Al QUDS: The manager of a clinic switches from car to motorcycle to speed blood samples to the lab. A homeowner abandons his suburban villa for a small city apartment. A college student leaves home two hours early for what used to be a 30-minute trip to class.
The lives of tens of thousands of Al Quds Arabs have been changed in ways big and small by a 100-km, 2 billion shekels ($465 million;euro363 million) ring of walls and fences -- Israel's biggest undertaking in the city since it captured and annexed the Arab sector in the 1967 Middle East War.
The barrier, part of a larger West Bank divider meant to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, slices through the city's Arab neighbourhoods. The 100,000 left outside it -- some 40 per cent of Al Quds’ 240,000 Arabs -- have to cross terminals with watchtowers, luggage scanners and lines for ID checks to get to downtown jobs and schools.
The result is a migration into Arab neighbourhoods inside the barrier that is pushing up housing prices. Some Arabs are even moving into Jewish neighbourhoods.
It also flies in the face of Israel's claim to have united a city that until 1967 was divided by a wall between its Jewish west and Arab east, and the new inward migration is undercutting Israel's stated goal of maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the heart of Al Quds.
Israeli officials are at pains to portray the barrier as temporary. They say the wall's cement slabs, up to two stories high, could be pulled up by cranes in a matter of days, if the city's final status was worked out in an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
The barrier went up in a hurry, starting in 2002, following a wave of suicide bombings aboard buses, in restaurants, outside synagogues. In the first four years of the Palestinian uprising that started in 2000, 172 people were killed in suicide bombings in areas where Al Quds's 470,000 Jews live.
The route was sketched hastily with little public debate, said former chief Al Quds planner Israel Kimhi. ''It might help prevent suicide bombers from entering into the city, but it's going to cause a lot of inconvenience to many thousands of people,'' he said.
The barrier is also turning Jerusalem from a metropolis into a ''dead-end city'' cut off from its West Bank hinterland, weakening its economy, bankrupting businesses in its shadow and threatening to radicalise a moderate Arab population, warned Kimhi's Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, a think tank that advises the government.
The government insists any drawbacks are outweighed by a sharp drop in attacks. ''The main issue is to prevent bombs from blowing up in the middle of Al Quds,'' said the Defense Ministry's chief barrier planner, Netzah Mashiah. He promised there would be more crossings and smart cards for commuters to reduce delays.
But the Palestinians and some Israelis believe security wasn't the only motive. The Al Quds barrier includes more than 180,000 Jews living in east Al Quds housing built after the 1967 annexation, and meanders to take in some 45,000 Jewish West Bank settlers.
A part of the barrier still to be built is supposed to thrust eastward, tripling Al Quds's municipal area while nearly cutting the West Bank in half.
Palestinians who seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip see east Al Quds as their future capital, but the barrier cuts it off from the West Bank. ''The official text is security,'' said Menachem Klein, a Jerusalem expert and former Israeli peace negotiator. ''The subtext is to demolish east Jerusalem as the metropolis of the West Bank.''
The city does not have numbers on migration, but officials believe thousands have moved.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 64 of 981 Al Quds area families questioned in a survey this summer said they moved in the past four years because of the barrier.
In A-Tur, an Arab neighbourhood of 28,000 on the biblical Mount of Olives, dozens of families have moved in every year for the past four years, Arab officials said. The influx has strained already overburdened local services, particularly schools, said Nazeeh Ansari, a community organiser.
Ansari, who speaks fluent Hebrew, escaped the overcrowding by moving his family to the Jewish neighbourhood of Pisgat Zeev. He got a mortgage on a $170,000 (euro132,500) three-bedroom apartment, cheaper than in a nearby Arab neighbourhood, where housing prices have doubled and all transactions are done in cash.
Al Quds historically has tended to segregate itself into religious and ethnic quarters, and the Ansaris are just of a few dozen Arab families in Pisgat Zeev, but the trend is picking up, said Kimhi.
In A-Tur, many of the returnees have squeezed into their parents' homes, leaving behind apartments in the satellite community of Azzaim on an adjacent West Bank hill, now cut off by the barrier. About one-fourth of Azzaim's 4,000 residents have left, said Mayor Adnan Subeh, who also resettled in A-Tur.
Accountant Ali Abul Hawwa, 68, said he spent his retirement benefits on building an apartment in A-Tur, after abandoning his home in Azzaim.
He said he moved to avoid barrier hassles and to secure the benefits that come with Al Quds residency status, such as national health insurance. Tarek Muna, a 35-year-old UN employee, cited the same motives in locking up his villa in the suburb of Bir Naballah and moving into a $500-a-month (euro390-a-month) two-bedroom apartment in noisy downtown Wadi Joz.
The barrier has perhaps been hardest on some 60,000 Arabs who live within city limits but have been ''walled out''.—AP
