November 3, 2001	Saturday	Shaba’an 16, 1422

SHUAFAT (Arab East Al-Quds): The wrecking crew came on the first chill morning of an Al Quds winter. As a phalanx of police sharpshooters spread out across the rooftops, a yellow Caterpillar plunged its spike deep into the roof of the Abu Nia home.

A collective shudder ran through the people on the neighbouring rooftop. “Everything is gone,” said Najaat Abu Nia, who watched, shivering in her pyjamas, as the machine tore into the two-storey house. Her father, Mustafa, a pharmacist, was in tears.

In front of him, a house that had taken him two years to build was wilfully — and legally — destroyed in a little more than two hours.

This urban sprawl of Arab East Al Quds is the frontline of a struggle over demographics that is not so much secret as sanitised, where the most basic cruelty is obscured by bureaucratic order. Building permits, zoning bylaws, court hearings, and demolition orders — anodyne terms for a process that on Tuesday reduced a home for eight people to a pitiable heap: bedframes and plastic flowers, family photos and sofa cushions.

Israel has destroyed 32 Palestinian homes in Arab East Al Quds since the start of the year. That is more than double the figure demolished last year as the authorities exploit the world’s fixation on the war in Afghanistan, and its weariness with a bloody 13-month revolt in the West Bank and Gaza, to press ahead on a long-term strategy of hemming in the Palestinian population.

Meir Margalit, a member of the Al Quds municipal council from the leftwing Meretz party, said more homes had been destroyed in 2001 than in any other year in the past decade, and the authorities were planning to demolish still more by the year’s end. “There is here a quiet war that the city of Jerusalem is waging against Arab residents,” Mr Margalit said. “It is quiet because the Arab residents are afraid but also because of the American and British governments. I know they are against house demolitions, but unless there are serious sanctions the state of Israel will continue to destroy because at the end of the day they know they can get away with it.” Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions said: “House demolition is one of the issues that most ignites the Palestinian population so in some ways, this is a challenge to the US and to Europe to see how far they can push Israel to toe the line.” The demolition of Palestinian homes is entirely legal, thanks to an intricate mesh of zoning laws whose effect for the past 34 years, since Israel occupied Arab East Al Quds in the 1967 war, has been to pen a rising Arab population into a fixed space. Despite a desperate housing shortage — more than 20,000 additional homes are needed for the city’s Palestinians — the municipality of Al Quds grants only 300 building permits a year in Arab East Al Quds.

Gaining planning permission is a tedious and expensive process. The eventual cost can run to US dollars 30,000 and — unless home builders are willing to bribe a notoriously corrupt city building inspectorate — they will most likely end up without permits.

Most Palestinians, Mr Abu Nia included, do not even bother to apply — in part because they despair of getting a permit, but also because they do not want to recognize the authority of the Al Quds municipality.

Mr Abu Nia had lived in his house for five years, had paid his municipal taxes, and sought every legal remedy in the city’s courts, but still his house could not stand. “They built without permission, and the court ordered their destruction,” said Tzvi Schneider, a spokesman for the Israeli interior ministry. “The situation is simple. He built in an area that was not zoned for building but is a designated green area.”

The equation appears equally straightforward from the rooftops of Shuafat where neighbours are watching two other homes go down. In the distance, one man pointed to a crane, putting up a new house, but that was in Ramot, one of the illegal Jewish settlements on the city’s perimeters. “This is Israel. This is democracy,” he said. “Here they are tearing down the houses of Arab people and there they are putting up houses for Jews.”

The Al Quds municipality, which demolished an additional four houses on Tuesday, rejects such accusations. It says it enforces building codes on both sides of the city, although it has torn down only three structures on the Jewish side. “This kind of violation is more common and more severe in the Arab areas,” Hagai Elias, the city spokesman, said.

The wrecking campaign gained momentum after the installation of Ariel Sharon as Israel’s prime minister. Amid Israel’s complicated coalition politics, his election created a rare unity of purpose among the agencies involved in house demolitions, with the Israeli housing and interior ministries controlled by members of the ultra-orthodox Shas party, while the public security ministry and the Al Quds municipality are controlled by Mr Sharon’s rightwing Likud party.

For Israel, the imperative is demographics, and the fear that a rise in the Arab population for the city will strengthen the Palestinian claim for a capital in East Al Quds, when a final peace settlement is eventually reached. Thirty three per cent of Al Quds’s 670,000 residents are Arab. Among those aged up to 10, the proportion climbs to 44 per cent, and it is this fear of the next generation that is driving Israel’s policy, hoping to propel people out of the city by demolishing their homes, or by cancelling residency permits. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.