M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S

M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S - Jerusalem, Making It jewish

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News, Information, & Analysis that Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Do Not Want You To Know!

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ISRAEL'S QUEST TO MAKE JERUSALEM JEWISH -- A HUMAN TRAGEDY

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DESTROYING PALESTINIAN LIVES & DREAMS

MAKING JERUSALEM JEWISH

MER - The callousness, cynicism, and hypocrisy of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians is outrageous.

That it is all done with American money, arms, and political support makes it all the more outlandish, tragic and bitter.

And all this is happening is hardly the result of Bibi Netanyahu and friends taking the reigns. It's been going on now for decades, no matter who is in power from the Zionist hierarchy. Indeed, when it comes to the crucial Jerusalem area, the Labor Party -- headed all these years by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres -- has actually done more to dispossess the Palestinians and build for Jews-only than has the Likud!

This telling article from the back pages of The Washington Post a few weeks ago reveals an important part of the story. Don't expect alot of honest, hard-hitting analysis from the Post when it comes to matters Middle Eastern and especially matters relating to Israel -- most of all from its Editorial pages. But when it comes to reporting from those in the field there are occasional features of this kind that are quite insightful and valuable; this one in particular for putting a human face on the Israeli plot to dispossess the Palestinians of Jerusalem, leaving their remnants fractured, embittered, and ever-shrinking in numbers.

This article though reveals but one small part of the plot. Massive Jews-only settlements now surround the historic city greatly expanding the Jewish population -- Har Homa but the last one completing the encirclement -- while the Arab population whithers. Israeli shopping centers will soon outmaneuver even the commerce of the historic Old City which is more and more reduced to the status of a living museum full of diminishing Arabs and encroaching Jews. Even on the way to Bethlehem new Israeli shops gradually are draining away business from the Arab Bethlehem merchants.

The real story is on the land and in the numbers -- numbers which make it crystal clear that the Judahization of Jerusalem has gone a long way and is probably not reverseable any longer by diplomacy. Meanwhile there are of course the individual human tragedies. Read on.

`You Have . . . Ceased to Be A Resident'

Move Against Teacher Tears Family Asunder

By Barton Gellman

JERUSALEM -- The calamity that struck Georgette Tarazi, tearing her from her husband and forcing a wrenching choice among family bonds, came in a polite form letter from a man she never met.

The Nov. 14 notice from the Interior Ministry's regional director began "Dear Sir or Madam" and ended with cordial regards. It told the East Jerusalem Arab schoolteacher that her application to register her children as residents had been turned down.

Then came the epilogue: "For your information, you have also ceased to be a resident of the country."

Soon came word that her Gaza-born husband, jeweler William Tarazi, would no longer be receiving three-month extensions of his permit to live with her in their walk-up apartment near the Old City's Damascus Gate. On Feb. 23, refusing to live here illegally, William Tarazi packed a battered brown suitcase and returned to Gaza.

In videotape shot that morning, the couple's 10-year-old daughter Lorena wept as she sat on her father's lap. "Children are supposed to be able to be with their parents," she cried.

Since then, William Tarazi has missed his son George Antoine's first birthday on March 5 and the Easter holiday celebrated by his Christian Orthodox family April 27.

Georgette Tarazi, 39, can bring her children to their father at any time -- but the moment she reaches the Erez Crossing to Gaza, the soldiers there will take her Jerusalem identity card and she will not be able to return. That would leave no one to take care of her elderly mother, who has a bad heart. It would tear Lorena from the St. Demetri school and dump her in Gaza's far more restrictive world of conservative Islam. And it would relinquish Tarazi's claim to live in the city where generations of her family were born.

"The whole idea is a one-way valve," said Yuval Ginbar of the Israeli human rights group B'tselem. "You want to go out, no problem. You want to come back, sorry. Other forms of deportation allow you to see the violence. This is a sort of bureaucratic violence."

Tarazi's problems began when she married her husband in 1984 and moved briefly to live with him in Gaza. At the time, before the Palestinian uprising and the Persian Gulf War, Arabs could travel without permits between here and there.

By 1987, despising the Gaza life, Tarazi persuaded her husband to move back to Jerusalem with her. She taught part-time at her daughter`s Christian school, and he sold gold jewelry and later musical CDs.

Nine years later, in a letter mailed to her Jerusalem home, the Interior Ministry notified Tarazi that its records showed she was still living in Gaza and therefore had no right to a Jerusalem ID.

Tarazi has no right, either, to a hearing, even though another government agency found two months later that Tarazi is "a resident of Israel."

May 5 1997 - The Washington Post

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