East Jerusalem neighborhood in settlement debate shows little sign of furor

East Jerusalem neighborhood shows no sign of furor

JERUSALEM — The sleepy Ramat Shlomo neighborhood at the center of the debate over Israeli construction in east Jerusalem shows no signs of the political furor.

On a recent morning, a bearded father carried his son from a car seat to a kindergarten. Teenage girls in shin-length skirts waited in a supermarket checkout line. The monotony of low buildings with light stone facades was broken only by an occasional grocery store or pizzeria.

The gulf between the way Jerusalem is seen by Israelis and by many in the world is nowhere more apparent than it is here.

For Ramat Shlomo’s Orthodox Jewish families — and for most Israelis — building Jewish homes in any part of Jerusalem is a natural right. Palestinians, who have spent four decades watching Israeli construction permanently change the face of the city, see every new housing project in east Jerusalem as a blow to their desire for a capital here.

Ramat Shlomo is in northeast Jerusalem, just outside the invisible line that delineates the part of the city Israel controlled before 1967. On one side lies Ramot, a larger Jewish neighborhood also built on land Israel conquered in that year’s Mideast war, and on the other, less than a mile away, is the Arab neighborhood of Shoafat.

Today, there are just over 2,300 housing units in Ramat Shlomo. Israel’s approval of 1,600 more has triggered the worst feud in decades between Israel and the U.S.

Washington condemned the move, which was announced during a high-profile visit to the country by Vice President Joe Biden.

The plans have shaken the Obama administration’s delicate efforts to restart peace talks just as they were showing success. And the new spotlight they have brought to east Jerusalem settlements like this one could also tie Israel’s hands after years of unrestricted development.

The neighborhood was built in 1996 specifically for ultra-Orthodox Jews, who generally prefer to live apart — even from secular Jews. Today it has 20,000 residents, drawn largely by low housing prices rather than ideology. It was not located in the midst of a Palestinian population, and its construction did not draw a high level of controversy at the time.

The residents appear bewildered by the political uproar.

“We have no idea how all of this landed on us,” said Ezra Berger, director of the neighborhood’s community center. “We’re just normal people living here in a normal neighborhood in Jerusalem.”

At the community center, a secretary in the straight brown wig typical of an Orthodox matron was laughing with a colleague about all the attention: A Norwegian journalist had interviewed her husband at the grocery store the day before.

The reasoning for the new building project is simple, Berger said: Residents have big families and have run out of room. After environmentalists defeated a major development plan on the western outskirts of Jerusalem a few years back, Israeli officials say they have been forced to look eastward, in the disputed sector, to ease a housing crunch.

The Arab population is growing too, but what would be normal city planning anywhere else in the world is politically explosive here.

While Israelis consider the neighborhoods to be like any other in the city, in the eyes of the Palestinians, Washington officials, most governments in the world and the United Nations, they are settlements like those Israel has built in the West Bank.

Israel captured Jerusalem’s eastern sector, and its Palestinian population, from Jordan in 1967 along with the rest of the West Bank. But unlike the West Bank, Israel formally annexed the area, then began ringing it with housing developments for Jews. The construction has cemented control around Jerusalem’s crown jewel: the Old City, home to the most sensitive Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious sites in the Holy Land.

Today, about 180,000 people — more than a third of Jerusalem’s Jewish population — live in the 10 or so districts. Squeezed between them are Arab neighborhoods — home to some 250,000 Palestinians — where Israel has heavily restricted building. Arab residents complain that infrastructure is neglected and that they are not allowed to expand for their own population growth.

The Jerusalem municipality would not make an official available for questions about planning policy and municipality spokesman Stephan Miller denied there was any discrimination.

“No special treatment is given to any neighborhood — each is planned with care for the residents and the needs of the city,” he said. “We are developing the entirety of the city and moving forward with business as usual.”

About a third of the territory Israel annexed in east Jerusalem was expropriated by the government, most of it from private Palestinian owners, and while the government has sanctioned the construction of nearly 50,000 homes for Jews, it has built none for Palestinians, according to figures from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Palestinian anger over what they see as an attempt to reduce the Arab population and impose a Jewish Israeli hold on the entire city occasionally erupts into violence. That happened in the past week, when Palestinian youths rioted for five straight days.

A 55-year-old woman standing next to a smoking garbage bin that had been torched by rioters in the nearby neighborhood of Wadi Joz blamed Israel for the unrest.

“Judaizing the city, the settlements, the home demolitions, the whole thing — there’s no solution as long as it’s this way in the city,” said the woman, who gave her name only as Salamah.

The Israeli building is aimed at “swallowing the city,” said Hatem Abdel Qader, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Jerusalem affairs. “This strong reaction from the Palestinian street sends a message to the Israelis that we will not accept that, that we will defend our land.”

The years of building in Jerusalem have erased the physical line between east and west that was once as stark as the border in Cold War-era Berlin. Today, few Israelis can even tell you exactly where the line between the sectors runs.

The Jewish neighborhoods tend to look like Ramat Shlomo — buildings of light Jerusalem stone set along streets that empty out in the morning as residents commute to jobs in the city center.

Residents of the Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhoods tend to be no more ideological than residents of west Jerusalem, a sign of how Israelis have come to feel that the Jerusalem construction — unlike West Bank settlements — is not a charged political issue. That consensus includes centrists and many doves, and likely explains why Israel’s political opposition, faced with the hard-line government’s largest blunder so far, has offered only lukewarm criticism of the move.

Israelis have always seen Jerusalem, the city at the center of the Jewish faith, as different, said Moshe Amirav, a Jerusalem expert at Beit Berl College who played a key role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that broke down a decade ago and later served as a city planner.

Immediately after Israel’s 1967 victory, he said, Israel offered to return all the lands captured in return for peace agreements — except for east Jerusalem.

Amirav, who was among the Israeli paratroopers who captured the city in 1967, said Israeli leaders went ahead with massive building projects in east Jerusalem even though they knew it contravened international laws governing occupied territory.

“Jerusalem is less about politics than it is about psychology,” he said. “In Jerusalem, one side of the brain said, ‘you can’t do this,’ but the other side said, ‘this is ours, and we will do it anyway.’”

“Over time, it simply becomes fact: united Jerusalem isn’t in the occupied territories,” Amirav said.

Speaking in parliament Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no indication that anything had changed.

“In the last 40 years, there has been no Israeli government that has limited construction in Jerusalem’s neighborhoods,” he said, proceeding to list every Israeli prime minister since 1967.