Israel accelerates pace of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem

From Khalid Amayreh in East Jerusalem

"While playing tricks with the American-backed Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and other Arab leaders, the Israeli apartheid regime is accelerating the pace of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli press on Sunday revealed that the racist measure of stripping native Palestinian Jerusalemites of their “residency rights” in their own town by the apartheid Israeli government was being carried out at an accelerated pace.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’retz reported that the number of East Jerusalem residents whose “permanent residency status” has been revoked has increased by more than six times in just one year. Quoting data made available to the human rights group, B’tselem by the Israeli Interior Ministry, Ha’aretz said the number of residencies revoked stood at 222 in 2005. In contrast, the number rose to 1363 in 2006, the highest since 1995, when an anti-Arab Haredi orthodox interior minister ordered thousands of East Jerusalemites’ residency rights revoked.

The minister Eli Suissa, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, then cited a series of concocted reasons to justify the draconian and inherently racist measures, including living outside Jerusalem and obtaining an additional citizenship. Suissa, according to Ha’aretz, made it extremely hard for East Jerusalemites (Arabs) to acquire construction permits. The Islamophobic policy eventually caused a serious housing shortage among Palestinians in East Jerusalem , forcing many to seek housing elsewhere.

Israel also systematically destroys Palestinian homes constructed without a building license, leaving tens of thousands of young Palestinians in East Jerusalem one option: emigration.

The brazenly racist policy is applied to non-Jews only since any Jew, merely by virtue of being a Jew, has an automatic right to full citizenship in Israel regardless of how many foreign passports he holds and whether he lives in Israel or abroad.

Human Rights groups operating in occupied Palestine have described the new policy as “obviously racist.” A spokesperson for the B’Tselem human rights group said they might seek to challenge the racist measure in court.

However, past intervention by human rights group in this regard made very little progress as the Israeli government refuses as a matter of principle to adopt the same standard of justice to Jews and non-Jews in Israel . Israel is defined as a Jewish state and any Jew anywhere in the world can become an Israeli citizen as soon as he or she arrives in Israel. However, non-Jews, e.g. Palestinians, are accepted as quasi-citizens only if they are willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state and recognize that Jews have certain fundamental privileges over non-Jews.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed the predominantly Arab town soon afterwards. Since then, the apartheid Israeli state has transferred hundreds of thousands of its citizens to Jewish-only settlements built in East Jerusalem and its suburbs in a frantic effort to Judaize (and strangle) the town and obliterate its Arab-Islamic identity.

The bulk of the international community doesn’t recognize Israel ’s annexation of E. Jerusalem . However, because of Jewish domination of American politics and policies, successive US government always cowered before Jewish pressure and vetoed UN Security Council resolutions denouncing Israel and demanding its withdrawal from occupied Arab land."