Campaign Kept Under Wraps

On Saladin Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in Palestinian-dominated East Jerusalem, an odd election ritual takes place almost every night.

Moving swiftly and stealthily, young Palestinian men affix campaign posters to concrete walls and the metal awnings of closed shops. And the next morning, Israeli police tear them down.

The upcoming Palestinian parliamentary election, scheduled to take place Jan. 25, has become entwined in one of the oldest and bitterest disputes between Israel and the Palestinians: sovereignty over Jerusalem, the holy city both sides believe is their rightful capital. And both sides believe that political activity -- campaigning and voting alike -- constitutes a powerful symbolic claim to its narrow streets and winding alleyways.

With the vote only days away, the city’s traditionally Arab sector has almost none of the trappings of what feels in the West Bank and Gaza Strip like a national campaign in full swing.

In East Jerusalem, home to an estimated 200,000 Palestinians, there are no noisy parades, no sign-waving rallies, no open-air speechifying. Candidates must meet with voters in private homes or closed halls. Their constituents, meanwhile, wonder how and even whether they will be allowed to cast their ballots.

Under mounting U.S. pressure, Israeli authorities are expected in coming days to relax the tight restrictions on campaigning in East Jerusalem, and formally lift threats that Palestinians living in the city will not be allowed to vote there.

But candidates and voters alike say they have already seen a significant stifling of what ought to be a spirited and freewheeling campaign for the first legislative elections in a decade -- and the first parliamentary vote to not take place under the auspices of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died 14 months ago.

Thirty-nine Jerusalem-based candidates are seeking seats in the 132-member parliament, and most report interference by Israeli authorities.

“I was surrounded by police before I could even open my mouth and say two words,” Nasser Qous said of his attempt to talk to people on the first day of campaigning. The bulky former bodyguard for Palestinian VIPs is running as an independent, although affiliated with the ruling Fatah faction.

On Jan. 3, Qous said, he tried to put up posters and talk to onlookers milling near the Damascus Gate, the crenelated archway that divides East Jerusalem’s main commercial area from the walled Old City.

“They fined me 450 shekels [about $100] for each poster I was carrying -- three of them,” he said. “And told me that next time, the fine would be bigger.” Other candidates report middle-of-the-night visits by agents of the Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security service, and arrests of relatives suspected of trying to engage in campaign activities on their behalf.

“They asked me: ‘Do you want to go back to jail? Didn’t you have enough of that?’ ” said Hani Issawi, an independent candidate who is affiliated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, considered a terrorist group by Israel. He spent a decade in Israeli prison in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Israel’s public security minister, Gideon Ezra, said last week that candidates are being allowed to campaign as long as they do not belong to militant groups. But he acknowledged that candidates had to submit requests in advance to Jerusalem police if they wanted to make a campaign appearance.

Candidates and police representatives are to meet Monday to discuss guidelines for assembly within the city and specific locations where campaign posters can be hung.

Among parliamentary candidates, there is a sense that their campaigns amount to a collective challenge to Israel’s grip on the eastern sector of the city, which Israel wrested from Jordanian control in the 1967 Middle East War.

“I feel that just by running, I am confronting this occupation,” said Fadwa Khader, a Palestinian Christian woman who is on the ticket of the small People’s Party. “I feel it’s a way of saying, ‘Here we are, and this is our city.’ ”

Conservative Israelis are infuriated by such talk.

“Allowing Palestinians to vote in East Jerusalem only eats away at our position in future negotiations on Jerusalem,” said Gideon Saar, a lawmaker with the rightist Likud Party. “We should let them vote, yes, but just not in Israel’s sovereign territory.”

Other Israeli politicians say the vote in East Jerusalem reflects the hard reality that the two sides will have to find some way to share the city, probably by Israel relinquishing its claim to areas solidly populated by Palestinians.

“At the end of the day, Israel will have to make a tough decision on how many Palestinian citizens Israel will be prepared to absorb,” said Amir Peretz, head of the left-leaning Labor Party. “I think our stand should be that we absorb as few as possible, so we ensure that Jerusalem remains a city with a Jewish character.”

Palestinians have for decades lived in a kind of legal limbo in East Jerusalem. They have special Israeli-issued blue identity cards that give them far greater freedom of movement than their compatriots in the West Bank, together with benefits such as access, at least in theory, to the Israeli national health insurance network.

“It seems they are the only people in the world who live in two countries: They are both Israelis and Palestinians,” Israeli security analyst Guy Bechor wrote in a commentary for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “It is not the residents of East Jerusalem who are responsible for this anomaly, but Israel, which has allowed such an odd situation to exist.”

The issue of East Jerusalem and the elections set off a contretemps last week within Israel’s caretaker government headed by Ehud Olmert, the deputy prime minister who took the reins of power after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke.

By and large, political rivals within the government sought to present a united front while Sharon lay unconscious and in critical condition after his Jan. 4 cerebral hemorrhage. But there was open discord last week over the question of voting in East Jerusalem.

Silvan Shalom, expected to step down as foreign minister in the coming week, said Sharon had decided before he was stricken that the Palestinians of East Jerusalem would be allowed to vote, but only in outlying villages. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz announced the same day that East Jerusalem Palestinians would be allowed to cast ballots at post offices within the city limits.

Adding fuel to the debate is the fact that four of the Jerusalem candidates are affiliated with the militant group Hamas, which is fielding candidates on a slate called Change and Reform. Hamas is expected to draw a substantial share of the parliamentary vote, particularly on its home turf of Gaza but in much of the West Bank as well.

Israel sporadically threatened for months to block the elections altogether if Hamas participated, but backed down in the face of intense international pressure. Hamas candidates in Jerusalem said they were still unsure whether they would appear on the ballot, however.

One of the Jerusalem-based Hamas candidates is in jail, and the other three say they could be behind bars by the time election day rolls around.

“We know we are subject to arrest -- the Israelis have told us, ‘To us you are not politicians, but terrorists,’ ” said Hamas candidate Mohammed Toutah, a professor of business administration at Jerusalem’s Al Quds University.

The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are traditionally more moderate in their political views than those living in the West Bank, and some Israeli observers warned that any steps to exclude them from the political process would only serve to strengthen Hamas.

“Israel needs to act in a smart and responsible way when it comes to Jerusalem,” said lawmaker Yitzhak Herzog of the Labor Party. “We need to do all we can to strengthen moderate movements in the Palestinian Authority.”

Toutah, the Hamas candidate, said he had made appearances only at rallies in Palestinian villages that abut Jerusalem, and was careful not to campaign within the city limits.

“And what do we talk about, always?” he said. “We tell the people we will defend Jerusalem, that we will go together to Jerusalem. We tell them it is ours.”