For a joint Jewish-Arab intifada in the Holy City
For a joint Jewish-Arab intifada in the Holy City
The
conflict aside, Israel’s eternal unified capital is a dysfunctional mess.
Just before our plane took off
Wednesday afternoon on my journey back to Jerusalem, the news came of another
hit-and-run attack in the city, this one killing a police officer and wounding
13 other people. Upon our landing, the first report arrived of a similar attack
on the Hebron-Jerusalem road (though the military since have changed their
assessment and now believe it was an accident). I was mildly surprised when the
driver of the Nesher taxi-bus decided to take the 443 road through the West
Bank instead of Highway 1. But the incessant night-time roadworks were a
greater deterrence.
We reached
the capital speedily but then began the arduous criss-crossing of Jerusalem to
deposit 12 passengers at eight different destinations throughout the city. The
first off was a Palestinian resident from Shoafat. He didn’t even expect to be
brought home but made do with being dropped at a junction on the Ramot road,
where his brother picked him up. Then we crossed back over the Green Line to
deposit ultra-Orthodox passengers, navigating through teeming alleyways in the
Haredi neighborhoods, still clogged at 11 P.M.
We finally
managed to extricate ourselves but got stuck again in Mahane Yehuda market,
dropping a new American immigrant computer engineer at his Nahlaot apartment
and wending our way uphill to deliver a Jewish tourist from France at a hotel
in the center. From there it was back east to bring a couple of Dutch
backpackers to their Old City hostel. If you hadn’t been listening to the news,
you could actually believe that all was well in a united Jerusalem.
Our
nocturnal meanderings ended near midnight and took over three times as long as
the journey from Ben-Gurion Airport to the city limits. We hadn’t been stopped
at any roadblocks; besides a slightly higher presence than usual of police
vehicles on the roads, we hadn’t seen any sign of the current unrest making the
headlines.
Traffic the
least of city's problems
Israel’s
eternal unified capital is a dysfunctional mess and its nightmarish lack of a
coherent traffic system is the least of its problems. One thing which was
barely mentioned in recent weeks with the entrance of right-wing Jewish
residents to apartments in Silwan and the plans to build hundreds of new homes
in neighborhoods such as Ramat Shlomo and Pisgat Zeev, across the Green Line,
is that nearly all the new building projects taking place in the city are now
somehow political, or simply out of reach for the great majority of
Jerusalemites, even those of above-average income. That is the case in Jewish
neighborhoods and even more so in the Palestinian ones.
With the
exception of a couple of high-tech millionaires, I don’t know one person in
Jerusalem under the age of 40 who has been capable of buying his or her own
apartment without an inheritance or significant help from their family. Nearly
all the new building west of the Green Line is for wealthy foreign Jews, such
as the Holyland complex, which resulted in prison sentences for two
bribe-taking former mayors and other city officials.
Since the
Safdie Plan, which was to add 20,000 new homes to the west was brought down in
2007 by an unholy alliance of (mainly out-of-town) environmentalists and
ultra-Orthodox politicians – who didn’t like it because it was aimed at the
general public – there has been no large-scale planning for the future.
Israel’s
biggest city is falling apart at the seams. Its education system is divided
between a host of religious and ideological groups squabbling over scarce
resources and inhabitable buildings. There are few new employment prospects
beyond the government departments and Hebrew University, which are both cutting
back. I don’t have to continue reminding readers that as bad things are on the
Jewish west side, they are at least twice as bad in the Palestinian east.
The day
after
Here’s a
prediction: The unrest around the Temple Mount will soon die down and the
vehicular terror will also peter out. The enclaves of Jerusalem will be left
with their sorrows.
The tiresome
and irrelevant argument over whether what we are seeing now in Jerusalem is a
third intifada has become a distracting and harmful cliché. No one who actually
lived in the city through the wave of suicide bombings in 2000-2004 can call
this an intifada with a straight face. But neither are the comparisons to the
first intifada valid.
Both
Palestinian intifadas matched the Arab meaning of the term – shaking off. They
shook the consciousness of Israelis. The first Intifada in 1987 was the
Palestinians’ way of letting Israelis know that 20 years after the Six-Day War,
they weren’t okay with the occupation, and through wide-scale riots in the West
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, it served to redraw the Green Line,
which many Israelis had begun to forget even existed, and create a clear
distinction between the territories. The first intifada dissipated due to
Palestinian fatigue, then the initial excitement of the Oslo process gave some
hope that change may be on the way.
The second
and much more murderous Intifada was an attempt to prove to Israelis that they
were not safe even in their coffee shops and shopping malls within the Green
Line. It failed because concerted military and intelligence operations and the
resilience of the Israeli middle class, which continued life nearly as normal,
proved to the Palestinians that they were paying an intolerable price for no
real gain.
The third
intifada
The third
intifada, if it ever arrives, will be a Palestinian campaign to prove to
Israelis that the status quo is ultimately untenable, and that they will never
have anything amounting to normal lives until the occupation ends. So far
nothing the Palestinians are doing is coming near to this, and what is
currently happening in Jerusalem is nowhere near that.
Jerusalem
does need an intifada however. It needs the young generation of secular and
modern Orthodox and Haredi and Palestinian communities to get together and
demand that both sides stop treating the city as a hostage to political
fortune. It needs an intifada of shared radical protests for affordable
housing, decent schools and employment.
Neither side
of the conflict proposes viable solutions – not Nir Barkat’s city hall or the
government ministers, none of whom (with the exception of Benjamin Netanyahu,
who spends his weekends in Caesarea) live in the capital. With all their talk
of Jerusalem’s indivisibility, none have any real plan of how nearly a million
people can have functioning lives here. Neither does the Palestinian Authority,
with its demand for its own capital in Jerusalem, have its own plan for how
that will work out. Do they actually believe the Palestinian capital will
flourish cut off from its other half?
No political
will
A long-term
solution between Israel and the Palestinians will have to find a way of sharing
Jerusalem, but there is no political will right now to find one, and you have
to be naive to believe one will be found before the children in today’s crowded
city schools will be leaving the city for lack of adequate housing and jobs.
Meanwhile, the Israeli side continues to act as if a third of the population
doesn’t exist, and the Palestinians refuse to interact with an Israeli City
Hall on the rare occasions it acknowledges their existence.
Jerusalem
can’t wait. The only hope for the city is for its residents to get together,
ignore their politicians and begin to work on a joint future. The politicians
on all sides have failed our city. Maybe one day they will get around to
marking borders and solving sovereignty issues; meanwhile, we have to live
here.
When we
finally arrived on Wednesday night in southern Jerusalem, down the hill and
across the Green Line in Abu Tor there were sounds of firecrackers and perhaps
also tear-gas grenades. From the promenade came sounds of a party with Mexican
music. The driver told me he was worried that the new high-speed rail to
Jerusalem, cutting travel time from Ben-Gurion to 20 minutes, would push
Jerusalem’s oldest taxi company out of business after 85 years.
The $2
billion rail-link and upgraded highway, with their new tunnels and interchanges
and underground stations, are the only major infrastructure projects involving
Jerusalem. It’s no coincidence they are happening on the west side, towards Tel
Aviv. As things seem now, they will mainly serve those who can escape to get
out even faster.
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