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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The phantom city
By Graham UsherFor the third time in a year, on 20 June, US President Bill Clinton delayed for six months the move of the US Embassy in Israel to the leafy suburbs of West Jerusalem. Clinton's repeated need to invoke his presidential prerogative stems from the Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act passed by the US Congress in October 1995.
This act mandated that the president relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to "united Jerusalem" by May 1999, the then deadline of the Oslo Agreement's five-year interim period. The act also included the threat of financial sanctions on the State Department should the embassy not be moved by that date. Due to Oslo's de facto extension and to avoid the penalties, Clinton is thus forced to waive the act in the name of "the national interests of the United States." But US "national interests" are just one of the mines the embassy move could detonate.
Israel leased to the US land in West Jerusalem for the embassy in 1989. The site is in the heart of the old Upper Beqaa district, one of the wealthiest suburbs of pre-1948 Arab Jerusalem. The problem for President Clinton, and perhaps even more so for his successor, whether this be George W Bush or Al Gore, is that the land was not Israel's to lease.
Following extensive research by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, it was determined "without question" that in 1948, 19 Palestinian families owned 70 per cent of the seven-acre plot. Today their descendants and heirs to the property "number hundreds ... at least 90" of whom are US citizens, says Khalidi. Should Clinton, Gore or Bush implement the act and move the embassy to the site, these citizens will take their government to court, Khalidi predicts.
The political consequences of the move are even more explosive. "It would mean not only the end of the American role in the peace process but of the peace process itself," says Faisal Al-Husseini, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's representative in Jerusalem. For in making the move the Americans would "effectively be deciding the future of Jerusalem before the negotiations had ended between us and the Israelis."
Moreover, Al-Husseini intends to use the embassy move to highlight an issue long obscured in the final status negotiations on the city: that of the restitution of Palestinian properties in West Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees to the homes they lost there in the 1948 war. "The Oslo agreements refer to the final status issue of Jerusalem, not only eastern Jerusalem, occupied in 1967" he says. "And we have an entire file on the question of Arab property in West Jerusalem that we intend to put on the negotiating table in the near future."
The file is burgeoning. Based on research done by the PLO and Palestinian non-governmental organisations, the current estimate is that some 40 per cent of all West Jerusalem properties are privately owned by Palestinian families, with another 36 per cent belonging to the Islamic Religious Trust, Christian churches or the British Mandatory government of pre-1948 Palestine. Only 24 per cent belong to Jewish families or trusts.
The Palestinian private properties are the patrimony of the roughly 90,000 Palestinians from West Jerusalem who were made refugees in 1948. Today these and their descendants number nearly 200,000 people, with about 90,000 living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, some within view of their former homes.
These are the Palestinians that haunt the "phantom city" of Arab West Jerusalem, says Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari, who has recently published a book on Palestinian property in West Jerusalem. Nor can their rights be exorcised, whatever the political compromises the PLO has made on Jerusalem.
"Most Israelis think that the Palestinian leadership, by accepting East Jerusalem as the future capital of Palestine, has given up any claim to West Jerusalem. But accepting Palestinian sovereignty in the eastern part of the city in no way compels the Palestinian leadership to forget property claims and the Palestinians' right to return to the western part of the city," says Tamari.
It is a sentiment echoed by Ibrahim Mattar, a "present absentee" from West Jerusalem under Israeli law and now "resident" of the East Jerusalem village of Azzariyyah. He points out the beautiful Arab houses with their arched windows and red-tile roofs in Upper Beqaa that today border the embassy site and, before 1948, belonged to his wife's grandfather. "My mother-in-law still has the deeds to these properties," he says. "The Israelis call us absentees. The world calls us refugees. I don't know what we are. I do know we want our homes back."
Present, absentee, refugee, resident, the Palestinians of West Jerusalem may be all of these or none, but they are not ghosts. On the contrary, as the day nears when the fate of their city is to be decided or again deferred they are ready to make a case for their properties and return to West Jerusalem based on real histories, real ownership deeds, real rights and a real, living people. It is likely to be a claim of more stubborn reality that those delusions of great powers which believe that the relocation of an embassy can "unite" a city whose life and land is disputed in its western part, occupied in its eastern section and fractured at the heart.
