Holy City’s Boundaries on the Line

Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinians’ chief map maker, picked his way through debris and goat dung to the top floor of the summer palace that Jordan’s King Hussein commissioned on the outskirts of the Holy City shortly before Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast War.

A breeze wafted through the hilltop ruins as Tufakji surveyed row upon row of Israeli houses in nearby Pisgat Zeev, Ramot, Reches Shuafat and other Jewish neighborhoods on West Bank soil long ago annexed to the city of Jerusalem.

Below him, bulldozers hungrily carved another road and concentric circles of lots for new Jewish housing blocks in what Palestinians say is an Israeli rush to claim more land before final talks on the future of Jerusalem.

“Every time I come here it makes me crazy,” Tufakji said. “You can see the future of Jerusalem. What is there to talk about?”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will begin final negotiations on the status of Jerusalem as soon as the two sides have completed a plan for an Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank city of Hebron.

The Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem to be the capital of an independent state, charge that the construction is part of a multifaceted drive by Netanyahu’s right-wing government to prevent the area’s return to Arab control. They say the Israelis have stepped up demolitions of Arab houses built without permits, squeezed the economy of East Jerusalem and confiscated residency cards to reduce the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem.

Moreover, Palestinians see the tortured Hebron negotiations as a dress rehearsal for Jerusalem talks and believe Netanyahu is trying to set a precedent for retaining political control over Palestinian areas by demanding reentry rights to the West Bank city to pursue alleged terrorists.

“Israel wants to teach us a lesson in Hebron that will be applied to Jerusalem,” said Hatem Abdel Qader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council representing East Jerusalem. “They want to make Hebron into a military and security issue. The true issue in Hebron is one of jurisdiction and authority. . . . For us, Jerusalem is a question of jurisdiction. This is our city, our capital.”

Israel denies any underhandedness in Jerusalem, but Netanyahu makes no bones about his intention to hold on to the “eternal, undivided capital” of Israel--a position most Israelis say they share.

The Likud Party leader--who narrowly beat Shimon Peres in national elections in May after a campaign that warned that the Labor Party leader would divide the city--says the previous government erred in agreeing even to discuss Jerusalem with the Palestinians. Peres insisted throughout that he was just as committed to keeping the city whole.

Mayor Ehud Olmert, also of Likud, says Jerusalem never was an Arab or Islamic capital and never will be.

“Jerusalem will remain forever a united capital of only the state of Israel--period,” Olmert said in an interview. “When you make peace, you don’t split cities, you don’t build walls in the middle of cities. You break walls, you unite cities.”

Most Palestinians argue that Jerusalem is far from united. They note with pride that there is still a psychological barrier between East and West Jerusalem that most Jews have not crossed since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, erupted nearly a decade ago.

This jagged divide is unmarked, but everyone knows where it is and which streets not to cross.

While devout Jews and tourists stream into the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and to the Western Wall, most secular Israelis steer clear of the area by the Temple Mount--the Al Aqsa mosque complex--on which Jews and Arabs base their claims to Jerusalem.

“We stopped going during the intifada,” explained one secular Jerusalemite, “and now it doesn’t even occur to me to go there. The city is divided.”

Divided in the minds of Arabs and many Jews maybe, but Tufakji’s maps tell another story on the ground. The East Jerusalem that Jews do not enter is a fraction of its former self--smaller, partitioned by Israeli roads, surrounded by Jewish neighborhoods and largely isolated from the rest of the West Bank.

Consolidating Jewish control over Jerusalem is the decades-old policy of Labor and Likud governments alike, Tufakji says. Today, a majority of East Jerusalem residents are Jewish, and most of its 27 square miles already are in Jewish hands.

On a driving tour of the city, Tufakji points to the Jerusalem-stone apartment buildings standing shoulder to shoulder in French Hill, Ramat Eshkol and Maalot Dafna that make the fight for East Jerusalem seem largely symbolic.

“When they created the Jerusalem boundary, the aim was to annex most of the empty land from 28 Arab villages but to leave the built-up, populated areas outside,” Tufakji said.

“They designated areas ‘green areas’ so we could not build on them, planted trees and then cut them down years later to build for the Jews,” he said.

The result is that Arabs in East Jerusalem are nearly surrounded by Jewish neighborhoods. The only connection between Jerusalem and the West Bank that does not pass through a Jewish neighborhood is a two-lane road.

In the center of Jerusalem, the four-lane Route 1 that Israelis call HaShalom and Palestinians call Nablus Road runs roughly along the old “green line,” or pre-1967 border, and serves as an unofficial dividing line between East and West.

Palestinian homemaker Hasibi Mughrabi lives on the “wrong” side of the street.

Mughrabi and her husband were a young couple when they bought their dome-roofed Arab house in rural Sheik Jarakh in 1966, shortly before the war landed them and their home in Israel.

The rustic, West Bank area was annexed to Jerusalem and--in no time at all, it seemed to Mughrabi--high-rise apartment buildings replaced the forest around her as Israelis built the Jewish neighborhood of Maalot Dafna.

The Israeli government paved Route 1 between Maalot Dafna and Sheik Jarakh, and suddenly Mughrabi’s family was cut off from the Palestinian neighborhood, caught in a cluster of just three Arab houses.

“We are an island,” Mughrabi said, offering a description that seems apt for all of East Jerusalem.

From her arched kitchen window, the 50-year-old mother of six looks out at a Jewish apartment building and hostile glances from neighbors. She says she often is greeted with sneers when she leaves home with a scarf covering her head in the Muslim custom.

But Mughrabi says she has turned down multimillion-dollar offers to sell her property to Jews.

“I love this house more than I love myself. The wind that comes through it, the trees around it. My children and my children’s children were born here. What is money compared to that?” she asked.

To the Arab traders of food, clothing and currency across Route 1 on Salah-al-Din Street, money is survival--the life or death of their businesses. And many of the shopkeepers in East Jerusalem’s commercial center are hurting.

Business is so slow on the main drag that by midafternoon many store owners pull down their metal shutters and head for home, leaving Salah-al-Din nearly deserted by 4 p.m.

The reason, Palestinians say, is that not only have Israelis stopped shopping there, but a closure imposed on the West Bank and Gaza Strip since a wave of bus bombings early this year also has prevented most of the 2 million Palestinians there from traveling to Jerusalem.

Without shoppers from the West Bank, many East Jerusalem businesses report a 40% drop in sales compared with last year.

“The closure has crippled commercial activity in East Jerusalem,” said Fayek Barakat, 69, head of the Arab Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Jerusalem.

Israeli officials say the closure is necessary for security reasons--to keep out would-be suicide bombers after Islamic extremists set off four explosions in Israel in February and March, killing more than 60 people.

But Palestinians view this as economic pressure and part of Israel’s effort to drive them out of the city. Arab banks are not allowed in East Jerusalem, and no cinema has operated there since being forced to close during the intifada. Now, Palestinians say, the closure has forced many other businesses to shut down or relocate to the West Bank, where their customers are.

“Capital is leaving Jerusalem for Ramallah and Bethlehem,” said Abdel Qader of the Palestinian legislature.

Furthermore, Qader says, Netanyahu has stepped up the practice of demolishing “illegal” Arab houses, built without the required permits that are difficult for Palestinians to obtain and can cost up to $30,000 when available. He says several dozen buildings in Jerusalem and surrounding villages have been razed since Netanyahu took office in June.

The most controversial demolition took place in the Old City during the summer, when an Israeli bulldozer leveled a Palestinian youth and seniors center under construction with foreign aid.

Israel has long used building permits as a tool to limit the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, Qader says. A scarcity of permits has created a dearth of Arab housing, forcing young Palestinians to move out of the city to the West Bank.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says nearly four times as many apartments were built in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as in Arab neighborhoods between 1967 and November 1995.

An estimated 65,000 Palestinians with cards identifying them as Jerusalem residents live outside of the city, according to Palestinian figures. And now, Palestinians say, the Netanyahu government is aggressively confiscating the cards, arguing that their “center of life” is outside the city. Without the cards, Palestinians are not allowed into Jerusalem and lose their rights to Israeli services and citizenship.

Orient House, the Palestinian Authority’s unofficial headquarters in Jerusalem, has documented 244 cases of identity-card confiscations since May--compared with 204 cases in the previous 1 1/2 years. Palestinian officials believe that many more Palestinians living in the West Bank and abroad risk losing their cards.

Hayyan Jubeh, whose Jerusalem card was taken earlier this year, is challenging the confiscation in Israel’s high court.

“Any Jew in the world can live here, even if he has no connection with this land. But I, who have a personal history and roots here, am denied my right to live here,” Jubeh said.

Jubeh, who had been living in London with his British wife and two daughters, returned to Jerusalem earlier this year after his wife died. When he applied for a travel document several months later, he was told by the Israeli Interior Ministry that he no longer could have a Jerusalem identity card because he held a British passport.

Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Tova Elinson denies that there has been any change in policy regarding Palestinian residency in Jerusalem. She says that since the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, more Palestinians are trying to return to Jerusalem. But the law states that a Jerusalem resident who left the city for more than seven years and whose “center of life is elsewhere” is no longer entitled to residency, she says.

Palestinians argue that this law is only applied to them.

“The Israelis are trying to strangle East Jerusalem by taking away people’s livelihoods and emptying the city of Palestinians,” said Nabil Feidy, a money-changer on Salah-al-Din Street.

Mayor Olmert adamantly denies any effort to strangle East Jerusalem. On the contrary, Olmert says, he wants to invest in run-down East Jerusalem and bring it up to the standards of West Jerusalem.

Even a newcomer to the city can quickly discern the difference in development between the two sides. While West Jerusalem has plenty of parks and public landscaping, East Jerusalem lacks adequate sidewalks and stoplights.

Olmert has presented Netanyahu’s Cabinet with a 46-page, $1.9-billion plan for overcoming decades of government neglect in East Jerusalem. His rationale: “Only equality of services and infrastructure can strengthen Israeli sovereignty in united Jerusalem.”

Times staff writer John Daniszewski contributed to this report.