It is critical to recognize that more than five decades of US policy paved the path for Trump’s recent dramatic moves in support of Israel, including the administration’s decisions to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the divided city as Israel’s capital, and the choice to drop the word “occupied” from its description of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
Though Trump is indeed only signing into ink what several prior US administrations had already consistently agreed to (and more importantly, acted on) in pencil, there are tangible consequences of Trump’s actions that are already negatively impacting Palestinians, particularly those directly affected by housing demolitions and evictions due to a spike in settlement expansion in Jerusalem since Trump took office.
According to data acquired from the Jerusalem Municipality by Israeli watchdog organization Peace Now, in the first two years of Trump’s presidency, 1,861 housing units were approved in East Jerusalem settlements. This is a 60% increase from the 1,162 approved in the previous two years. Permits for settler housing issued in 2017 were at their highest, 1,081 permits, since 2000. As the Associated Press notes, this data already shows a significant discrepancy, but cannot even account for the number of Palestinians who do not apply for permits due to reasonable expectations of systematic discrimination and denial.
Furthermore, B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, documents 169 houses and non-residential structures demolished in East Jerusalem in 2019 alone, more demolitions than in any single year since at least 2004.
At the end of my most recent trip, I spent a night in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiyya, staying in the apartment of a Palestinian friend of a friend. Not far from the entrance of Isawiyya, on Mount Scopus, you can see settlements, including Pisgat Ze’ev, which has had new construction in recent years. Ziad Ghneim, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian and lifelong resident of the city, told me that parts of Isawiyya have become “a big mess,” with horrible conditions for many people living there. “It looks like another refugee camp,” he explains, his voice tinged with dismay.
Ziad, who goes by Abu Hassan, runs the political tourism company Alternative Tours, which operates in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. He tells me that in the less than two months between our meeting in Jerusalem in November 2019 and our early January phone conversation, he knows of at least 12 home demolitions that have occurred in Jerusalem alone.
Demolitions are ongoing within a context of fear. Isawiyya in particular is seen by Palestinians as a site of “collective punishment,” especially following near-constant raids that Israeli police have been conducting in the neighborhood over the past several months. In June, a 21-year-old Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli forces for reportedly discharging firecrackers, “in circumstances which did not pose a threat of death or serious injury to Israeli forces, raising concerns about excessive use of force in violation of the right to life” according to OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
OCHA also reports that 41 percent of all child detentions by Israeli police recorded in East Jerusalem are of children from Isawiyya. Children as young as five years old have been chased and apprehended by police. More than 600 residents have been arrested since the start of the period of intensified raids, and approximately a third of these people are reported to be minors.
OCHA has documented numerous violations of children’s basic human rights, such as police officers’ pursuit of a six-year-old boy, who is reported to suffer from asthma and a heart condition. The child, accused of throwing stones, was yanked from his mother’s arms, and his mother was instructed that he should be confined to the house. His father was summoned to appear at a police station the next day for interrogation. An eight-year-old girl, whose family’s home is in a building located next to the community high school, was injured in July when Israeli police entered the school to remove Palestinian flags. They set off a sound bomb, a fragment of which hit and injured her eye.
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Carly A. Krakow | Radio Free (2020-02-12T23:00:00+00:00) Settlement expansion in the Occupied West Bank – Part 1: unjust pasts and interrupted futures. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/12/settlement-expansion-in-the-occupied-west-bank-part-1-unjust-pasts-and-interrupted-futures/
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