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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493
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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 Staying put, for now
By Graham Usher
In a final push to rescue the Camp David summit, US President Bill Clinton submitted a number of "creative" solutions for the question of sovereignty in Jerusalem's Old City. Among them was a proposal that the Palestinians would be granted a "certain degree of sovereignty" over the Muslim and Christian quarters. Israel would have "residual" sovereignty over the Old City as a whole and full sovereignty over the Jewish and Armenian quarters.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak gave a wary nod to the idea "as a basis for discussions" but only if Palestinian President Yasser Arafat were to also accept it. Arafat refused, insisting on full sovereignty over the Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters, and especially over the Dome of the Rock complex that houses the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The American proposal fell short both of what the Palestinian leader was willing to accept and what international law requires. But it went way beyond anything previously countenanced by an Israeli government. And when the summit ended, the air was thick with sighs of relief. It was the sound of the Old City's 1,200 Armenians exhaling.
For them the American idea (and Barak's conditional embrace of it) was just about the worst "solution" imaginable. They also knew it was coming. On 17 July, the Armenian Patriarch, together with his Latin and Greek Orthodox peers, dispatched a letter to the three leaders at Camp David opposing any solution for the Old City that would "separate" the Armenian and Christian quarters. Arafat, it seems, heard their commandment and withstood the sin of temptation.
Tracing a lineage of over 15 centuries, the Armenian quarter covers about one sixth of the Old City. But it is a community in decline.
Prior to the war in 1948 that gave birth to the state of Israel, there were 12,000 Armenians in Mandate Palestine. In its bloody aftermath, there were 6,000, as Armenians fled with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to what all believed were the safer and temporary abodes of Lebanon and Syria. Further emigration and flight ensued after Israel's occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem in the 1967 war.
Those who stayed were burdened with a status defining them legally as Palestinian "residents" but ethnically as Armenian. And for the last 33 years their lives, properties and heritage have been bound by the same Israeli constraints as their Palestinian compatriots. But their plight has been compounded by the smallness of their numbers and by the fact that their quarter lies at the junction of the main access roads between Israeli West Jerusalem and the holy sites within the Jewish quarter and the Western Wall. It is this combination of vulnerability and location that makes the Armenian quarter such prime real estate in Israeli eyes.
And it has given rise to a "silent war" waged between Jewish settlers and the Armenian churches for the properties of the quarter, says Vartan Sivaslian, an Armenian resident of the Old City. Predictably, it is a fight the Armenians are losing. Since 1967, a reinvigorated Jewish quarter has expanded by some 40 per cent, he says, claiming 71 of the Armenian quarter's 581 houses.
Many of the new residents and synagogues of the Jewish quarter are fuelled by funds from rich benefactors in the US, creating a market where "first-world money chases Third-World conditions." Sivaslian says an ordinary two-room apartment in the quarter can today fetch a price as high as $200,000. "Ten years ago it would have cost $40,000. Most Armenians can no longer afford to live in their own houses." And so the younger ones leave for the cheaper climes of Europe, the US and Canada.
It is a process of communal asphyxiation that would only get worse if -- as the Americans' desire -- the Armenian quarter were to fall under full Israeli sovereignty. For 33 years the gravest blight eroding Jerusalem's Armenians has been their enforced separation from kin in Lebanon and Syria. "If we are now to be isolated from our Christian brothers in the Old City and the rest of Jerusalem, I doubt whether we would last long," says Sivaslian.
Nor is it just the loss of the Armenians' traditionally close relations with Latin and Greek Orthodox churches that heightens the fear of demise. There is also the cautious identification many Armenians have with the Palestinian struggle. It is a bond evidenced by the high rate of intermarriage between the Armenian and Palestinian Christian communities and by several Armenians' visible participation in protests like the Palestinian Intifada. "The Patriarchate is officially neutral in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians," says Sivaslian. "But as Christians I believe we should be on the side of justice."
Yet there are few Armenians who would advocate exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the Old City. The quiet consensus among them is rather for the Holy City to come under an international dispensation made up of all three monotheistic faiths. Only this regime could truly guarantee the rights of all the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities that reside within its walls, says Sivaslian.
He knows it is a forlorn hope. For better or worse, the national struggles of Palestine and Israel are essentially modern movements that equate sovereignty with territory, demography and, of course, religion. Israel's hold on the Old City is maintained by the control it has to effect demographic and territorial facts on the ground as much as by the sanctity of the Jewish holy sites within it. The Palestinians' resistance to this power is born not only of their rights under international law, but also by the facts that -- despite Israel's assiduous attempts to change them, the Old City remains culturally and architecturally Arab and home to 37,000 of their nation as against 3,000 Jews.
As Camp David II negotiations showed, the room for compromise between such aspirations is small indeed. And, for communities like the Armenians, even the prospect of compromise is bleak if forged solely by the balance of power. They know it could only come at their expense. And they fear the ultimate price may be the extinction of 1,500 years of their presence in Jerusalem.
