The battle for Jerusalem is entering a new phase as Israel continues to build new settlements in the east of the city and a series of violent attacks by lone Arab attackers ratchets up the tension
- The Observer, Sunday July 27 2008
Palestinian Fawzia al-Kurd walks past a house displaying Israeli flags in the neighbourhood of occupied east Jerusalem where she lives with her family Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty
Fawzia al-Kurd’s home is nothing special. She has lived within its walls for the past quarter of a century, in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. The house is tidy. But at first glance, it would not appear to be worth $10m.
That is the sum that the al-Kurd family claim they were offered by Israeli buyers as an incentive to move on, a figure confirmed by their lawyer. Fawzia refused to make a deal, whatever the price. It would have hurt her ‘integrity’ to take it and leave, she said. So last week she received an eviction notice, based on an arcane legal claim to the site that her husband first called home in 1956.
If she and her family are forced to leave as a result, ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers from a company called Nahlat Shemoun - linked to a nearby Jewish shrine - will take over half of the house. Settlers have already occupied her illegally built extension. The Kurd house may soon be draped with Israeli flags - as is another a handful of metres distant - and Arab East Jerusalem will have shrunk perceptibly once more.
‘Their objective [in trying to evict me] is political’, said Fawzia. ‘They are claiming as theirs something that is not.’
The story of Fawzia’s house reflects the larger battle for the future of Jerusalem, a city contested with an intensity and urgency unmatched anywhere else in the world. In the interminable saga of the Middle East peace process, agreement on the ‘final status’ of the Holy City remains as elusive as ever.
As Fawzia pondered her eviction notice, Gordon Brown arrived in town to tell the Knesset that he favoured Jerusalem as a shared capital of two separate states: Israeli and Palestinian. US presidential hopeful Barack Obama followed, and adroitly back-tracked on a recent assertion that the city, as the capital of Israel, ‘must remain undivided’. ‘Final status,’ he said, would be for the ‘two sides to negotiate’.
What is at issue now is what has been at stake since Israel’s foundation and before: how can two peoples’ claim on a city as the centre of their national ambitions ever be reconciled? Since the ‘uniting’ of Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, when Israeli troops overran Jordanian positions on the east side of the city, Palestinians have largely watched, furious but impotent, as Israeli construction in Arab East Jerusalem has proceeded apace. Israeli flags dotted around Palestinian quarters bear defiant testimony to Jewish insistence on a unified city and capital.
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