“Husseini Warns Against Continued Israeli Occupation in Jerusalem.”
Report from a Palestine Center briefing with Faisal Husseini

12 April 2000—In a Center briefing on 6 April 2000, Faisal Husseini, the principal official of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, expressed hope for the Middle East peace process, although his optimism hinged less on Palestinian-Israeli negotiations than on the Palestinian will to maintain a dynamic presence in “the center of Palestine.” While the peace process remains suspended “in a moment of opportunity,” it is, he suggested, equally poised to come crashing to the ground. This is because it is held hostage by Israel’s “unilateral actions,” actions that may force both Palestinians and Israelis to “pay a high price.”

If Israel continues to hold its commitments in abeyance, Husseini warned, “Palestinians will choose other roads” to self-determination. Their example will be southern Lebanon, where Israel, if it makes good on Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s pledge to unilaterally withdraw from its self-styled “security zone,” will have demonstrated that, “by violence, [it is] ready to leave without any condition.”

But while the case of Israel’s nearly two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon may be instructive, it is far less complex than the Jewish state’s “policy of the three circles” toward Jerusalem. Israel’s de facto rule over all of Jerusalem, Husseini argued, is a result of the deliberate “isolation, deportation, and replacement” of that city’s Palestinian residents.

Affirming that “Jerusalem was always the center of [Palestinian life],” Husseini described two sets of “disasters” that befell the city in 1948 and 1967. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Israel gained control of West Jerusalem and “kicked out” tens of thousands of Palestinians. Zionist forces then “emptied” neighboring areas of their Arab inhabitants, effectively encircling West Jerusalem—the “most advanced part of the city”—with a Jewish-only presence. With the Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, control of the Palestinian capital was “moved to Amman.”

Disaster struck again for the Palestinians in 1967, when the remainder of Jerusalem was occupied and neighboring Palestinian areas were consumed by the expanded municipal boundaries of the city. Moreover, any Palestinians who were not residing within those boundaries at the time of the occupation were stripped of their residency rights. Since the 1967 war took place in June of that year, nearly half of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population (some 45,000 people) was working abroad in Jordan and the Gulf states. But even those Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem “were considered foreigners” by the Israeli authorities, who granted Palestinian Jerusalemites “residency” in their city.

Diluted though it was, the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem became a rallying call for popular mobilization. While Israel attempted to “change the reality” on the ground by seizing control of religious sites, schools, and health care services, Palestinians fought to maintain authority over these municipal functions. They set up the “Islamic Higher Committee,” which “succeeded in protecting our holy places … and waqf [Islamic trust].”

When Israel imposed a state curriculum in Jerusalem’s schools, the “Palestinian response was to open new schools.” After one of the largest of Jerusalem’s private institutions, the Rashidiyyeh school, was taken over by the Israeli ministry of education, the school’s population “went from 500 to two” as students defected to makeshift, Palestinian-administered classrooms. It then became clear that Palestinians had no intention of succumbing to Israel’s plans for them, and the municipal government “got the point”: Palestinians would control their own schools, with the one condition that Hebrew would continue to be taught.

Palestinians also retained control over Jerusalem’s Makassed Hospital. Before the facility was complete, the Israeli authorities planned to seize it and turn it into a police station. Preempting this, Palestinians, “within 48 hours,” filled the facility with beds, patients, and doctors. So swift was the operation that, by necessity, “not all the doctors were doctors, and not all the patients were patients.”

If Palestinians managed to maintain some control over their religious sites, education, and health care, they were powerless to stop the influx of Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem. But even this concerted effort to alter the demographic balance of Jerusalem is not cause for despair. Husseini noted that, despite Israel’s aggressive settlement policy, the Palestinian population of Jerusalem actually increased from 25 percent, in 1967, to 27 percent, in 1993. The larger Jewish population translates into “de facto, not de jure” Israeli control over Jerusalem, a fact that is confirmed by the international community’s consistent refusal to bestow legitimacy on Israel’s illegal claims.

In principle, this international support remains an important source of strength for Palestinians, allowing them to “succeed in keeping Jerusalem a Palestinian city.” If Husseini revealed any pessimism, however, it was regarding the international community’s unwillingness to criticize Israel for its ongoing closure of Jerusalem. By setting up military checkpoints, Israel refuses entry to all Palestinians who do not hold permits. Even those who do obtain permits can have their entry into the city severely restricted and their clearance revoked without notice.

These Israeli assertions of sovereignty—what Husseini called “the logic of power”—cannot sway the Palestinian commitment to an “open, free-access” Jerusalem. Palestinians, said Husseini, remain united; although they constitute less than one-third of Jerusalem’s population, their collective will is stronger than that of the Jewish population, whose “secularist and fundamentalist” factions do not even “communicate with one another.”