Militants Get Preference on Move to Arab Areas : Israel: By offering low rent to nationalists, officials seek one-way integration in Jerusalem suburb.

Last summer, before moving into half a dozen houses in the Jerusalem Arab suburb of Silwan, the militant nationalist El Ad organization signed a rental agreement with a government agency that had taken charge of the buildings from their Palestinian owners.

The rental fee--$12 a month--was bargain basement even for Silwan, a poor community that sits in the shadow of the Old City walls.

Although police originally objected to the occupation, saying it would stir community resentment, rental agreements like the $12 deal are being produced by the government to defend the legality of the takeovers.

The technical issue of who has the right to live in the homes is being fought in Israeli courts.

But the message of the government action is clear: preferential treatment is being given to militant nationalists to move into largely Arab neighborhoods with the intent of forcing a one-way integration of Arab communities. Most, like Silwan, have been inflamed with anti-Israeli passions during the four-year Palestinian uprising.

In effect, the persistent battle over land that characterizes life in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip has spread to Jerusalem.

The Housing Ministry, headed by Ariel Sharon, a chief architect of the West Bank and Gaza settlement program, is laying the groundwork to obliterate the bounds of Arab communities in Jerusalem while segregated Jewish neighborhoods remain intact.

In a written statement to a challenge in the Supreme Court, Sharon stated flatly, “It is the policy of the government of Israel to encourage Jews to live in Jerusalem. . . . My ministry has viewed and continues to view favorably the activity of El Ad. El Ad has enjoyed cooperation according to government policy.”

Mention of Jerusalem Arabs, who even if they have refused Israeli citizenship are supposed to enjoy equal rights, is missing from Sharon’s landscape. The eastern half of the city was won by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War and annexed afterward.

Evidence of the campaign in Jerusalem has been building for months. The government has handed over property in Arab enclaves of Sheik Jarrah to nationalist yeshivas whose sole purpose appears to be to provide tenants.

In the Old City, property along streets in the Muslim quarter has been passed to Ateret Hacohanim, a group committed to putting the entire walled area in Jewish hands. Ateret Hacohanim gained notoriety during the week before Easter, 1990, by moving into a property in the Christian Quarter owned by the Greek Orthodox Church.

The government provided the money to buy a lease from a tenant of the Greek Orthodox property. While a court has been trying to decide whether the rental is valid or was executed without church officials’ knowledge, the occupiers have been permitted to stay in control of the building.

Silwan burst into prominence because of the style and timing of the takeovers. The settlers moved in during the dead of night, clambering into yards and terraces looking for houses they wanted to occupy. If the buildings were inhabited, they evicted the residents at gunpoint. The raids took place just days before Secretary of State James A. Baker III was scheduled to arrive in Israel to make final arrangements for Middle East peace talks.

The establishment of settlements on the eve of previous visits by Baker created friction with the Bush Administration, which says the program undermines peace efforts. At the peace talks, Israeli delegates have insisted that the question of Jerusalem’s future, the east half of which is claimed by the Palestinians, must be decided later.

On the ground, Sharon is pushing it as a priority.

By extending his preoccupation about land to Jerusalem, Sharon has raised other touchy issues.

Traditionally, Israeli expansion into the city’s eastern half was done through construction around--not inside--its borders. Presumably these suburbs did nothing to restrict Arab life in the city or to upset the customary separation among ethnic groups in Jerusalem.

Critics of the move into Silwan, including longtime mayor Teddy Kollek, have warned that the already tattered fabric of unity in the city is being destroyed. Kollek often points out that while it may not be illegal for him, as a Jew, to move into a strictly observant Jewish neighborhood, it would be unwelcome. The mayor, now 80, has consistently defended the separation of ethnic and religious neighborhoods but has been unable to deter Sharon.

“Teddy has stood for an open city, one in which the integrity of different neighborhoods is respected,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University. “The vision of the city developed since 1967 is being violated.”

On Friday, members of the leftist Israeli Peace Now movement and Palestinian activists led a march of several hundred to protest the Silwan takeovers. “It is an expression of a lot of sentiment inside Jerusalem that this kind of provocation by the government and by the settlers is simply not acceptable,” said Galia Golan, a Peace Now member and a university professor.

At issue in the settler move into Silwan is the place of non-Jewish residents in the city’s future. Sharon has been treating the Jerusalem Arabs, who number about 140,000, much in the same way that he treats the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza--purely as guests on the land. The Jewish population of the city exceeds 350,000.

Newspaper reports speak of 200 properties in East Jerusalem that are in government control, primarily through an official agency that is “custodian” for houses whose owners were abroad at the time of the 1967 war or who fled and were not permitted to return.

As trustee, the government is supposed to handle the properties as if it had the owners’ interests at heart, critics of the current settlement program say. That is why the cheap rents in Silwan have raised eyebrows.

Also, once it was decided to evict the current residents, replacements were limited to El Ad--an acronym for “To the City of David,” the site of an ancient part of Jerusalem that lies beneath Silwan. The group claims that, as the original site of King David’s town, “it belongs to Jews alone.”

Other properties have reportedly been purchased, although some sales are being contested and at least one piece of property in Silwan, belonging to a Jewish owner who fled violence during the 1930s, was abandoned.

One mystery about the program is just where the money is coming from to purchase and to buy out Arab tenants, some of whom have agreed to give up their residences if paid. In late October, an opposition member of Parliament inquired into the funding. He claimed that almost $1 million has been set aside from funds meant for other projects, including housing for the mentally retarded and the poor. The government has yet to answer the query.