Palestinian Jerusalem Faces a ‘Fourth Wave’ of Israeli Assaults

• Palestinian Jerusalem Faces a ‘Fourth Wave’ of Israeli Assaults
  by Helena Cobban, https://mondoweiss.net/
  … Inside Jerusalem itself, the Israeli government’s push to encircle, suffocate, and expel the city’s 320,000 Palestinians has greatly intensified in the months since the U.S. Embassy moved there. What these Palestinians now face can be seen as the Fourth Wave of a decades-long Zionist assault on their presence and institutions in the holy city.
  –
  The First Wave occurred back in 1948. The UN’s 1947 Partition Plan decreed that Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and a broad swathe of land around them should be made an “international city,” separate from the Palestinian Arab and Jewish statelets around it. That never happened. Jewish/Israeli fighters took over West Jerusalem and the Jordanian Army took over East Jerusalem (including the historic, walled Old City), along with the rest of the West Bank.
  –
  West Jerusalem, where many upper and middle-class Palestinians had lived in gracious, beautiful homes, was thoroughly ethnically cleansed by the Israelis. Most of those expelled ended up living, many in deep poverty, in the east of the city. The Jordanians meanwhile expelled a much smaller number of Jewish residents from East Jerusalem but allowed the Hebrew University to retain its campus there.
  –
  Jordan’s British-backed monarchs never allowed self-rule for the Palestinians of East Jerusalem or the rest of the West Bank. They simply annexed it all to their own “East Bank” land, exerting their dictatorial rule over East Bankers and West Bankers alike.
  –
  The Second Wave of Zionism’s assault on Palestinian Jerusalem started in 1967. In the short Arab-Israeli war of that year, the Israeli military captured East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and Sinai. The first steps it took to transform and Judaize any of the newly occupied areas were those it took in East Jerusalem.
  –
  Shortly after the war’s end, the Israeli government annexed East Jerusalem–within city boundaries that it greatly increased. It created a whole new legal category for the Palestinians of East Jerusalem: that of “permanent residents” of the city, but without any defined nationality. (The “permanent” part of that status is always deeply in question. )
  –
  Israel also speedily reclaimed control of the ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City while it destroyed the ancient Moghrabieh (Moroccan) Quarter—to make space for the broad plaza in front of the Western Wall. And it built a string of large new Jews-only settlements within the new city boundaries.
  –
  For the first 27 years after 1967, the Israeli overlords of Jerusalem treated the East Jerusalem Palestinians in much the same way their military counterparts in the rest of the West Bank, or Gaza, treated the Palestinians there. They seized, exploited, or transformed Palestinian private and public lands as they wished. They undertook wide arrest campaigns and tortured many arrestees. They shamelessly ripped off the economies of these captive markets and tightly censored Palestinian media.
  –
  read more.

end