Settlers’ Project to Alter Skyline of Jerusalem’s Old City
By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 11 February 2007
Most Palestinians have resisted offers to sell their homes, facing deadly reprisals if they accept. But settler leaders said two recent developments have made it easier for Jews to acquire Palestinian property.
The international aid boycott of the Palestinian Authority imposed after Hamas’s election a year ago has ravaged the economy in the territories, prompting more Palestinians in East Jerusalem to sell their land out of financial necessity. In addition, they said, the 24-foot-high wall Israel is building around Jerusalem has nearly sealed the city off from the West Bank, home to armed Palestinian groups opposed to selling property to settlers, offering a sense of protection for those who do sell.
Wilson is applying an altruistic lacquer to the illegal Wall that does nothing to change the face of its coercive brutality. He also seems to be implying that Palestinians would freely sell their properties if only they didn’t face deadly retribution for doing so. I think it’s obvious that if the Palestinians were not facing deadly retribution from the Israelis for not selling their land and were able to live freely and securely they would not sell their properties at all which is why the Israelis resorted to starvation, humiliation, and hiding behind third-party purchasers in order to acquire land they couldn’t bulldoze and occupy otherwise.
Adnan Husseini, the Jerusalem director of the Waqf, the Islamic land trust that has authority over the al-Aqsa mosque complex, traces his Palestinian family’s Jerusalem roots back 800 years. His office overlooks the olive grove and cypress stands of the Haram al-Sharif, his centuries-old walls rising into vaulted ceilings above his cluttered desk.
“They have failed to control the city,” he said. “And they will never succeed.”
Husseini, a 59-year-old engineer wearing gold-rim half-glasses and a cardigan, said Jewish settlers with help from the Israeli government are “destroying the scale of the city” by pushing large symbolic projects in the Muslim Quarter and in contested religious areas.
He cited the Flowers Gate synagogue, which requires several more layers of approval, and the project to build a wider ramp from the Western Wall plaza to the Mugrabi Gate, the entrance to the mosque complex used by Israeli soldiers and tourists. Walls dating to the 7th-century Umayyad rule are threatened by the work, and Muslim concern prompted last week’s protests.
“They want to create a new situation, a new conflict,” Husseini said. “Jerusalem is in danger.”
From the Old City ramparts above the Flowers Gate project, Jon Seligman, Jerusalem director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, looked toward a horizon spiked with spires and minarets. The only Jewish buildings that once appeared there were a pair of synagogues, destroyed by Jordan during its nearly two-decade reign.
“Whether a Jewish presence on the skyline is appropriate is something that can be legitimately raised,” said Seligman, referring to the Flowers Gate synagogue. “It is something that is present for all other major religions here except Judaism.”
More than half of Seligman’s budget comes from construction projects that require preliminary excavations, which at the Flowers Gate site have revealed the thick stone walls of a 600-year-old Arab neighborhood. Plans call for the synagogue to be built above it.
Why continue with the plans then if not out of vicious, hateful spitefulness?