The police are rare, illegal guns are plentiful, post office is shut

Annexed Palestinian village is now isolated behind a wall

Straddling the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah, the Palestinian neighborhood of Kafr Aqab is a confusion of illegally built apartment buildings, potholed streets lined with trash and snarled traffic.

Looming over it all are the massive concrete slabs of Israel’s security barrier.

Immediately after conquering the West Bank in the Six Day War, 50 years ago last month, Israel declared some of Kafr Aqab part of a united Jerusalem. But today, the district feels abandoned to an existence all its own.

This is a place where the police seldom come, illegal guns are plentiful and the sole post office was shut down years ago. Yet most people, including the head of the Palestinian Authority-run local council, have Israeli residency cards and pay municipal taxes to Jerusalem.

“It’s complicated,” said the council head, Imad Awad. “Two countries are responsible for Kafr Aqab, the Palestinians and Israel. It has two municipalities and, unfortunately, big problems.”

When the Israelis arrived, Kafr Aqab, about three miles from the center of Ramallah and more than twice that distance from Jerusalem’s Old City, was a rustic village of stone houses and olive groves with just a few hundred residents. Like the rest of the West Bank, including the eastern half of Jerusalem, it had been under Jordanian rule. The war ended that.

In the weeks after the war, part of the village was incorporated by Israel into an expanded east Jerusalem, annexed and declared part of a unified capital city. Kafr Aqab lies at the tip of a narrow corridor jutting northward that was gerrymandered to include an old airstrip that lies within the city limits. Part of the old village remained outside Jerusalem and lies formally within the West Bank.

Palestinian residents of Kafr Aqab and other east Jerusalem neighborhoods got Israeli residency cards and social welfare benefits. Most critically, they got the right to work in Israel and move about freely. Within years, Arabs from cramped neighborhoods in the center of east Jerusalem began moving to Kafr Aqab to buy larger homes at lower prices.

Over the years, Kafr Aqab morphed from a village on the outskirts of Ramallah to a Jerusalem suburb.

But about 15 years ago, in the throes of a campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings, Israel built a several-hundred-mile barrier around the West Bank and through east Jerusalem to keep out attackers. The wall physically severed the neighborhood from the city and a population estimated in the tens of thousands from most municipal services, while leaving it linked to nearby Ramallah.

Though nominally still part of Jerusalem, Kafr Aqab found itself adrift, facing a vacuum of authority. That, along with the daily trials of crossing through the West Bank’s main checkpoint to the rest of the city, underscored the uncertain political status of Palestinians.

“We don’t feel like we are really in Jerusalem because of the wall,” said Raed Hamdan, a 55-year-old resident of Kafr Aqab.

On the eve of the 1967 war, Hamdan was a 5-year-old who lived in the Christian Quarter of the Old City. His father worked for the Jordanian police. He recalled non-uniformed soldiers hiding guns in the family bathroom. Adults spoke of blood running through the alleyways down from the Damascus Gate.

When Hamdan and his family emerged from their home, Jordanian soldiers had been replaced by Israelis greeting them with the Hebrew “Shalom.”

About one year later, his family moved to Kafr Aqab. Fifty years later, he lives near Kafr Aqab’s wildcat apartment buildings and the graffiti-covered separation wall and complains about the absence of police – Israeli or Palestinian.

“Many people have guns here,” said Hamdan. “We have no government or rules.”

The neighborhood lacks sufficient school classrooms, ambulances or fire trucks. To reach Israeli hospitals, residents must pass through checkpoints.

The absence of any building and planning code enforcement has allowed construction of a cluster of medium-rise apartment buildings just a few feet away from each other, overburdening the neighborhood’s sewage system.

Garbage collectors contracted by the Jerusalem city government pick up garbage irregularly.

The Palestinian Authority in nearby Ramallah has not moved into the vacuum, though it did establish a local council in the part of Kafr Aqab just outside of the Jerusalem border.

“Abu Mazen is making a state in Ramallah, and he doesn’t care about Kafr Aqab or Jerusalem,” said Jeries Tannous, 27, referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas by his nickname.

At a car wash on the main road to Ramallah, young Palestinian men talked about what things were like before the wall and the Kalandiya checkpoint were built, back when trips into the heart of the city took just a few minutes instead of more than an hour.

“It was much better. There were jobs,” Tannous said. “This is a real chaos.”

– Los Angeles Times /TNS)