The Sydney Peace Prize is Australia ’s pre-eminent way of acknowledging the extraordinary people who risk their lives for the cause of peace. Past recipients have been towering symbols of justice: Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Xanana Gusmao, William Deane and Muhammad Yunus. Their achievements speak for themselves.

In stark contrast, the award of this year’s Sydney Peace Prize to Dr Hanan Ashrawi, a well known Palestinian human rights activist, politician and academic, has been dogged by spectacular controversy. The typically laconic pace of Sydney politics has been shaken by claims that Ashrawi supports Palestinian violence and opposes Israel ’s right to exist.

In response, the city council has withdrawn its support for the prize in protest against Ashrawi. The lord mayor has been accused of bowing to Jewish pressure to reject Ashrawi, in order to help her husband get elected to federal politics in an electorate with a large Jewish population. The local university has refused to allow the award to be presented in its ceremonial hall. It seems the full fury of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been dumped on the beaches of the relaxed harbour city. Ashrawi herself arrives in Sydney in early November to collect her prize, surrounded by this turmoil.

The Sydney Peace Prize is judged on three criteria: a significant contribution to global peace, an ability to further the cause of peace with justice, and a commitment to non-violence. Putting aside the provincial politicking, on all of these measures, Dr Hanan Ashrawi is a deserving and well considered choice.

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is simply impossible to achieve universal agreement on the ‘right’ choice. The history of that conflict is one of deep bitterness, which has soured this year’s award and obscured the real achievements of Dr Ashrawi. To her credit, Dr Ashrawi has refused to comment on the parochial politics and considerable vitriol behind much of the dispute.

Unlike most commentators, Hanan Ashrawi has lived her life under Israeli military occupation. At different times she has been arrested and detained, barred from her homeland, subjected to arbitrary and humiliating strip-searches at military checkpoints, held the head of a dying student, rushed wounded students to hospital, been fired on with teargas, and borne the brunt of intense international scrutiny and criticism, including hurtful assertions that she is not really committed to peace.

Despite all of this, Ashrawi has remained committed to a peaceful and non-violent solution. Since her early student involvement in human rights and legal aid, she has had a distinguished role in grassroots politics, including during the intifadah, as well as by representing Palestinians in government and at peace talks. She founded leading civil society groups devoted to citizen’s rights, dialogue and democracy.

She has also been a strong supporter of the rule of law, through strengthening judicial institutions, training and disciplining police and security forces, ensuring due process, and guaranteeing the accountability of those in power. She resigned from the Palestinian government in 1998 because of concerns about corruption, and she fell out with Arafat over her call for the democratic reform of Palestinian institutions. She plainly does not put politics before principle, even if it damages her own career.

Internationally, she has worked with the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Bank and the United Nations. It is a wonder that someone so principled and distinguished has become so embroiled in a messy local controversy, which unfairly challenges her reputation.

Yet Ashrawi is an easy person to defend, precisely because her record is so impressive. Two main accusations must be answered – first, that she has encouraged violence and second, that she rejects a two-state solution and Israel ’s right to exist.

On the first charge, Ashrawi’s record shows that she has been firmly committed to non-violence. As she plainly wrote in 2002: “Violence against civilians is morally reprehensible and repugnant regardless of the identity of the perpetrator”.

While she has often discussed why Palestinians have resorted to violence, there is a crucial moral difference between explaining the causes of violence and actively supporting it. Identifying the causes does not justify violence, but hopes to understand the grievances and desperation felt by Palestinians under occupation. Many of the views falsely attributed to Ashrawi rest on a failure to understand this distinction.

Ashrawi has rightly stated that much of the violence, while deplorable, is a response to illegal Israeli occupation, territorial expansion through settlements, the building of a physical wall of segregation, the policy of assassination, the demolition of houses and confiscation or destruction of land, political detentions and human rights abuses – including torture – in detention.

It was past winner of the Peace Prize, Desmond Tutu, who in 1989 compared the Israeli occupation to apartheid in South Africa . As Ashrawi said in 2000, Israel cannot “create a powder keg situation and then complain once the powder keg explodes”.

At the same time, Ashrawi has condemned terrorism. On Australian television in September 2003, she strongly criticised the violence of Hamas and Jihad and demanded that they commit to democracy and the rule of law. As she said: “Nobody gave Hamas or Jihad the mandate to carry out these [terrorist] actions in the name of the Palestinians.” In her view, Hamas and Jihad are not controlled by the PLO, but oppose it, precisely because, unlike the PLO, those groups do not accept Israel ’s right to exist.

Ashrawi has also observed that it was unrealistic to expect the Palestinian Authority to crack down on terrorist groups at a time when Israel was methodically destroying the institutions and capabilities of the Authority. She said that to require the under-resourced Palestinian Authority to stop the same violence that the Israeli army could not stop ‘is to set the authority up for a fall’. Pre-conditioning peace on the Authority eliminating violence was always unrealistic.

Ashrawi correctly denied that Palestinians celebrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is true that limited television footage showed some groups of Palestinians celebrating. But that hardly proves that most Palestinians reacted that way, just as footage of soccer hooligans does not prove that most soccer fans are violent. Indeed it is a bluntly orientalist view of Palestinians to believe that brief and sensational news clips reflect the experience of wider Palestinian society.

Yet it also is important to distinguish armed conflict from terrorism. Terrorism has no meaning in international law, whereas military action in self-defence by a people (or self-determination group) against an illegal occupier is well recognized in law. When Xanana Gusmao received the Peace Prize in 2000, nobody argued that he was a poor choice because he supported the East Timorese military campaign against Indonesia . The important point is that civilians must not be targeted and Ashrawi has never called for the killing of civilians, nor even for the killing of Israeli soldiers.

On the second charge, it manifestly clear that Ashrawi accepts the principle of a two-state solution and Israel ’s right to exist. She has constantly struggled for a just peace, not just any peace. She has repeatedly said that negotiations cannot trade justice for peace; that politicians cannot barter away the human rights of Palestinians in the search for a solution.

Indeed this argument has been one of her major contributions to the peace process and is why some parts of the road-map on a two-state solution have been so unacceptable. Dr Ashrawi has argued that the great inequality of power between Israel and the Palestinians has disadvantaged Palestinians in the peace process. The weakness of Palestinians is exploited by Israel , which dictates the terms of the negotiations and excludes multilateral solutions in conformity with international law.

As Ariel Sharon himself said in 1998: “The Oslo agreement is very important for the Palestinians since it is the only official agreed-upon document they got. We have another document, a much older one … the Bible.”

Under the peace deal suggested by Israel , the territory offered to Palestinians was limited in both size and quality, with Israeli settlers poaching much of the best land, water and roads. The right of return of refugees was excluded. As Ashrawi says, the foundation of Israel took over 78 per cent of the British mandate territory of Palestine , yet Israel wants to retain control over the best parts of the remaining 22 per cent comprising the occupied territories. Accepting any of the settlements amounts to consent to the acquisition of territory by force, which is indisputably unlawful under international law.

Critics say that Palestine was never a State and the Palestinians never had legal title to the land. But that misses the point. Palestinians once lived there. Then they were forced to leave. Over 4.6 million are still in exile, awaiting justice. Legal complexities do not change the fact that many Palestinians once had homes but now do not.

It is also doubtful whether Palestinians can trust their partners in peace. In 1998, Ariel Sharon told a group of Jewish militants: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” It is hard to negotiate in good faith with a Prime Minister such as this, historically known for inciting violence.

As Ashrawi said at the World Conference Against Racism in 2001, it is little wonder that Palestinians feel victimized when senior Israeli leaders in the past have called them two-legged vermin, cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs, a people that have to be exterminated unless they live as slaves, grasshoppers to be crushed, crocodiles, and vipers. Far from being a Holocaust denier, as an English scholar, a Palestinian, and a woman, Ashrawi is painfully aware of the dehumanizing and demonising language of persecution.

Israel ’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was frank about the dispossession of the Palestinians. His words should be remembered by those who blame the Palestinians for the failure of peace: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel . It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz , but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”.

Dr Ashrawi accepts it because, after so much violence, she wants peace.

Ben Saul is a Tutor in Public International Law at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He wrote this opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Dear friends

You may not know that Hanan Ashrawi has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for 2003 awarded by the Sydney Peace Foundation. Hanan Ashrawi has been subject to an unprecedented campaign of vilification and disinformation by the Zionist Establishment. There is an international campaign to have Carr and the University of Sydney dissassociate itself from the award.

The University has already withdrawn the use of its Great Hall for the presentation, despite it having been available for previous awards. The Premier of NSW Bob Carr is presenting the prize 6 November. He has so far resisted the pressure to withdraw.

The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull has caved in to the pressure and has disassociated the City of Sydney, a sponsor of the prize, from the presentation this year.

A factor is that Turnbull's husband, Malcolm Turnbull, is a very wealthy merchant banker now trying to bulldoze his way into a nomination for a parliamentary seat.

This may seem a storm in a teacup for you as someone far from the parochial squabbles of Sydney. But with the intervention of Associate Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University with an international petition now said to number 10,000, this is an international attack on the standing and credibility of a key Palestinian leader. It is an attack on the Palestinian national movement.

What you can do:

Write to:

Australian Jewish News valhadeff@jewishnews.net.au
Sydney Morning Herald letters@smh.com.au
Premier Bob Carr bob.carr@www.nsw.gov.au

Shalom

Vivienne Porzsolt
Jews Against the Occupation Sydney

Dr Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi is a woman, a professor of English, an international human rights activist, and a politician. A year ago she was chosen, unanimously, to receive the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize. The Premier, Bob Carr, will present Ashrawi with her award at State Parliament in 12 days. The first four recipients of the annual prize were honoured at functions in the Great Hall of Sydney University. They included South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999), East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao (2000) and Australia's Sir William Deane (2001). However, for Ashrawi, the Great Hall is out of bounds.

This is not because Ashrawi is either a woman, an academic or a political activist. It is because she is a Palestinian. That is enough to ensure a virulent campaign of distortion and ridicule by Jewish critics to brutalise her image and try to have Carr renege on Ashrawi's presentation and the award taken from her. So far Carr has refused to buckle. Not so Sydney University.

Earlier this year the university's chancellor, Justice Kim Santow of the NSW Supreme Court, made it known to Professor Stuart Rees, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, and to Kathryn Greiner, the foundation's chairwoman at the time, that the Great Hall would be closed to Ashrawi. Rees and an academic colleague, Ken McNabb, took the matter to Sydney's vice-chancellor, Gavin Brown. In what was called a "difficult and shameful" meeting, Brown confirmed the decision. The campaign now is about maximum political pressure for other corporate and civic sponsors to abandon Ashrawi and intimidate Carr.

Lucy Turnbull, Sydney's Lord Mayor since Frank Sartor joined Carr's ministry after the NSW elections in March, is the latest to fold her tent and take flight. Sartor, as lord mayor, had earlier arranged for the City of Sydney to be a $30,000 annual sponsor, for five years, of the Peace Foundation lecture, which is always given, in a separate function, by the peace prize winner the night before the award ceremony on the first Thursday in November.

On Tuesday this week, in a brief "Dear Professor Rees" letter dated October 20, Turnbull told Rees the Sydney City Council "will be unable to participate in this year's Peace Prize events". That is, the council was blackballing both the lecture and the award ceremony. Turnbull's reasons for doing so were a travesty: the usual ignorant mishmash of allegations forever trotted out by the usual suspects against any Palestinian with international credibility and standing in the peace process.

Lucy Turnbull should read the letter from a Jewish academic at Oxford University published in the Herald yesterday. Then she should go hide her head in shame. The letter responded to Tony Stephens's story in the Herald two days earlier about Turnbull's craven cave-in to the anti-Ashrawi campaign. It said: "Opposition to awarding the Sydney Peace Prize to Dr Hanan Ashrawi has so far been based on historical ignorance, ideological blindness, wilful malevolence or provincial political opportunism." (Are you listening, Malcolm?)

The letter continued: "Dr Ashrawi has been a rare and precious voice of reason in the peace process and her commitment to a just solution has been exemplary. She has consistently encouraged Palestinians to reject violence, despite continuing Israeli territorial expansion and systemic political oppression." (signed) Ben Saul, Tutor in International Law, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, England.

And what does Rees think of Lucy's white feather? He said yesterday: "When I negotiated the sponsorship contract with the City of Sydney, I did so with Frank Sartor, not Lucy Turnbull. She's an interesting person. I've had face-to-face communications with all the major corporate sponsors who support us over this issue. I even flew down to Melbourne to talk to Rio Tinto. But Lucy Turnbull and co are like the Medicis of the Town Hall. She never talks to me. All I got was this summary note a couple of days ago in which, for her own purposes, she completely misinterprets Ashrawi's public statements and says she won't publicly support us this year.

"In other words, she won't be seen in the same company as Ashrawi. She doesn't even want to be seen in the lecture theatre. Apparently it's more than her husband's political life is worth."

Ah, yes, of course - Malcolm Turnbull's much publicised stalking of the Liberals' Peter King in his pursuit of the eastern suburbs' federal seat of Wentworth. Lucy Turnbull has gone to ground since her "Dear John" letter to Rees this week. But a senior business figure phoned Rees on Tuesday to tell him of a conversation he'd overheard at a function the previous night. It apparently included Lucy being told something like: "That wretched King is going around saying you support the Palestinians because you're a party to this peace prize."

Rees commented: "So Hanan Ashrawi gets her name sullied and ridiculed because the Turnbulls want to be more important that they already are."

And Kathryn Greiner? Greiner was chairwoman of the Sydney Peace Foundation for four years until her resignation this year over an issue of solidarity involving her husband, Nick, against the Senate of Sydney University and unconnected with the peace prize bitchiness. She was one of the jury of six who selected Ashrawi unanimously in September last year as this year's recipient (the other five: Rees; social researcher Hugh Mackay; Dr Jane Fulton from University management; Stella Cornelius, Sydney's 83-year-old grand dame of conflict mediation; James McLachlan, a director of Kerry Packer's PBL).

Greiner remains a non-voting member in support of Rees. But two weeks ago, on October 9, she phoned Rees to talk frankly about her concerns with an accelerating campaign against Ashrawi. A file note of their conversation reads:

KG: "I have to speak logically. It is either Hanan Ashrawi or the Peace Foundation. That's our choice, Stuart. My distinct impression is that if you persist in having her here, they'll destroy you. Rob Thomas of City Group is in trouble for supporting us. I think he must have had a phone call from New York. And you know Danny Gilbert [partner in the law firm, Gilbert and Tobin] has already been warned off."

SR: "You must be joking. We've been over this a hundred times. We consulted widely. We agreed the jury's decision, made over a year ago, was not only unanimous but that we would support it, together."

KG: "But listen, I'm trying to present the logic of this. They'll destroy what you've worked for. They are determined to show we made a bad choice. I think it's Frank Lowy's money. You don't understand just how much opposition there is. We cannot go ahead. If only there was progress in the Middle East, this would not be such a bad time."

SR: "I won't be subject to bullying and intimidation. We are being threatened by members of a powerful group who think they have an entitlement to tell others what to do. This opposition is orchestrated. The arguments are all the same - that Hanan Ashrawi has not condemned violence sufficiently, that she was highly critical of Israel in her address to the UN's Johannesburg Conference on racism, and wilder accusations that do not bear repetition."

KG: "But you're not listening to the logic. The Commonwealth Bank - I was at a reception last night - is highly critical. We could not approach them for financial help for the Schools Peace Prize. We'll get no support from them. The business world will close ranks. They're saying we are being one-sided, that we've only supported Palestine."

SR: "Kathryn, we need to avoid the trap of even using the language of 'one side'. That's not the issue. We are being bullied and intimidated and you are asking that we give way to it. The letter writers and the phone callers who this group encourage have spent weeks bullying a 25-year-old colleague of mine who handles the foundation's administration. You are asking me to collude with bullying."

KG: "I'll tell you how serious this is. Bob Carr won't come to the dinner. He'll flick the responsibility to [his deputy, Andrew] Refshauge at the last minute. And you won't get the Town Hall. It is more than Lucy's life is worth. They will desert us as well."

SR: "I've never given way to bullying. Public life is too much characterised by cowardice. If we give way I'd be so ashamed I couldn't face myself. The image of the Peace Foundation would be shameful. Our reputation would count for nothing."

KG: "My friend, I am telling you what the reality is. The foundation will be destroyed. I'd hate to see its work come to nothing over this. Our critics are saying it's an awful choice."

SR: "These critics are 'they' and 'them', invisible but powerful people. They stay powerful because they are invisible. They bully and intimidate in the same breath they behave as unblemished pillars of the community. Do you mean to say that in cautious, often gutless Australia we are not going to follow through on this? No. I remain completely committed to our decision."

Watch this space.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”