespa in the main street to speak on the phone, cars pile up behind and can’t get past me!”
When the Palestinians say they want Jerusalem as their capital, they do not mean areas like Abu Dis, Shuafat or Kufr Aqab.
Shuafat and Kufr Aqab are part of the territory that the Israelis annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, in the heady days after their victory in the gruesome SixDay War.
“Jerusalem is the old walled city. The rest is not Jerusalem,” said Nazmi Jubeh, an archaeologist and historian who runs the Birzeit University Museum in the West Bank. “We mean by Jerusalem — and I think everybody around the world means — the holy sites. This game of playing with words has no meaning at all.”
In broad terms, the Trump administration plan would give Israel overall military control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It would allow Israel to annex about 30% of the West Bank along with all the Jewish settlements in the territory, although most of the world considers those settlements a violation of international law.
While Israel had long been expected to hold on to some large settlement blocs in the West Bank in return for land swaps, there was also an expectation it would dismantle more isolated settlements in territory designated for a Palestinian state.