An insult to suggest an Israel-built ghetto could be the capital of a Palestinian state
From the offputting concrete edifice that confronts visitors to Abu Dis, the significance of this West Bank town – past and present – is not immediately obvious.
The eight-metre-high slabs of Israel’s separation wall silently attest to a divided land and a quarter century of a failed Middle East peace process.
The entrance to Abu Dis could not be more disconcerting, given reports that Donald Trump’s administration intends it to be the capital of a future Palestinian state, in place of Jerusalem.
The wall, and the security cameras on top of it, are the legacy of battles for control of Jerusalem’s borders. Sections of concrete remain charred black by fires residents set years ago in the forlorn hope of weakening the structure and bringing it down.
Before the wall was built, more than a decade ago, Abu Dis had a spectacular view across the valley to Jerusalem’s Old City and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock, less than three kilometres away. It was a few minutes’ drive – or an hour’s hike – to Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the reputed location of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Now, for many of the 13,000 inhabitants, Jerusalem might as well as be on another planet. They can no longer reach its holy places, markets, schools or hospitals.
Abu Dis, its residents say, is hemmed in on all sides – by Israel’s oppressive wall; by illegal Jewish settlements encroaching on what is left of its lands; and by a large, Israeli-run landfill that experts say is a threat to human health.
The Palestinian authorities do not even control Abu Dis. The Israeli security cameras watch over it and armoured jeeps full of Israeli soldiers make forays at will into its crowded streets.
Perhaps fittingly, given the Palestinians’ plight, Abu Dis feels more like it is being gradually turned into a wing of a dystopian open-air prison than a capital-in-waiting.
Nonetheless, the town has been thrust into the spotlight. Rumours have intensified that US President Trump’s promised peace plan – what he terms the “deal of the century” – is nearing completion. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been drafting it for more than a year.
In January, Palestinian PresidentMahmoud Ab bas confirmed
that the White House was leaning on him to accept Abu Dis as his capital.
The issue has become highly charged for Palestinians since May, when Mr Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognised the city as Israel’s capital.
That appeared to overturn a once widely shared assumption that Israel would be required to withdraw from East Jerusalem, which it occupied in 1967, for the Palestinians to declare it their capital.
Instead Mr Kushner and his team appear to believe they can repackage Abu Dis as a substitute capital.
How plausible is it that the Palestinians can accept a ghetto-ised, anonymous community such as Abu Dis for such a pivotal role in their nation-building project?
Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian cabinet minister, said Mr Trump would find no takers among the Palestinian leadership.
“A Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital simply won’t work. It’s not credible,” Mr Khatib said.
“It’s not just Jerusalem’s religious and historic significance. It also has strategic, economic and geographic importance to Palestinians.”
The people of Abu Dis appear to feel the same way, with many pointing to Jerusalem’s enormous symbolic power and the role of international tourism in developing the Palestinian economy.
But Abu Dis is unlikely ever to attract visitors, even with a makeover.
The approach road, skirting the huge settlement of Maale Adumim that is home to 40,000 Jews, is adorned with red signs warning that it is dangerous for Israelis to enter the area.
A section of wall at the entrance to Abu Dis indictaes residents’ growing anger and frustration, with Israel and some of their own leaders.
Artists have spray-painted a giant image of Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian resistance leader imprisoned by Israel for the past 16 years. It shows him lifting his handcuffed hands to make a victory sign.
But next to him is a much smaller image of Mr Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, whose face has been painted out.
He has come under increasing criticism for maintaining Palestinian “security co-operation” with Israel’s occupation forces.
Resentment at such co-operation is felt especially keenly in Abu Dis. Large iron gates in the wall give the Israeli army ready access in and out of the town.
Under the Oslo accords signed in the mid-1990s, all of Abu Dis was placed temporarily under Israeli military control and most of it under Israel’s civil control.
That temporary status appears to have become permanent, leaving residents at the whim of hostile Israeli authorities who deny building permits and readily issue demolition orders.
The restrictions mean Abu Dis lacks most of the infrastructure one would associate with a city, let alone a capital.
“We are now a small island of territory controlled by the Israeli army,” said Abdulwahab Sabbah, a local community activist.
“We have lost our schools, the hospitals we once used, our holy places, the job opportunities that the city offered. Families have been split apart too, unable to visit their relatives in Jerusalem.
“We have been orphaned. We have lost Jerusalem, our mother.”
A short drive into Abu Dis and the shell of a huge building comes into view, a reminder that an upgrade to the city is not solely an idea of the Trump government.
Mr Khatib said that Israel began rebranding Abu Dis as a second “Al Quds” – the Holy City, the Arabic name for Jerusalem – in the late 1990s, after the Oslo agreement allowed Palestinian leaders to return to Gaza and some parts of the West Bank.
The Palestinian leadership, desperate to get a foothold closer to the densely populated neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, played along.
They expected that Israel would eventually relinquish Abu Dis to full Palestinian control, allowing it to be annexed to East Jerusalem in a future peace deal.
In 1996 the Palestinians began work building a $4 million (Dh14.6m) parliament on the side of Abu Dis closest to Jerusalem. The site was selected so that the office of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would have a view of Al Aqsa Mosque.
Reports from that time talk of Abu Dis becoming a gateway, or “safe corridor”, for West Bank Palestinians to reach the mosque. One proposal was to build a tunnel between the two.
But with the outbreak of hostilities in 2000, work on the parliament came to a halt. The interior was never finished and there is now no view of Al Aqsa. The parliament is sealed off from Jerusalem by the wall.
Since then Israel has barred the Palestinian Authority from any role in East Jerusalem.
Khalil Erekat, a caretaker, holds the key to the unused parliament. Once visitors could inspect the building, including its glass-domed central chamber.
Now, Mr Erekat said, only pigeons and the odd stray dog or snake ventured inside.
“No one comes any more,” he said. “The place has been forgotten.”
And that, it seems, is the way Palestinian officials would prefer it. With the Trump government offering the town as a substitute capital, the parliament is an embarrassing white elephant.
Requests from The National to the Palestinian authorities to visit the building were rejected on the grounds that it was no longer structurally safe.
Evidence of how quickly Israel has turned Abu Dis from a rural suburb of Jerusalem into an eyesore ghetto are evident in the homes around the parliament.
A once-palatial four-storey villa next door, with its collapsed top floors, would be more at home in war-ravaged Gaza than an impending capital.
Mohammed Anati, 64, a retired carpenter, is a tenant occupying the bottom floor with his wife and three sons.
Mr Anati said the destruction was carried out by the Jerusalem municipality several years ago, apparently because the upper floors were built in breach of planning rules Israeli military authorities imposed after 1967.
Neighbours speculate that Israel was more concerned that the top of the building provided views over the wall.
Mr Anati said that the Jerusalem municipality treated this small neighbourhood as being within its jurisdiction.
“We have to pay council taxes to Jerusalem even though we are cut off from the city and receive no services,” he said.
Asked whether he thought Abu Dis could be a Palestinian capital, Mr Anati scoffed.
“Trump will offer us the worst deal of the century,” he said. “Jerusalem has to be the capital. There is nothing of Jerusalem here since Israel built the wall.”
Near by, Ghassan Abu Hillel’s two-storey home presses against the slabs of concrete. He said cameras on the wall monitored he and his neighbours around the clock.
Mr Abu Hillel’s family moved to the house in 1967, when he was 14, and shortly before Israel occupied Abu Dis along with the rest of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The restrictions mean Abu Dis lacks most of the infrastructure one would associate with a city, let alone a capital
Until the wall was built, he spent his time herding sheep and goats in the surrounding hills. Now he has to corral then into a corner of the wall. Their improvised pen is daubed with graffiti: “Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape.”
The flock of what was once more than 200 sheep is down to barely a dozen. The animals can no longer graze out on the hills and he cannot afford to feed them straw.
Unlike Mr Abu Hillel and his sheep, his pigeons still enjoy their freedom.
“They can fly over the wall and reach Jerusalem whenever they want,” he said.
His family owned much of the land surrounding Abu Dis before 1967 but almost all of it had been taken by Israel, originally on the pretext that it was needed for military purposes.
Since then, Israel has built Jewish settlements on that land, including Maale Adumim, Kfar Adumim and Kedar.
In the early 1980s it opened a landfill site to cope with the region’s waste.
In 2009 the UN said that toxic fumes from burning waste and leaking into the groundwater posed a threat to local inhabitants’ health.
Some residents are actively finding ways to break out of the isolation imposed on Abu Dis by Israel.
Mr Sabbah is a founder of the Friendship Association, which encourages exchange programmes with European students, teachers and youth clubs.
His political activities may be a reason his home, along with the local mayor’s, was one of 10 invaded in the night on September 4.
The operation had the hallmarks of what former Israeli soldiers from the whistle-blowing group Breaking the Silence have called “establishing presence”, which means military training exercises designed to disrupt the lives of Palestinian communities and spread fear.
Mr Sabbah is sceptical that the Abu Dis proposal by the Trump administration has been made in good faith.
“It’s a bluff,” he said. “Israel has shown through all its actions that it does not want any Palestinian state and that means no capital, even in Abu Dis.
“It is being offered only because Israel knows no Palestinian leader could ever accept it as a capital. And that way Israel can again blame us for being the ones to reject their version of ‘peace’.”
But amid its confinement, Abu Dis does have one asset. Its university attracts thousands of young Palestinians, although it adds to the overcrowding. The main campus of the Palestinian-run Al Quds University has been operating in Abu Dis since the 1980s.
On the crossroads between the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Nablus to the south, Jericho to the east and Ramallah to the north, the Abu Dis campus has grown rapidly.
It has profited from the fact that West Bank Palestinians cannot access another campus of Al Quds university in East Jerusalem.
It is enclosed and security is tight. Inside, students enjoy spacious grounds with shaded gardens, a small oasis of normality where it is possible briefly to forget the situation outside.
But the university is not immune from Israeli military operations either.
On September 5, soldiers shut down the campus and nearby schools as they fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets at youths.
Omar Mahmoud, 23, a medical student from Nablus, raised his eyebrows at the suggestion that Abu Dis could serve as the Palestinians’ capital.
“It’s fully under Israeli control,” Mr Mahmoud said. “One side there is the wall and on the other side there are Israeli settlements. There are no services and it just gets more crowded by the year.
“To be honest, I can’t wait to get out of here.”