Hallowed Heritage
كلمات مفتاحية: 
Musa Budeiri
Hillel Cohen
The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Palestinian Politics and the City since 1967
الكتاب المراجع
النص الكامل: 

The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem: Palestinian Politics and the City since 1967 , by Hillel Cohen. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. vii + 136 pages. Notes to p. 148. Sources and Bibliography to p. 152. Index to p. 162. $124.00 cloth, $45.95 paper.

Reviewed by Musa Budeiri

In addition to a heavenly Jerusalem, there is an earthly one, also invented, yet very much a work in progress. Jerusalem and Jerusalemites are not one and the same thing. Israeli control of the city’s physical space and its inhabitants serves only to highlight this distinction. As in other settler enterprises, the native population is of interest only as an obstacle to be overcome. In this particular case, its disappearance constitutes an essential part of Israel’s imagined Jerusalem. This is the terrain of Hillel Cohen’s text. His primary preoccupation is with attacks on Israeli sovereignty manifested in Hamas’s attempt to establish a “balance of terror,” challenging as it does the legitimacy of Israel’s annexation of the Arab part of the city conquered in June 1967. On 28 June 1967, Israeli law was extended to a new enclave carved out of the occupied West Bank, which became part of “municipal Jerusalem.” Settlements were built encircling it from east, north, and south; now that this has been accomplished, the establishment of Jewish enclaves within its historically Arab neighborhoods is on the agenda, primarily in Silwan, Ras al-Amud, al-Tur and Shaykh Jarrah.

In addition to a heavenly Jerusalem, there is an earthly one, also invented, yet very much a work in progress. Jerusalem and Jerusalemites are not one and the same thing. Israeli control of the city’s physical space and its inhabitants serves only to highlight this distinction. As in other settler enterprises, the native population is of interest only as an obstacle to be overcome. In this particular case, its disappearance constitutes an essential part of Israel’s imagined Jerusalem. This is the terrain of Hillel Cohen’s text. His primary preoccupation is with attacks on Israeli sovereignty manifested in Hamas’s attempt to establish a “balance of terror,” challenging as it does the legitimacy of Israel’s annexation of the Arab part of the city conquered in June 1967. On 28 June 1967, Israeli law was extended to a new enclave carved out of the occupied West Bank, which became part of “municipal Jerusalem.” Settlements were built encircling it from east, north, and south; now that this has been accomplished, the establishment of Jewish enclaves within its historically Arab neighborhoods is on the agenda, primarily in Silwan, Ras al-Amud, al-Tur and Shaykh Jarrah.

Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule has always been fractured. The national movement itself mirrored the differences and divisions that existed within society. The inhabitants were not conscripted to the struggle nor were the requisite resources marshaled. People “resisted” the occupation each in their own particular way. A small minority maintained its faith in armed struggle. But varied interpretations coexisted, including the ability to form political alliances with ex-senior Israeli military or intelligence officials (such as Amihai Ayalon and Yossi Ginosar). Active street politics remained the playing field of a few. The vast majority went about their daily lives while extending verbal support to the political leadership ensconced in Ramallah. Israeli policies of isolating Jerusalem and severing its arteries with its natural hinterland contributed to this political impotence, though they can hardly be blamed for the acquiescence of the Palestinian leadership to Israel’s interpretation of the rules of the game—notwithstanding the repeated reference to the centrality of Jerusalem and the ever-repeated mantra “with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Cohen has written a war narrative chronicling resistance, mainly armed, and of the cells and individuals who carried it out in the aftermath of the breakdown of the Camp David peace talks in 2000. He provides many figures for civilians killed and activists arrested, amplified by biographical details about those engaged in violent resistance. He is concerned with their military activity, their methods of operation, their social and military connections, and their political affiliations, as well as what distinguishes the partisans of Hamas and Fatah, despite the fact that they are embarked on similarly violent campaigns. His story begins with the Oslo process, which itself led to the weakening of Jerusalem’s political role as the center of Palestinian politics. Although the closure of Jerusalem was enacted in 1991 during the first Gulf War, the process rapidly accelerated after the Oslo accords. By necessity the focus of his attention is Hamas as the initiator of the suicide bombing campaign, which took a heavy toll on civilian life, but Fatah’s emulation of Hamas’s tactics is also part of his brief.

Israel’s main achievement in Jerusalem has been one of transforming the geography of the city’s Arab inhabitants, and thus their lives. First it enlarged the city, incorporating surrounding villages into its domain, then it forbid entry to Arabs who did not qualify according to its legal definitions, later building a physical barrier to impede their entry and exit from the city. Meanwhile Israel’s discourse is one of open ethnic cleansing: how to reduce the number of Arab inhabitants even if that involves surrendering control of some of its residential suburbs. Where the author sees Israeli success in transforming the identity of the city’s Arab inhabitants, thereby creating a hybrid that is differentiated from the rest of the inhabitants of the territories ruled over by the Israeli military but administered by the Palestinian Authority, he fails to note that as far as Israel is concerned, the inhabitants of the city possess no specific identity. Their national formation is totally at the mercy of Israeli dictates. Today they are Jerusalemites, but their actual blood brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins are not necessarily so. And overnight they themselves might be forced to shed this temporary identity—which they possess solely due to the possession of a temporary Israeli identity card—and be made to assume another one.

The city’s Arab inhabitants are not an intrinsic part of the city’s fabric. Their inclusion and exclusion is achieved by bureaucratic fiat backed by force. As Cohen correctly points out, the municipality represents this “coerced annexation.” It collects taxes, imposes zoning laws, carries out home demolitions, runs the dilapidated school system, and oversees the ghetto-like transformation of every residential Arab area under its jurisdiction.

This is a work, we are told, commissioned by the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies. Consequently it should come as no surprise that the author enjoyed access to privileged sources; a site frequently referred to carries the cumbersome title of the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center of the Israeli Intelligence, Heritage, and Commemoration Center. What is rather more disconcerting, however, is the reading of a presumed Islamic meeting held at al-Aqsa Mosque in 1987, presided over by Shaykh Ahmad Yasin and attended by “tens of thousands of members of the Moslem brotherhood.” In an image reminiscent of other places and other times, Cohen writes, “Towards the end of the event, all those present arranged themselves in row after row, recited a prayer, and stamped with their feet loudly in unison ... and [they felt] the ground tremble under their feet” (p. 72). Soon after, the first intifada broke out, harbinger of greater things to come.

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MUSA BUDEIRI lives in Jerusalem and teaches political science at Birzeit University.