End Palestinian demolitions in Jerusalem, UN tells Israel
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- Written by Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
- Published: 01 May 2009 01 May 2009
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End Palestinian demolitions in Jerusalem, UN tells Israel
Report increases pressure over displaced families but mayor says planning policy even-handed
* Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 May 2009 11.25 BST
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/01/israel-palestinian-jerusalem-demolitions
The United Nations has called on Israel to end its programme of demolishing homes in east Jerusalem and tackle a mounting housing crisis for Palestinians in the city.
Dozens of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem are demolished each year because they do not have planning permits. Critics say the demolitions are part of an effort to extend Israeli control as Jewish settlements continue to expand. The 21-page report from the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs is the latest round in an intensifying campaign on the issue.
Although Israel's mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, has defended the planning policy as even-handed, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in March described demolitions as "unhelpful". An internal report for EU diplomats, released earlier and obtained by the Guardian, described them as illegal under international law and said they "fuel bitterness and extremism". Israel occupied east Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later unilaterally annexed it, a move not recognised by the international community.
The UN said that of the 70.5 sq km of east Jerusalem and the West Bank annexed by Israel, only 13% was zoned for Palestinian construction and this was mostly already built up. At the same time 35% had been expropriated for Israeli settlements, even though all settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.
As a result Palestinians in east Jerusalem had found it increasingly difficult to obtain planning permits and many had built without them, risking fines and eventual demolition, the UN said. As many as 28% of all Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem were built in violation of Israeli planning rules.
"Throughout its occupation, Israel has significantly restricted Palestinian development in east Jerusalem," the UN report said. It said 673 Palestinian structures had been demolished in the east between 2000 and 2008. Last year alone 90 structures were demolished, leaving 400 Palestinians displaced, the highest number of demolitions for four years. Similar demolitions are carried out regularly by the Israeli military across the West Bank.
The UN said it was particularly concerned about areas facing mass demolition, including Bustan in Silwan, just south of the old city, where the threatened destruction of 90 houses would lead to the displacement of 1,000 Palestinians.
Families who lose their homes are faced with the choice of moving into crowded apartments with relatives or renting new homes. They face "significant hardships", including having their property destroyed and struggling with debts from fines and legal fees, the UN said.
A 2007 survey, quoted in the UN report, found that more than half of the displaced families took at least two years to find a new permanent home and often moved several times in the process. Children missed out on school and suffered emotional and behavioural problems for months, with poor academic records over the longer term.
The authorities in Jerusalem challenged the UN report and denied "the accusations and numbers throughout". Israel's Jerusalem municipality accepted there was a "planning crisis" but said it was "not just in eastern Jerusalem but throughout all of Jerusalem that affects Jews, Christians and Muslims alike". It said the mayor would present a new plan for the city.
"Recent events indicate that the Jerusalem municipality will maintain, and possibly accelerate, its policy on house demolition," the UN report said. "Israel should immediately freeze all pending demolition orders and undertake planning that will address the Palestinian housing crisis in east Jerusalem."
Last week, Barkat, who won election five months ago, rejected international criticism of demolitions and planning policy as "misinformation" and "Palestinian spin. There is no politics. It's just maintaining law and order in the city," he said. "The world is basing its evidence on the wrong facts.The world has to learn and I am sure people will change their minds."
Barkat said he wanted to improve the life of all the city's residents, Jewish and Arab, but that he was committed to maintaining a Jewish majority. Jews make up around two-thirds of the city's population.
The UN said nearly a third of east Jerusalem remained unplanned, meaning there could be no construction. Even in planned areas there were problems, including the number of small privately held plots, poor infrastructure and few resources.
Although the number of permit applications more than doubled between 2003 and 2007, the number of permits grants remained relatively flat, the UN said. There was a gap between housing needs and permitted construction of 1,100 housing units a year. "Due to the lack of proper urban planning, the under-investment in public infrastructure and the inequitable allocation of budgetary resources, east Jerusalem is overcrowded and the public services do not meet the needs of the Palestinian population," the report said.
Sour visit: "Increasing indications are that Obama will act to see implementation of a Pal. State"
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- Written by Khaled Amayreh Khaled Amayreh
- Published: 30 April 2009 30 April 2009
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Khaled Amayreh
Increasing indications are that Obama will act to see the implementation of a Palestinian state, regardless of the prevarications of Tel Aviv, writes Khaled Amayreh in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem
In his latest visit to Palestine-Israel last week, US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell repeatedly urged the right- wing Israeli government to endorse the two-state solution with the Palestinians, but apparently to no avail. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Mitchell that Israel didn't wish to "rule over another people", and that Israel was still interested in reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. However, the obvious prevarication didn't impress the former US senator who told his hosts resolutely that the Obama administration was committed to the creation of a Palestinian state on territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
Mitchell reportedly went as far as telling his Israeli interlocutors that the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem was a strategic American interest. Unaccustomed to hearing American officials say "No" or even a "half yes" to Israel, Israeli leaders are now at loss as to how to deal with the "crisis" in Washington. Indeed, a fleeting look at the mostly right- wing Israeli media would give the impression that the ultimate threat to Israel's national security just came from across the Atlantic rather from Israel's neighbours.
Indeed, the manifestly rude reception Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman gave Mitchell during their meeting in West Jerusalem last week, which was incompatible with diplomatic tradition, may be interpreted as a defensive reflex by a government -- and a country -- that always took the US for granted and expected successive American administrations to be at Israel's beck and call. Lieberman, arrogantly placing his hands in his pockets, refused to walk with or shake hands with the American envoy following their meeting. The former Moldovan immigrant told Mitchell that "the Americans have their view points and we have ours, and that Israel is a democratic state."
World Bank finds Israel’s water policy hard to swallow
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- Written by Stephen Glain Stephen Glain
- Published: 29 April 2009 29 April 2009
- Hits: 4050 4050
As a former, and by many accounts successful, finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu presumably knows his way around economics. So when the Israeli prime minister says he will work to provide the Palestinians with economic, if not political, independence, might that not suggest his hard-line government understands that a prosperous Palestine would be an important first step towards a more stable Middle East?
Not according to the World Bank, which last week issued the latest in a series of reports about how the Israeli government is systematically pre-empting the evolution of a viable Palestinian economy. The 154-page “Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Sector Development” is written with a blandness suited to the banality of this particular Israeli outrage. The report offers a detailed look at how Israel deprives the West Bank and Gaza of the most basic commodity for human survival, a deficit that consumes a growing share of Palestinian GDP.
The report is another indictment, as if one were needed, of the now-defunct Oslo Accords. Just as Oslo lacked adequate mechanisms to enforce Israeli pledges to sharply reduce its occupation of Palestinian land, so too has Israel been allowed to abrogate its commitment to revise interim agreements relating to water systems in the Arab territories it controls.
Instead, according to the World Bank report, Israel has aggrandised a growing share of available water supplies while intensifying Palestinian reliance on Mekorot, the Jewish state’s national water carrier. The report states that Israel, without the approval of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) – a legacy of the Oslo process – draws more than 50 per cent from the aquifers that support both the West Bank and Israel beyond what it is authorised under the accords. Needless to say, Palestinian protests of such violations are routinely ignored, according to the report.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as much about resources as it is about land. It is no coincidence, for example, that West Bank settlements are located on top or near groundwater wells, a strategy that dates back to the earliest days of the settler movement. But the situation has worsened over the past decade, when Israel began restricting mobility in the West Bank and Gaza following its “withdrawal” from certain Palestinian areas under the terms of Oslo. Palestinians must now pay an estimated 8 per cent of their household budgets for adequate water supplies, about double the globally accepted standard. That is beyond the capacity of many Palestinian families, and revenues have fallen precipitously in the parts of the West Bank under Palestinian administration.
Rural villagers who are unconnected to the water grid must allocate up to 20 per cent of their household income for tanker-born drinkable water, an increasingly expensive enterprise due to the proliferation of Israel-controlled checkpoints, the massive, serpentine security wall and other barriers to mobility throughout the West Bank. The World Bank estimates the added expense of transporting water by tanker amounts to about 1 per cent of the Palestinian GDP. In Gaza, water availability has reached “crisis levels”, while utility revenues have collapsed and tax collections rates are down 20 per cent.
Water quality is deteriorating and there is growing evidence of rising water-related diseases. The public health costs of waterborne illness for children below the age of five alone is 0.4 per cent of GDP, the report estimates. The environmental impact, meanwhile, is devastating. Sanitation and sewage systems have been badly neglected due to unstable security conditions and Israeli restrictions on movement. Sewage is returned untreated into lagoons, wadis and the sea or seeps into the soil where it ultimately contaminates aquifers. In rural areas, septic tanks are not properly emptied, while Israel’s settler population routinely dumps raw sewage on to Palestinian soil.
Just as Israel controls the borders, roads, air and sea ports, airspace and export revenue on which the Palestinian economy vitally depends, so too does it control Palestinian water resources via Mekorot, an unhealthy reliance intensified by Israeli over-extraction of available supplies. Mekorot’s dominant role in water distribution, the report states, “makes [the West Bank and Gaza] vulnerable to Israeli decisions and interventions, and may increase commercial risks and costs”.
The report concludes with a raft of proposals that might ameliorate the crisis, all of which require Israeli co-operation and consent. It suggests, for example, the wholesale reform of the JWC, which is strongly biased in Israel’s favour due to its disproportionate levels of power and capacity. Only half of the US$121 million (Dh444.4m) worth of Palestinian-proposed projects have been approved since 2001, while all but one mooted by Israel have been granted. Israel, the report lays out, routinely decides unilaterally how regional water sources will or will not be developed.
An economy without access to clean water supplies is by definition unsustainable. Mr Netanyahu either fails to understand this or his commitment to Palestinian economic independence is nothing more than political palaver. Either way, Palestine’s man-made water crisis should be at the top of the agenda when the Israeli leader meets his US counterpart early next month.
No more make-believe in the Middle East
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- Written by Norman H. Olsen Norman H. Olsen
- Published: 29 April 2009 29 April 2009
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Bibi's policies may be misguided, but at least he doesn't pretend to be a peacemaker. Such intellectual honesty could prove salutary.
Cherryfield, Maine - Let's not be so hard on Bibi.
The squealing on the Israeli and American left is making Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu out to be a minority radical, a warmonger among the majority progressives who want a just peace with the Palestinians.
In reality, the bad news – and the good – is that Mr. Netanyahu doesn't pretend to be a peacemaker.
Let's look at the record.
Settlement construction, including the massive developments encircling Jerusalem, has continued for four decades. All of Bibi's predecessors – even the "doves" – never once slowed settlement construction, despite their repeated assurances. Throughout, despite intensive US monitoring and reporting on growth, the US has always pretended to believe them.
In the early 1990s, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the US that settlement sites such as Har Homa were merely in the planning stages. When site work began, he claimed that it was only preparatory work with no approval for construction. When ministry approvals for construction were given, he and his successors claimed that they would prevent construction. Today Har Homa stands as one of the many monuments to the success of deny, deny, deny.
The latest and final major link in the chain of Jerusalem-encircling settlements, known as E1, has followed exactly the same progression. E1 is important, because if it is allowed to become a town, it will effectively split the West Bank in two, ending hopes for a two-state solution. US observers, myself included, reported during the past six years the clear evidence of site preparation, only to be told by the highest levels of the Israeli government that roadbeds, drainage systems, terracing, and other clearly observable major works were "erosion control." Again, the US pretended to believe the official spin.
Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert told the US repeatedly that the separation barrier would not be used for political purposes, and that its route through the West Bank, rather than along the internationally accepted "Green Line," was to provide security "setback" for towns on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Again, the US pretended to believe them.
Today, the tens of thousands of acres of West Bank land between the Green Line and the separation barrier are the fastest-growing areas for settlement construction, all built right up against the barrier, with no security setback, ensuring Israeli facts on the ground.
The Obama-Netanyahu Showdown
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- Written by Robert Dreyfuss Robert Dreyfuss
- Published: 28 April 2009 28 April 2009
- Hits: 4265 4265
deal with Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who'll be making his
first visit to the United States as Israel's new leader in mid-May.
The Obama-Netanyahu meeting promises to be a showdown.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veteran strategist and hardliner -- who was
Jimmy Carter's national security adviser -- told a conference
yesterday that in the history of US peacemaking in the Middle East,
the United States has never once spelled out its own vision for what a
two-state solution would look like. That, said Brzezinski, is exactly
what President Obama needs to do. And fast.
Brzezinski was speaking at a conference on US-Saudi relations
sponsored by the New America Foundation and Saudi Arabia's Committee
on International Trade. Brzezinski, who advised Obama early in the
presidential campaign, was exiled from Obamaland after his
less-than-devout support for Israel made him a liability.
"The United States has to spell out the minimum parameters of peace,"
said Zbig. Perhaps in deference to the conference's Saudi sponsors,
Brzezinski said that there is an "urgent need for a US-Saudi alliance
for peace in the Middle East." Other speakers on a star-studded
opening panel were Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from
Nebraska and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who served for decades as the
head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service.
Turki, who also served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United
States, warned Obama to preempt Netanyahu, who intends to tell the
president that there can't be progress in the Israel-Palestine
conflict until the United States solves the problem of Iran's pursuit
of nuclear weapons to Israel's satisfaction. Obama, said Turki, should
tell the Israeli leader: "Mr. Netanyahu, you have to listen to me
first." Rita Hauser, the veteran conservative strategist on the panel,
agreed: "Netanyahu has to learn very quickly that the president means
business."
Hauser, long associated with the RAND Corporation and other
thinktanks, also said bluntly that the United States is going to have
to deal with Hamas, which she called a "central element" of
Palestinian politics. "Hamas will control Gaza," she said. She urged
the administration to take steps to encourage the formation of a
Palestinian unity government, involving Hamas and Fatah, the central
pillar of the old Palestine Liberation Organization.
Obama, said Hauser, will find it politically difficult to talk to
Hamas. (Translated: She means that the Israel lobby and its friends in
Congress would go ballistic.) So she recommends that Washington
encourage the Europeans in their dialogue with Hamas and allow Saudi
Arabia to help broker a deal. (Egypt is already trying to swing a
Fatah-Hamas deal.) The current chaos in Palestinian circles benefits
Israel, she said, and she accused former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon of deliberately splintering the Palestinians by withdrawing
from Gaza, an action that allowed Gaza to fall to Hamas.
A Hamas-Fatah accord is an important, even crucial, first step in
making any progress toward an Israel-Palestine two-state solution,
which Obama says he supports strongly -- and which Netanyahu opposes.
Getting it done won't be easy, however. At the conference, Turki
pointed out that "the popularity of Hamas skyrocketed" after the
December-January invasion of Gaza by Israel. "In the eyes of the
Palestinians,
might be a lot harder to convince Hamas to make concessions.
But both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, of course, are suspicious of Hamas,
not only because of its radicalism but because of its ties to Iran.
According to the Egyptians, who are sponsoring talks in Cairo between
the two Palestinian factions, Iran is pressing Hamas to resist a deal.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Abdel Monem Said Ali of
Egypt's premier thinktank said:
After the war [in Gaza] ended, Egypt resumed its efforts to reach
a long-term cease-fire. Iran pressured the Hamas leadership to resist.
Cairo's ongoing effort to build a Palestinian unity government, by
bringing together Fatah and Hamas, has also been undermined by intense
Iranian pressure on Hamas.
Obama needs to tell Netanyahu, in public or privately, that he
supports a Hamas-Fatah accord and that the United States will deal
with a Palestinian unity government. He needs to explain to Netanyahu
that he won't be diverted by Israel's alarmist cries about Iran,
instead maintaining the focus on the two-state solution. And, as
Brzezinksi says, Obama needs to outline his vision for a deal. The
world knows what it means: the removal of Israel's illegal settlements
in the West Bank, the withdrawal of Israel to its '67 borders, the
partition of Jerusalem in some fashion to allow the Palestinians to
have their capital in East Jerusalem, and an equitable deal over the
Palestinians right-to-return to the former Palestine, involving a
hefty financial compensation to those who were forced to flee their
homes in 1948 and 1967. The world knows it. Now, Obama has to say it.