Returning to the cause

The Intifada remains an anti-colonial revolt -- and Um Tuba proves it. Graham Usher reports
For some the Intifada is or is becoming an ethnic-religious conflict, an interpretation given substance by the increasing savagery of the Israeli repression and by the aegis of certain combatants, whether it is the Brigades of Al-Aqsa on the Palestinian side or the Temple Mount Faithful on the Israeli.
Most Palestinians, still, do not hold this view, though some in the Islamist streams veer to it. For most the cause of the revolt remains what it was on 29 September 2000, less a religious struggle over the sanctity of Jerusalem's Haram Al-Sharif, more a national fight over the plight of Um Tuba and dozens of Palestinian villages like it.
Together with its sister village Sur Bahir, Um Tuba was annexed to "municipal Jerusalem" after Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Since then, "we have become imprisoned by a wall of settlements," says Abu Jalal, chairman of Um Tuba's Land Defence Committee. "First the Israelis built East Talpiot to our north. Then Gilo to the west."
And then Har Homa ("Mountain Wall") to the south, built on 1,851 dunums of Um Tuba land at Jebel Abu Ghneim, including 1,400 square metres owned by Abu Jalal. Today Har Homa's new apartment towers and ring roads spread over the mountain like the wings of a bird poised to devour the few hundred dunums that remain.
And devour it will. On 28 March, Israel's Jerusalem municipality issued 19 demolition orders on Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, including five at Um Tuba. The given reason was that all the dwellings had been built without a licence. The actual reason, in the eyes of the Abu Tier family who own the land on which the Um Tuba homes were built, is that their construction thwarts the municipality's plan for a feeder road linking Har Homa to the "eastern sector" of a new Jerusalem ring road.
Approved by Israel's Interior Ministry in September 2000, the ring road will confiscate 658 dunams of Palestinian land through the Jerusalem villages (among others) of Abu Tur, Ras Al-Amud and Sur Baher, all locales where the demolition orders are pending. It will also link the 15 "Greater Jerusalem" settlements one to the other and all to West Jerusalem and sever the villages from their West Bank hinterland.
And together with the ongoing construction at Jerusalem's Har Homa, Maale Adumim and Givat Zeev settlements, it destroys the capacity of Palestinian East Jerusalem ever becoming "a prime metropolitan city, with real prospects for urban development and employment," says the Dutch settlement expert, Jan de Jong. It is also in grave violation of international law and UN resolutions, though those powers appear to have little purchase in the occupied territories.
Nor is this how Israel sees things, whether from the "peace camp" or from the "non-belligerency" (if increasingly belligerent) camp allied with Ariel Sharon. For the "left", Israeli sovereignty over the Jerusalem settlements is part of the Jewish "national consensus"; a "fact" implicitly recognised by the Palestinian negotiators at both Camp David and Taba meetings.
For the right, aside from the usual stuff about Jerusalem being the "eternal, united capital of the Jewish people," the expansion of settlements like Har Homa and Maale Adumim is necessary to meet the "housing crunch in Jerusalem faced by many young couples," in the words of a municipality spokesperson.
The first argument is disingenuous. While Palestinian negotiators may have conceded the principle of Israeli sovereignty over the Jerusalem settlements at Camp David and Taba, they did so on the basis of the settlements' existing built-up limits and on condition that equivalent land would be "swapped" from inside Israel. As for the "housing crunch" that is nonsense.
On 20 March, Jerusalem municipality approved plans for another 2,832 housing units to be built at Har Homa. Two weeks later, Israel's Housing Ministry put out tenders for 710 housing units in West Bank settlements, including 496 at Maale Adumim, all in the name of "natural growth" and firmly within the Israeli government "guidelines."
In a riposte, and citing the Housing Ministry's own statistics, Israel's Peace Now movement showed that of the 3,470 units tendered at Maale Adumim between 1994-2000, 1,610 or 47 percent had stayed unsold. It revealed that of the 2,200 units offered for sale at Har Homa between 1999-2000, 1,670 or 76 percent had no buyers and of the 810 units put on the market at Givat Zeev, a colossal 790 or 97 percent had no takers.
What Peace Now leaders were reluctant to admit, at least publicly, was the cause of this downturn in "need." And that was a decision taken by Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement three weeks into the uprising, seven years after negotiations began at Oslo and four years after a joint Palestinian-Israeli peace tent was pitched to protest settlement expansion "peacefully" at the foot of Jebel Abu Ghneim. The decision was to use arms against the settlements, whether by launching mortars on those in Gaza, shooting at Gilo from Beit Jala or indeed firing the occasional pot shot at Har Homa from Beit Sahour.
"That could be the future here, in Jerusalem, in Um Tuba," says Abu Jalal, who can hear sounds of war every night from Bethlehem. "The house demolitions will cause a confrontation in the village, like what happened when they started building Har Homa in 1996. But the expansion of the settlement into the village proper could turn us into a military front-line, like Beit Jala."
This need not be the future. The tendering of the units at Maale Adumim drew a rare US rebuke that Israel's ongoing settlement construction risked "further inflaming an already volatile situation in the region." The European Union explicitly condemned the expansion at Har Homa, adding that "all settlement activities are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to peace." And at the core of the current Egyptian-Jordanian proposal for resuming negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is the demand for a "total and immediate freeze on all settlement activities, including those in East Jerusalem."
But these strictures are on paper. Unless backed up by the real sanctions, Israel will ignore them and the Palestinians will have to fight with the only means they have. And these include building "illegal" houses to prevent the further alienation of their land as in Um Tuba or, as at Har Homa, firing shots to deter ordinary Israelis from becoming another generation of colonists.
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