Sunday, December 9, 2007
It's a complex picture. Combine this with Avi Dichter's statements about the questionable loyalty of the city's Arab residents along with rumors of a surging Hizb ut-Tahrir presence to start building up a view of that complexity: A strange struggle for Jerusalem
French Hill is being conquered by Arab residents - some of them Palestinians and some of them Israeli citizens - and that is the tip of the iceberg: 250,000 out of 450,000 people living in East Jerusalem are Palestinians who want to improve their housing conditions. Givat Hamivtar, Ramot Eshkol and nearby Ramot are changing their image: The secular or tolerant religious middle class are moving out, replaced by the ultra-Orthodox.
Jerusalem as a whole is losing its productive backbone and is deepening its dependence on state handouts. Young, secular, educated people able to earn a wage are leaving it in droves, followed by their parents. The city leadership is in the hands of ultra-Orthodox elected officials who imbue their managerial style with concepts derived from their world and priorities. This process stems from demographics whose significance is highlighted by the following projection: In about eight years the number of students in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox elementary schools will be more than three times the number of students in secular and religious public schools...
It is not known to many people:
From 1948, after the Jordanian legion (commanded by British officer named John Bagot Glubb) was able to concur the Jewish quarter of old Jerusalem, the area was immediately settled by Palestinians Arabs.(some or all of them refugees from other areas of the 1948 war)
In 1966, the UN decided to move all those people from the old city of Jerusalem. The Un built a new neighborhood in north Jerusalem near the village of Shuafat but the Palestinians in the old Jewish quarter refused to evacuate it.
So the UN started to give free food distribution in the new neighborhood – but only to residents who moved there from the quarter. Soon enough the old Jewish quarter became totally empty again.
When Israel regain control over the old city in 1967 the Jewish quarter was empty and could be resettled with Israelis without having to move any one.
Religious Jews living in Ramat Eshkol and Givat HaMivtar? Oh, the horror! Dichter neglects to mention that many of these "ultra-Orthodox" families are American olim, who are, in his words "Young [albeit not secular], educated people able to earn a wage." We visited our kids in Givat HaMivtar recently and stayed at a B&B in Ramat Eshkol. From what we saw, neither the dati Leumi (Dichter's "tolerant" orthodox Jews, although he seems to mean by that those Orthodox Jews that HE is willing to tolerate) nor secular Jews were abandoning the neighborhood.
Just for the record, that part is from the piece by Uzi Benziman, not Avi Dichter. (I could have been clearer in the post