Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Fourth of July party at the American ambassador’s home in Israel on Thursday.
WASHINGTON — It was only one paragraph buried deep in the most plain-vanilla kind of diplomatic document, 40 pages of dry language committing 189 nations to a world free of nuclear weapons. But it has become the latest source of friction between Israel and the United States in a relationship that has lurched from crisis to crisis over the last few months.
At a meeting to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in May, the United States yielded to demands by Arab nations that the final document urge Israel to sign the treaty — a way of spotlighting its historically undeclared nuclear weapons.
Israel believed it had assurances from the Obama administration that it would reject efforts to include such a reference, an Israeli official said, and it saw this as another sign of unreliability by its most important ally. In a recent visit to Washington, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, raised the issue in meetings with senior American officials.
With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scheduled to meet President Obama on Tuesday at the White House, the flap may introduce a discordant note into a meeting that both sides are eager to portray as a chance for Israel and the United States to turn the page after a rocky period.
Other things have changed notably for the better in American-Israeli relations since Mr. Netanyahu called off his last visit to the White House to rush home to deal with the crisis after Israel’s deadly attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla sailing to Gaza in late May. His agreement to ease the land blockade on Gaza, which came at the request of the United States, has helped thaw the chill between the governments, American and Israeli officials said.
Meanwhile, the raft of new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, after the passage of the United Nations resolution, has reassured Israelis, who viewed Mr. Obama’s attempts to engage Iran with unease. Mr. Obama signed the American sanctions into law on Thursday.
“The overall tone is more of a feel-good visit than we’ve seen in the past,” said David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It has been more focused on making sure that the Ides of March have passed.”
He was referring to the dispute during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in March, when Israel approved plans for Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. Mr. Obama was enraged by what he perceived as a slight to Mr. Biden, and when Mr. Netanyahu visited a few weeks later, the White House showed its displeasure by banning cameras from recording the visit.
But despite the better atmospherics, some analysts said the nuclear nonproliferation issue symbolizes why Israel remains insecure about the intentions of the Obama administration. In addition to singling out Israel, the document, which has captured relatively little public attention, calls for a regional conference in 2012 to lay the groundwork for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. Israel, whose nuclear arsenal is one of the world’s worst-kept secrets, would be on the hot seat at such a meeting.
At the last review conference, in 2005, the Bush administration refused to go along with any references to Israel, one of several reasons the meeting ended in acrimony, without any statement.
This time, Israel believed the Obama administration would again take up its cause. As a non-signatory to the treaty, Israel did not attend the meeting. But American officials consulted the Israelis on a text in advance, which they found acceptable, a person familiar with those discussions said. That deepened their surprise at the end.
Administration officials said the United States negotiated for months with Egypt, on behalf of the Arab states, to leave out the reference to Israel. While the United States supports the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East, it stipulated that any conference would be only a discussion, not the beginning of a negotiation to compel Israel to sign on to the treaty.
The United States practices a policy of ambiguity with respect to Israel’s nuclear stockpile, neither publicly discussing it nor forcing the Israeli government to acknowledge its existence.
The United States, recognizing that the document would upset the Israelis, sought to distance itself even as it signed it.
In a statement released after the conference ended, the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, said, “The United States deplores the decision to single out Israel in the Middle East section of the NPT document.” He said it was “equally deplorable” that the document did not single out Iran for its nuclear ambitions. Any conference on a nuclear-free Middle East, General Jones said, could only come after Israel and its neighbors had made peace.
The United States, American officials said, faced a hard choice: refusing to compromise with the Arab states on Israel would have sunk the entire review conference. Given the emphasis Mr. Obama has placed on nonproliferation, the United States could not accept such an outcome.
It also would complicate the administration’s attempts to build bridges to the Arab world, an effort that is at the heart of some of the disagreements between the United States and Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama will have plenty of other things to discuss this week. After several rounds of indirect talks, brokered by the administration’s special envoy, George J. Mitchell, the United States is pushing the Israelis and the Palestinians to begin direct negotiations.
A central question, analysts said, is whether Mr. Netanyahu will extend Israel’s self-imposed moratorium on new residential construction in West Bank settlements, which expires in September. He is unlikely to take such a step unless the Palestinians agree to face-to-face talks, they said.
For Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu, the most basic priority may be establishing trust between them — which is why the flap over the nuclear conference, though small, is potentially troublesome.
“Most American presidents who end up being successful on Israel manage to create, even amid great mistrust and suspicion, a pretty good working relationship,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator. “This has been a real crisis of confidence, which cuts to the core of how each leader sees his respective world.”
FM Mottaki says Israel would not have raided Gaza flotilla if the UN had taken a stronger stance against ‘Zionist crimes.’
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Sunday accused the United Nations of neglecting their responsibility to deal with the “atrocities” of the Zionist regime, according to the Iranian news agency IRNA.
At a ceremony marking 28 years since four Iranians vanished in Beirut – an event Iran claims was orchestrated by Israel – Mottaki said he regarded “Zionists as the worst threat to the Middle East.”
“If the UN had adopted a severe stand against the crimes and atrocities of the Zionists in the past, the regime would not have dared to commit new crimes such as targeting Gaza-bound flotilla,” Mottaki said.
The Iranian FM was referring to the May raid by Israeli special forces on a Gaza-bond aid flotilla, which resulted in the death of nine of the flotilla participants.
“The Zionist regime has turned into a source of threat to all nations of the region, endangering peace and security of the world,” Mottaki said, adding that the “inhuman crimes committed by the usurper regime in the past six decades in the occupied lands as well as other parts of the region, truly demonstrates the savage nature of the fabricated regime.”
“The Zionist regime has lost its credibility and legitimacy among world nations and is now on the verge of collapse,” Mottaki said, adding that “the Zionist regime like the former apartheid regime in South Africa is doomed to failure and the nations of the region mainly the Palestinians will witness formation of a democratic system in place of the Zionist occupiers.”
Mottaki also reiterated Iranian claims that Israel was behind the disappearance of the four Iranian diplomats. Evidence proved that the officials were “kidnapped by the Zionist regime are held in Israeli jails,” Mottaki said, urging all Lebanese and Palestinian groups and international organizations to help secure their release.
An Iranian official indicated last week that Iranian lawmakers protesting Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip would join an aid ship destined to leave from Lebanon.
Lebanon had said last month that it would allow a Gaza-bound ship called The Julia to sail via Cyprus, despite warnings from Israel that it reserved the right to use all necessary means to stop ships that tried to sail from Lebanon to Gaza.
Mahmoud Ahmadi-Beighash, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said Iranian parliament delegates could sail on the ship rather than attempt to enter Gaza via Egypt.
“A ship is going from Lebanon to Gaza in the course of the current week and the lawmakers are following up to go to Gaza via this ship,” he said in comments carried by semi-official news agency ISNA.
By Jeremy Bowen
For many years Israel has enjoyed a close relationship with the USA, but after recent tensions many Israelis will be watching closely when their leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, meets Mr Obama in Washington on Tuesday.
Benjamin Netanyahu does not have a great history with the occupants of the Oval Office.
He got off to a bad start with Bill Clinton during his first term as Israel’s prime minister in the 1990s. After he lectured Mr Clinton about the Arab-Israeli conflict the president was not happy.
“Who the heck does he think he is?” he expostulated. “Who’s the hecking superpower here?”
Only according to the witness, a diplomat called Aaron Miller, he did not say “heck”.
It is safe to say that Mr Netanyahu’s relations with President Obama have been disastrous.
Unlike his predecessor, Mr Obama believes that some of Israel’s actions are part of the problem in the Middle East.
He tried – and failed – for months last year to get the Israeli leader to order a complete freeze on the construction of homes for Jews in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Tensions date back to Vice-President Biden’s troubled visit to Israel
Then, while the US Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting, Israel announced a big expansion of Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in occupied east Jerusalem. The Americans were furious.
So a few weeks later, when Mr Netanyahu (who spent part of his childhood in America) visited the White House, President Obama did not exactly welcome him as the prodigal son.
It was not just settlements. Mr Netanyahu also lobbied US politicians, looking as if he was undermining the Obama administration on its home turf.
To make matters worse, just before he was due in the Oval Office the prime minister gave an uncompromising speech to the leading Israeli lobby in the United States, which is called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
If anyone doubts the power of Israel’s friends in the US, they ought to sign up now for Aipac’s annual policy conference.
TIMELINE: 2010 ISRAEL-US ROW
9 Mar: Israel announces the building of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem during visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
Mr Biden condemns the move
11 Mar: Mr Biden says there must be no delay in resuming Mid-East peace talks, despite the row
12 Mar: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the Israeli move is “deeply negative” for relations
15 Mar: The US says it is waiting for a “formal response” from Israel to its proposals to show it is committed to Mid-East peace
16 Mar: The US envoy to the Mid-East postpones a visit to Israel
17 Mar: President Obama denies there is a crisis with Israel
22 Mar: Hillary Clinton tells pro-Israel lobby group Aipac Israel has to make “difficult but necessary choices” if it wants peace with Palestinians.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Aipac Israel has a “right to build” in Jerusalem
23 Mar: Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu meet behind closed doors with no media access
23 Mar: Jerusalem municipal government approves building of 20 new homes in East Jerusalem
24 Mar: Mr Netanyahu ends Washington trip talking of a “golden” solution amid US silence
Take a look at their website, which boasts that it attracts half the Senate, a third of the House of Representatives and “countless Israeli and American policymakers and thought leaders”.
I went to this year’s conference, in March, the one where Mr Netanyahu made his speech.
It is held in a massive convention centre in Washington DC. The delegates, more than 7,000 of them, filled the kind of room that is usually measured in terms of football pitches.
The delegates, and politicians, and “thought leaders” gave the Israeli PM a standing ovation when he said that Jerusalem was not a settlement, but Israel’s capital.
To the White House, it looked as if Mr Netanyahu was rubbing salt into the wounds of the Ramat Shlomo affair.
President Obama showed his displeasure by treating his guest, in the words of one Israeli newspaper, like the president of Equatorial Guinea.
No video in time for Israel’s evening news. Not even a still photo. Mr Obama reportedly retreated entirely for a while to have a private dinner with his family.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, admittedly no friend of the prime minister, said he left America “disgraced, isolated and altogether weaker… “.
Cultural links
So this time, Mr Netanyahu’s people say it is all going to be different. They have briefed that he will stay in the official guest quarters, Blair House, and that the row is now officially over.
It is certainly the case that there is a symbiosis between Israel and the United States that can never exist between Washington and the Palestinians.
It goes far deeper than the influence of Aipac – or even the $3bn (£2bn) a year the US gives Israel.
President Harry Truman in 1948 was a key supporter of Israel’s declaration of independence.
There are ties of religion, and culture.
Many Israelis have family in the United States. American leaders, including Joe Biden in that visit to Jerusalem that was hijacked by the settlement plan, speak of their love for Israel and the way they feel at home when they visit.
But what seems to have happened under President Obama is an attempt to return to the kind of relationship that American used to have with Israel.
Every American president declares himself a friend, but not all of them have been uncritical friends.
The first President Bush had a serious spat with a hardline Israeli nationalist prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, over Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
In the 1950s President Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Egyptian territory seized in the Suez war.
Once it was by no means automatic that America would veto criticism of Israel in the UN security council.
And so on…
Political times change. But some realities are constant, and one is that powerful countries like the United States will not act against what they believe to be their own interests.
The Americans have said they will be warm but unrelenting in trying to extract something from their visitor that will persuade the Palestinians that it is worth going to yet another round of direct peace talks.
EDITOR: The Boycott is catching, but…
An annoying article by Zvi Bar’el, who is usually quite open-minded, but here he is equating all boycotts, for and against apartheid, and boycotts by liberal lefties with those by Israeli fascists. If even people like Bar’el are speaking of the boycott against Israel, the chances for any internal change are less than nil.
Cancelling vacations in Antalya, protests and boycotting Turkish goods have become symbols of the “just struggle” against the bad guys.
By Zvi Bar’el
How charming the boycott cry is. Boycott Israeli universities, Israeli products from the settlements, flowers grown in Israel. When this call comes from Israelis, it reflects a great deal of despair, and stems from goodwill, of course. It’s an enchanting formula: They’ll boycott Israel, the public outcry will reach the government and the latter, being democratic, will have to obey the will of the people. How could they not have thought of it sooner?
They did think about it. That is exactly the formula behind the sanctions against Iran. Economic isolation, frozen bank accounts, senior officials not being able to travel abroad – then the Iranian people will wake up and change their regime, or at least its policies. Iran has been under sanctions for 30 years, and the people, wonder of wonders, have not risen up. They protest, but not because of the sanctions; because of the regime’s suppression.
This remedy was also tried with Iraq. For 12 years the Iraqi people groaned under sanctions and dictatorship, but did not rise up against the great military leader who ruled their bedrooms. In the end there was no choice but war. Sanctions did not help.
And what about South Africa? The ostensibly successful sanctions and boycott, which led to the regime’s fall? Sanctions – first military – were imposed on South Africa as early as the start of the 1960s. Then in the mid-1970s, they were extended to oil exports, and finally came the widescale sanctions of the mid-1980s. But apartheid was eliminated only in the mid-1990s, and even then it was not due to sanctions alone; in fact, in those years South Africa experienced economic growth and its exports increased 26 percent. President P.W. Botha’s response to the blacks was no less vindictive than the West’s desire to impose sanctions. Botha wanted to prove that outside intervention would not impact apartheid.
Israel has adopted the same policy. It has blockaded Gaza to spur the inhabitants to rise up against the Hamas regime, in order to achieve politically what the Israel Defense Forces could not achieve militarily. But three years of blockade, four years of fighting Hamas, and even the destructive Operation Cast Lead did not do the trick. The people of Gaza did not rise up, and the Hamas regime only grew stronger.
Anywhere sanctions are imposed – from Iraq to Iran, from Gaza to Pakistan – nationalist and radical forces actually have become stronger. Even the intellectuals who oppose the regimes have found themselves forced to defend them from outside intervention. Nationalism, or more correctly, extreme nationalism, rejoices.
People calling for a boycott of Israel or its institutions and products have given up on change from within. But what is worse, the call is motivated by the same logic that guides government policy in Gaza, and it is just as mistaken. After all, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the Israeli government or the public will behave differently than Gazans or Iranians.
The fact that Israel is a democracy is no guarantee. Proof of this lies in the collective behavior in the face of Turkey’s attack on Israel and the threat of military sanctions. Cancelling vacations in Antalya, protests and boycotting Turkish goods have become symbols of the “just struggle” against the bad guys.
If Israeli scholars are banned by universities in London, that’s not so terrible. They can still go to Pennsylvania, and if they are banned there, they can still correspond and publish online; what’s more important is that foreigners don’t dictate policy “to us.” If now, even before a boycott, lecturers have to think twice about what they say lest extreme nationalists mark them, then under sanctions, some elected officials may ensure such academics are immediately fired. In any case, people waiting for an academic uprising amidst a boycott should have their heads examined.
Who else can take part in the civil disobedience in the boycott proponents’ fantasy? Farmers? Students? Travelers? Businesspeople? How many of them will wrap themselves in the Israeli flag to show the world we do not give in to sanctions? That will be the finest hour of the right wing, the “nationalist camp,” fascism. Boycott becomes them.
Nicholas Lezard welcomes a book that asks Israelis to be outraged
In his 1987 book The Yellow Wind, the Israeli novelist David Grossman said: “In Israel, the reality is that it is easier for a man to change religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinions.” Nearly a quarter of a century on, the only modification that sentence needs is to replace the words “maybe even” with “certainly”. And there is a possible further modification, if we are assuming that this sentence refers to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: insert the words “not only” at the beginning. I was quite amazed, for instance, when a link was posted on Facebook to some overheard mutterings, full of bravado, which purported to “prove” that the activists on the Mavi Marmara were actually looking for a fight. When I suggested, perhaps facetiously, that this accounted for the people who were shot in the back, I was very quickly unfriended.
The Punishment of Gaza
by Gideon Levy
160pp, Verso, £6.99
Buy The Punishment of Gaza at the Guardian bookshop
Well, let us set to one side the legitimacy or otherwise of Operation Sea Breeze, as the IDF raid on the flotilla in May was named. (One should at least salute the officer who dreamed that codeword up: the spirit of George Orwell can turn up in the most unlikely places.) It might be, after all, that my gut instinct is wrong, and that the debacle was in fact a work of supreme cunning on the part of Hamas, deliberately engineered in order to discredit Israel in the eyes of the world.
Which is where Gideon Levy comes in. For nearly three decades he has been writing for the Israeli daily Haaretz, chronicling, in the face of outraged opposition, the depredations suffered by those targeted by the IDF. His particular interest is Gaza, and even though he has been banned from there since November 2006, he continues to plug away at the subject. “I am asking all Israelis to be outraged – or at least to understand what is being perpetrated in their name, so that they may never have the right to claim: we did not know.”
This makes for painful reading, and it is with a heavy heart that you realise, while reading it, that someone who has decided that Israel’s rights in this matter outweigh all other considerations will dismiss each of this book’s 148 pages as emotive propaganda. And then there follows the even more depressing knowledge that anyone who raises any objections to Israel’s behaviour and policies is going to be slandered as an antisemite. This was indeed the fate of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose massive and exhaustive report on the conflict, released under the auspices of the United Nations, was rejected out of hand.
You can find it on the net easily enough, but Levy’s book acts as a passionate footnote to it. The details are harrowing. The most obscene development is the increasing number of children being killed. Almost 100 were killed in 2009 – “a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking”, says Levy. (However, in the chronology at the end of the book it appears that Operation Cast Lead, a three-week operation from December 2008 to January 2009, resulted in the deaths of 1,330 Palestinians, 430 of whom were children.)
So is this propaganda? Doubtless there is much of the story he leaves out – but he is an Israeli dedicated to saving his country’s honour, and if that means rubbing our noses in the details of Mahmoud al-Zakh, a 14-year-old boy whose father had to first identify him from looking at his belt and his socks, then a day later finding the rest of him, then so be it. (You wouldn’t believe what the IDF called the manoeuvre which resulted in this death, along with 21 others: “Operation Locked Kindergarten”. There really is someone with a genius for names over there.)
Well, I know what’s going to happen now. I and the blameless Review section of this newspaper will be denounced as either Hamas stooges, antisemites, or both. It would appear that unimpeachably impartial reporting from this miserable part of the world is a categorical impossibility. (I’ve seen pro-Israel websites which maintain that the residents of Gaza actually have it pretty peachy.) But whichever way you lean, this is a very important book indeed.
Harriet Sherwood
The Guardian’s new Jerusalem correspondent gives her first impressions of the bitterly divided yet beautiful city
The Guardian’s new Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood at the Jaffa Gate in the Old City. Photograph: Gali Tibbon
There is a point on a hill looking out over Jerusalem, right on the 1948 armistice line, known as the Promenade, where both Jewish and Arab families can be found picnicking in the warmth of the late afternoon sun. It’s a good spot. Straight ahead is the Old City, the honey stones of its walls absorbing and reflecting the sun’s rays. The golden Dome of the Rock, the revered and iconic Muslim site from where the Prophet Mohammed began his ascent to heaven, gleams high above the Wailing (or Western) Wall, the equally revered and iconic Jewish site where the devout bury prayers in the cracks between stones and mourn the destruction of their ancient temple.
To the left is modern West Jerusalem, green with trees and parks, whose towering cranes indicate the development of another luxury hotel or smart shopping mall. To the right is parched and dusty East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city that is now dotted with Jewish settlements. Here and there you can glimpse sections of the bleak 8m-high concrete wall – slicing through Arab neighbourhoods, cutting roads down the middle, dividing neighbour from neighbour – which has become a symbol of the division and conflict that characterises Jerusalem.
Spread out before me is the city that will be my home for the next few years: the most divided city in the world, the epicentre of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a city claimed by both sides as their capital and their historic right. It is also the most awe-inspiring and beautiful city I have ever been to, central to the three great monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and where the centuries of history, sacredness and violent discord still weigh in the air.
Up here on the Promenade, a few weeks into my new life as the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, I try to untangle the medley of impressions that have crowded into my head. Making sense of this place won’t be easy – I know from previous visits that it’s contentious, confusing, exhilarating and exhausting; that just when you think you understand it a little better, something happens that makes you realise you understand it less than ever.
As I leave the Promenade I’m surprised to come across a “monument to tolerance” – a quality that does not seem to be in abundant supply in this city. The sculpture, depicting two halves of a broken column linked and shaded by an olive tree, is dedicated to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not for the first time, I feel a sense of unreality.
Just past the sculpture, a huge roadside hoarding advertises the new Jewish settlement of Nof Zion, built illegally on territory that Israel occupied and annexed in 1967. The smart apartments, largely complete though far from fully occupied, have sensational views across to the Old City. Pleasant landscaping marks out the settlement: newly planted saplings, decorative iron railings, a children’s playground.
As I continue down the hill, something curious happens. The pavement abruptly ends, the road becomes potholed, the street lighting sporadic, the rubbish uncollected. It’s like going from a first world country to a developing country in the space of a few metres and without any formal demarcation. Goodbye, planet Israel; welcome to Arab East Jerusalem.
That fundamental divide is the defining characteristic of this place. But, as I am soon discovering, Jerusalem is not just divided into two, but into multiple, complex layers.
In my first week, I get lost in my car trying to find a downtown cafe where I am to meet a man about – prosaically – my worldly goods, stuck on the dock in Ashdod. In impossibly narrow backstreets, where nervously and repeatedly I’m forced to reverse and perform multiple-point turns, I encounter visibly poor Jewish children whose parents yell and gesticulate admonitions, the precise details of which I can’t understand but whose universality is clear.
A few days later I meet a charming and sophisticated middle-aged Palestinian woman who shows me round her neighbourhood, dressed in white jeans and jewelled sandals, offering asides in flawless English on her latest divorce and recent trip to Paris.
A Palestinian woman walks with her child out of Herod’s Gate in the Old City. Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill
Impoverished Israelis and affluent Palestinians challenge stereotypical expectations, but they don’t mask the city’s central breach. While the nationalistic, political and religious divide seems as unbridgeable as ever, the geographical separation is blurring, to the detriment of the Palestinians.
They are bitter about what they describe as the “Judaisation” of East Jerusalem. Ever since the six day war in 1967, when Israel forcibly took control of the Arab sector, successive governments have pursued a policy of building settlements in the east, creating a Jewish ring around the city, cutting off Palestinians in the West Bank from Jerusalem and making an East Jerusalem capital an unrealisable dream.
Some of the settlements are huge. Ma’ale Adumim, home to almost 40,000 Israelis, is a mini-city in its own right. It feels like an enormous American gated community transported to the Middle East. Lavish municipal flowerbeds are tended and watered by Palestinian gardeners; there are 40 synagogues and seven high schools; huge areas of nearby land spreading towards the Palestinian city of Jericho are earmarked for expansion. Like most settlements, it’s built on a hill with commanding views and dominance over Palestinian villages in the valleys.
But some of the most recent settlements are tiny – for now. Rather than new towns complete with service infrastructure, they are the first toe-holds of what these fundamentalist settlers hope will grow into a permanent presence – and they are right in the heart of Jerusalem, as opposed to on its outlying hills.
In Sheikh Jarrah – a historic Palestinian neighbourhood where many of the spacious stone villas, draped with gorgeous bougainvillea, have been leased to foreign consulates and NGOs – a number of families have been evicted from modest homes assigned to them by the UN in 1948. Settler groups wanting to establish a presence there have brought legal challenges – through the Israeli courts, of course – to the ownership rights and turfed the families out.
Among a jumble of homes, I find a few proudly – and provocatively – flying Israeli flags. New paving stones have been laid outside the front door; wall-mounted cameras monitor passersby; security men sit in booths, refusing to answer questions about who pays their wages. These are now Jewish homes, but the occupants, glimpsed through the windows, are reluctant to engage in conversation about their presence in an Arab neighbourhood.
The evicted families, who spend their days on a battered sofa and cracked plastic chairs in the shade of a tree on Sheikh Jarrah street, have no such reticence. Pouring glasses of chilled water for their hot and thirsty visitors, their voluble bitterness at their sudden homelessness does not eclipse their charm and hospitality. These unwilling neighbours eye each other with mutual hostility and incomprehension.
A short distance away is the Old City, 800 metres square of packed winding alleys just on the eastern side of the Green Line, where young Palestinian men barrel their way through the crowds delivering goods on handcarts to shops outside which an older generation sits on stools sipping tiny porcelain cups of strong sludgy Arabic coffee or glasses of sweet mint tea.
Thirty-seven thousand people live in the Old City, making it one of the most densely populated places on earth. Thousands more come to work, worship and wonder. The sound of the muezzin – the Muslim call to prayer – mixes with church bells, chants and song. Greek orthodox clerics brush past Catholic nuns; Jews stride through the souks on their way to pray at the Western Wall; Muslims flock to the magnificent mosques at Haram al-Sharif in the south-eastern corner, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Here, too, Israeli flags are increasingly hung in the Muslim quarter as Jewish families take over Palestinian homes. The tension is often palpable, and the presence of young Israeli border police with rifles slung over their shoulders on almost every corner only adds to the uneasy mix.
It’s hard to see how Jerusalem can be unscrambled; how the Palestinians can ever regain a definable half of the city as the capital of any future state. That, of course, is Israel’s intention in building and encouraging settlements both big and small in the eastern sector; it claims Jerusalem as its “indivisible and eternal capital” and is creating facts on the ground to make its claim a reality. Forty-five per cent of the population of the eastern half of the city is now Jewish, I’m told by the Jerusalem Institute.
But the city is changing in other ways, too. In a separate dimension from the Arab-Israeli, Muslim-Jew divide is an increasing gulf between Jew and Jew – the religious and the secular. The ultra-orthodox – or Haredim – community is growing, both absolutely and in proportion to secular Jews, many of whom are packing up and heading off to the more relaxed and liberal coastal towns and cities. The ultra-orthodox made up about 10% of Jerusalem’s population in the 1960s; now they are around a third.
A political scientist from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University told me that the secular-religious divide was the new “culture war”. The ultra-orthodox were seen as “parasites”, he said, for their refusal to do paid work, devoting themselves to biblical study. These people have six, seven, eight children, another Israeli analyst told me. They have changed the atmosphere in Jerusalem, he went on; people are afraid they are taking over. I was taken aback at the enmity with which both men spoke.
Traditionally the ultra-orthodox have been based around Mea Shearim, an area of the city centre redolent of pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. Whole families walk together beneath washing hanging from the balconies of dilapidated buildings: women with hair covered by scarves or wigs, wearing thick dark stockings despite the June heat; men in their monotone ultra-orthodox uniform; children dressed as miniature versions of their parents clinging to adult hands or hanging on to a younger sibling’s pushchair.
Anyone foolish enough to drive through there on Shabat – the Jewish Sabbath – will be at best vigorously berated; more likely their car will be pelted. Pasted on the stone walls are countless religious tracts. A huge billboard in English reads: “To women and girls. We beg you with all our hearts: Please do not pass through our neighbourhood in immodest clothes.” Specific instructions follow regarding length of sleeves and tight-fitted garments. Non-Jews and secular Jews are not made to feel welcome. In recent months there have been regular evening disturbances involving young men setting fire to rubbish bins and stoning police officers in protest at infringements of religious observance.
But the influence of ultra-orthodox spreads beyond Mea Shearim. The area of west Jerusalem in which I live has a prosperous main street lined with cafes and eclectic small shops. The previous tenant of my apartment told me that when he moved in four years ago, Shabat was barely different to any other day of the week. Now the place is eerily deserted from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday: shops are shuttered, cafes closed, relatively few cars appear on the normally clogged road. Secular businesses have apparently succumbed to pressure from the religious lobby.
The lighter traffic on Shabat is, however, a boon for me: it gives me the chance to try to find my way round this city without being tailgated, honked at and shouted at by fellow motorists. Jerusalem’s baffling one-way systems, indecipherable road markings and minuscule street signs are currently exacerbated by a massive project to build a light railway through the city. Once complete – allegedly by next year, though nobody here believes that for a moment – it should relieve the burden of traffic thundering past fragile historic sites. But this, too, has a political dimension. The city authorities say the railway will be open to all, except when “security considerations” require the stations in Arab parts of the city to be closed. We shall have to wait to see just how often that happens.
At least the stop-start nature of the traffic gives me the opportunity to stare in wonder at the sights and views; from the beautiful golden stone of the Old City ramparts to the ugly dull grey concrete of the imposing separation wall. At some point, I assume, all this will become the routine backdrop to my life, but I hope I never take Jerusalem’s extraordinariness for granted.
And the people? Each side is passionate about their unassailable right to the land. Each side has suffered terrible injustices and inhumanity over their history. Each side is exhausted by conflict. And each side wants to welcome me to their country. “Baruch haba, shalom,” say the Israelis. “Marhaban, salam,” say the Palestinians. And, they all add: “Good luck.”
