WITNESS 06

In November 1947, the United Nations General
During the 1967 war, Israel captured the West
Dear Supporter, Assembly voted in favour of the partition of
Palestine into independent Jewish and Palestinian
We have decided to focus this issue of Witness on East Jerusalem because without a states. Jerusalem and its surroundings were to form
just resolution of the Jerusalem question there seems little hope of peace. As expanding a corpus separatum under international
administration. The partition plan was officially
settlements and the Separation Barrier continue to isolate East Jerusalem from the rest accepted by the Jewish Agency but rejected by
of the West Bank, the prospects of a viable Palestinian state are shrinking.
Palestine's Arabs.
Jerusalem is of special interest to MAP because it has traditionally been the centre of
During the war that followed Israel's declaration
medical care for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. There are a number of of independence in 1948, Israel captured West
Jerusalem while Jordan held and eventually
major hospitals in East Jerusalem, all institutions of distinction providing world-class annexed East Jerusalem. The line of demarcation
Bank, annexing East Jerusalem and extending
the city's municipal boundaries to include an
additional 664 square kilometres of West
Bank land. The UN Security Council rejected
the annexation.

The new “united Jerusalem” covered an area
around 2.5 times the size of pre-war West and
East Jerusalem combined.

In July 1980, Israel passed the Basic Law
formalising the annexation of East Jerusalem and

EYEWITNESS: JERUSALEM SINCE 1947

secondary and tertiary care. However, gradually that is being eroded. First, Gaza is proclaiming Jerusalem the complete and united
became known as the Green Line. Neither the
capital of Israel. In 1988, Jordan dropped any
sealed off. Getting to Jerusalem for treatment is no longer an option for the vast Jordanian nor the Israeli actions obtained
claim to sovereignty over East Jerusalem.
majority of Gazans. international approval.
Photo: Teisha Leigh
Then, on the West Bank, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and the Wall have all severely
limited people's ability to access Jerusalem medical care. Stories of births and deaths at
checkpoints are well known. For those who do get through there are a myriad of
practical problems to overcome. At night in the Makassad hospital, for example, the
corridors are packed with the relatives of patients who cannot return home and have to
sleep over instead. It works the other way too. Doctors and medical staff resident in the
West Bank cannot reach the hospitals and once they do, they may be unable to return
home for days. Under such duress, the hospitals are struggling to maintain standards.
Naturally enough, coping mechanisms and adaptations, such as mobile clinics, have
kicked in and in this edition of Witness, we describe a creative way around the problem
of training doctors. But none of this will replace the absolute need to address the
question of Jerusalem and to find a solution that will meet the minimum aspirations of
Israelis and Palestinians alike. Only in this way is a viable two state solution possible.

Belinda Coote
Chief Executive
Qalandiya checkpoint, now the main access point into and out
of Jerusalem from the northern West Bank.
 F F
STRANGLING JERUSALEM
East Jerusalem's 250,000 Palestinians
live in a kind of limbo. Permanent
residents of territory annexed by
F E AT U R E : S T R A N G L I N G J E R U S A L E M
Israel, but not citizens of the Israeli
state and with little connection to
the Palestinian Authority, their status
is ambiguous - politically, legally and
territorially. The uncertainty is hard
enough to live with. But worse still
is the growing fear that the
government of Israel intends to
finalise the annexation of East
Jerusalem and ensure its permanent
isolation from the West Bank.
The Separation Barrier is already dividing
Palestinian from Palestinian, slicing through
communities for whom the city's municipal
boundaries have little real meaning. Many of the
55,000 East Jerusalemites whose homes look set to
fall on the eastern side of the Barrier are moving
“inside”, concerned that their residency status in
Jerusalem as well as their access to family, health
services, jobs and schools are in jeopardy.
East Jerusalemites who remain “outside” the Barrier
are finding it increasingly difficult to enter
the city where most of them were born and grew up.
Faced with a regime of permits and checkpoints
just to get to work, hospital or school, many are
now looking to the West Bank for essential services,
but risk being stripped of their residency rights as
a result. Loss of residency means Palestinians can
no longer live or work in Israel, including East
Jerusalem. To retain residency status, they must
prove that their 'centre of life' is in East Jerusalem.
For those now cut off by the Barrier from family,
jobs, schools and medical services, this is
extremely difficult.
The influx of Palestinians to areas “inside” the
Barrier has sent house prices soaring. This is putting
intolerable financial strain on families and additional
The Dome of the Rock. Photo: MAP
pressure on already overcrowded neighbourhoods
where the Israeli authorities continue to impose
severe restrictions on construction by Palestinians.
With housing density in Palestinian residential
areas already almost twice that of Jewish
neighbourhoods, the demolition of Palestinian
homes built without permits or on some other
premise, has predictably devastating consequences.
Illegal settlement activity is also strangling East
Jerusalem. The construction of new settlements
and the expansion of others is isolating many
Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem from
the West Bank. And if plans go ahead to bring the
largest settlement blocs inside the Barrier, the
encirclement of East Jerusalem will be complete
and the West Bank practically cut in two.
The separation of East Jerusalem from the West
Bank is also tearing many families in two. Since
F E AT U R E : S T R A N G L I N G J E R U S A L E M
2003, Israelis and East Jerusalem Palestinians
married to residents of the Occupied Territories
have been forbidden from living with their partner
in Israel or East Jerusalem. Israeli law also
prohibits the registration of children of East
Jerusalem Palestinians who were born in the
Occupied Territories as residents of Israel. So
families choosing to live together in East Jerusalem
must do so illegally and live in fear of capture. This
puts children and their parents under great
psychological stress and severely impairs the right
to family life.
This collection of inter-linked policies is separating
Palestinians from their homes and families and
threatening to sever East Jerusalem from the West
Bank under a permanent settlement imposed
unilaterally by the Israeli government. The
economic and humanitarian consequences are
already serious and look set to worsen for many
Palestinians while, politically, the prospects for a
viable two-state solution with East Jerusalem as
the Palestinian capital are fast receding.
 Now used by surrounding
residents as a dumping
ground for household
waste and litter,
Hezekiah's Pool in
Jerusalem's Old City was
once an important
THE BIG PICTURE

resevoir. The municipal

authorities used to pump
out the stagnant
rainwater, but this
practice has stopped.
The pool is now a
festering pit, home to
wild cats, chickens, frogs
and mosquitos.
Photo: Teisha Leigh

1 Abu Dis, severing it from East Jerusalem. It is now
MAP’S PARTNERS
Foundation for Al Quds Medical School
When the first Palestinian doctors to
be trained entirely on home soil
M A P ’ S PA R T N E R S : M E D I C A L S C H O O L
graduated in 2001, it was a proud and
historic moment. The Al Quds
University Faculty of Medicine, the
first and only Palestinian medical
school, opened in October 1994 with
32 students. The student body today
comprises around 280 undergraduates
and 214 doctors have now graduated
from the school.
But the School's success comes in the face of
countless difficulties. Israeli military checkpoints,
roadblocks, closures and now flying checkpoints
regularly frustrate the efforts of students and
teaching staff trying to reach the School. By 2004,
with severe restrictions on movement across the
Occupied Palestinian Territories an unhappy fact of
life, supporters of the Medical School had started
thinking about a work-around solution. With the
problems of access threatening a dramatic decline in
teaching quality, they agreed that the introduction of
a distance learning capability was an urgent priority.
But today, the Separation Barrier cuts through to continue their education, despite the occupation, 1
yet another work-around solution may need to
almost impossible for students from the Abu Dis be implemented.
campus to access teaching hospitals just a few
kilometres away in East Jerusalem, or for
teaching staff and students to make regular
Plans to extend the video conferencing network
to neighbouring countries will go ahead, but
additional funds may now have to be raised to
visits to the school.
ensure that East Jerusalem students and teaching
While the distance learning programme has made staff are not permanently isolated from the
MAP and our partner organisation the Foundation it possible for many Palestinian medical students Medical School that bears the city's name, Al Quds.
for Al-Quds Medical School (FQMS) are now
implementing a comprehensive healthcare distance
M A P ’ S PA R T N E R S : M E D I C A L S C H O O L
learning programme. By providing video
conferencing facilities at five different locations
within the Occupied Territories, the project offers
remote medical education and training to
Palestinian students denied access to the Abu Dis
campus and Jerusalem teaching hospitals.
It is a work-around solution to the problem, but an
essential one if Palestinian medical students are to
continue receiving the highest possible standard of
education. But the story doesn't end there. Since
this project was conceived, construction on the
Separation Barrier around the West Bank has added
a new dimension to the problem of access.
In the past, even when students from Gaza and
Photo: Hisham Erout
increasingly the West Bank were denied access to
East Jerusalem, teaching staff from East Jerusalem
hospitals had relatively easy access to the Abu Dis
campus. The new video conferencing facilities meant
their knowledge and skills could still be shared with
The Wall viewed from a classroom in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem. Taken as part of The Right to Education Photography Project
students in the West Bank and Gaza.
(http://right2edu.birzeit.edu).
 RICHARD BURDEN MP
SPEAKING OUT
I was one of the international observers
“
monitoring recent Palestinian parliamentary
elections. It was a professionally conducted election
with a high turnout. Nobody has seriously tried to
dispute that the result genuinely reflected the
SPEAKING OUT: RICHARD BURDEN MP
democratic will of the Palestinian people.
Why then, did Hamas win? Western governments
and commentators struggle to understand how
Palestinians have become so alienated from the Road
Map process that they elect a parliamentary majority
sceptical of even the principle of a negotiated
settlement. They could do worse than to look at the
electoral experience itself in Jerusalem.
Under international law, East Jerusalem, like the
rest of the West Bank, has been occupied since 1967.
Yet according to Israeli policy, it is no longer really
part of the Palestinian territories at all.
So the Israeli authorities insisted on organising the
Palestinian elections in East Jerusalem. They allowed
neither polling stations nor polling booths.
Palestinians “eligible” to vote had to fill in their
ballot papers at the counters of six Israeli post offices.
The fiction was that the Palestinians were casting
postal votes for elections taking place elsewhere.
The right to vote was a ”privilege” bestowed by an
occupying power on condition that the voter
pretended to be an absentee in his or her own city.
Only 6,000 Palestinians were allowed to vote in central
East Jerusalem.
Richard Burden has been Labour MP for
Birmingham Northfield since 1992. He chairs the
Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group.
 Between 1993 and 2004, 3683 East Jerusalem
Palestinians were stripped of their right to live and
*
The other 119,000 living there had to travel to the
work in the city where most were born and grew up.
outskirts to vote. Again it was about creating a
fiction - this time about the number of Palestinians
recognised as living in and around the Old City.  Palestinians contribute 33% to Jerusalem's municipal
The turnout among East Jerusalemites required to taxes. In return the municipality spends 8% of its
travel outside to vote was low. They knew it meant
going through military checkpoints or crossing the budget in Palestinian areas. 90% of the city's sewage
Wall. Many were reluctant to travel outside the Wall pipes, roads, and pavements are in West Jerusalem.
to vote anyway, concerned that their vote could be
recorded and used by Israel as “proof” that they had
 In 2004-2005, 198 Palestinian homes were demolished
T H E D E TA I L S
no right to live in the City. There is no evidence that
the Israelis had this in mind. The fact that people
feared it speaks volumes about what it is like to be a in East Jerusalem, making 594 people homeless.
Palestinian in Jerusalem today.
The Israeli Government says the voting
Despite terrible over-crowding, Israel issues less than
arrangements came out of the internationally 100 building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem
brokered Oslo agreements. They are right about that.
It says much about why so many Palestinians are each year.
sceptical of foreign governments' claims to even-
handedness. It should also remind us that we must
not ignore what is happening now. The Wall,  Only 11% of East Jerusalem is available for Palestinian
restrictions on residency rights and the continuing development. The remaining 89% is reserved either for
expansion of settlements are not only illegal; they
directly undermine the chances of resolving the the expansion of Jewish settlements or zoned as green
Jerusalem question in a way that respects the rights areas where development is prohibited.
of both Palestinians and Israelis. A just solution in
Jerusalem is not an “optional extra”. It will
”
be an essential part of any lasting Sources: B'Tselem, Suppressed EU report on Jerusalem November 2005,
settlement in the Middle East. International Crisis Group report The Jerusalem Powder Keg August 2005.
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COVER: Palestinians queue to pass an Israeli

checkpoint near al-Eizariya village in East
Jerusalem, 14 January 2006.

Photo: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters

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