One hill too far

Activists of the Israeli peace movement have known for many years the name Har Homa, as a distant threat hanging on the horizon. It came up occasionally in meetings with Palestinians, during international conferences, and especially at the annual proccessions of Israelis and Palestinians held each December in the town of Beit Sahour. We have always known that this struggle, if and when it came, would be a major one. But most members of the general public were not at all aware of the issue. (Indeed, even now -- with the name conspicuous in every news broadcast -- many inhabitants of the city of Jerusalem itself hardly know where the place is).

Until 1967, nobody considered Jebl Abu Ghneim -- the name of this Arab hill -- to be part of Jerusalem. It was just a hill located between the town of Beit Sahour and the villages of Umm Tuba and Sur Baher, on top of which the Jordanian army established a (not particularly important) outpost. Then came the war of 1967, and the victorious state of Israel extended the boundaries of Jerusalem enormously in all directions, and declared all of the territory taken in to be part of the sancrosanct "United Jerusalem, Indivisable Capital of Israel". Jebl Abu Ghneim was engulfed, together with the villages of Umm Tuba and Sur Baher; the new Jerusalem municipal boundary -- which serves also as the dividing line between 'annexed territory under Israeli law' and 'occupied territory under military law and administration' -- was drawn just south of Abu Ghneim, seperating the landowners in Beit Sahour to the south from their property on the slopes of the hill.

The 1970's and early 1980's saw a concerted move to establish a solid Jewish presence in the new "parts of Jerusalem". Great blocks of land were confiscated "for public purposes". Under Israeli law, "public purposes" are whatever the government defines them to be; in this case, "public purposes" meant constructing tens of thousands of houses for Israeli Jews, and not a single one for the original Palestinian inhabitants. Thus, a wide ring of Jewish "new neighborhoods" was established, seperating the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from the adjacant Palestinian towns of the West Bank.

But to the south, a single link was missing from this chain: at Jebl Abu Ghneim. Even in the 1970's, the government planners had not overlooked this site; the Palestinian landowners were forbidden to construct anything on their lands, under the pretext of keeping the wooded hill "green". At that time, then Defence Minister Moshe Dayan vetoed any further moves; construction on the site might have hindered plans which Dayan had -- to cultivate the Christian population of Beit Sahour and its neighbor Bethlehem, and play them off against the Muslims.

But Dayan fell from power, and the gambit of sowing divisions between Christians and Muslims with him and, in the 1980s, the planners started giving serious attention to this overlooked hill.

Land ownership on the hill was found to be divided into three categories. A big part consisted of several dozen plots owned by Palestinian families from Beit Sahour and Umm Tuba; a second part had been purchased in 1970 by the Israeli building contractor David Myr, in a rather shady deal (the Palestinians who supposedly sold him the land went immediately afterwards to the United states and disappeared); still a third part of Jebl Abu Ghneim was recorded as having been owned by the Jewish National Fund before the Jordanian army conquered the area in 1948, and the courts ruled this ownership to be still valid (Palestinian ownership of lands which were conquered by the Israeli army in 1948 is invariably denied).

Both the Palestinian plots and the one in possession of David Myr were confiscated "for public purposes", thus giving the government legal possession of the entire hill (JNF lands are automatically administered by the government). Plans were drawn up to establish on the spot a large Jewish neighborhood; from the big number of synagogues and other religious institutions provided for in these plans, the new neighborhood seems to be mainly intended for ultra-Orthodox inhabitants, though this was never openly stated.

Much of this took place under the aegis of Labor governments and in the municipal administration presided over by the affable Teddy Kollek, who continued to enjoy the international reputation of being a liberal and a moderate.

By the time the Har Homa plans were drawn up, the Intifada was already in full swing. The inhabitants of Beit Sahour, who had impressed the world with their persistent refusal to pay Israeli taxes, alerted their contacts in the Israeli peace movement to the impending settlement plans for Jebl Abu Ghneim. First to be involved was the Rapprochement group, which is in constant contact with the Beit Sahurians, then Gush Shalom and Peace Now.

It was the Ir Shalem association, linked to Peace Now, which took up the struggle on the judicial level. For years its lawyer Danny Seidmann, representing the Palestinian landowners, managed to postpone the project, skilfully opposing each step of the building plans' approval through the zoning committees' apparatus. He managed to get several injunctions from the Supreme Court on procedural grounds (the planners, in their haste to get the plans approved, cut quite a few corners). A parallel judicial struggle was waged by the dispossesed Israeli contractor David Myr, who asked for all the confiscations to be cancelled and for both himself and the Palestinian landowners to be allowed to build on their respective plots. Ir Shalem and the Palestinian land owners cautiously accepted him as "a tactical partner".

All the appeals were ultimately rejected, but they and the public campaign associated with them succeeded in halting the project for several years, and in making it politically controversial as no similar project in "Greater Jerusalem" had been before.

In all the appeals, the Supreme Court refused to deal directly with the principal issue raised by Adv. Seidman: Is it acceptable, by basic democratic norms, to confiscate lands "for public purposes" from persons belonging to one ethnic group and then use the land to construct housing intended exclusively for members of another ethnicity?

Going seriously into this could have led the court to conclusions with fundamental consequences, not only with regard to Har Homa but concerning the land policies enacted throughout Israel by all governments since 1948. Instead, the judges dropped the hot potato by proclaiming the issue of the future Har Homa inhabitants to be "still hypothetical" and offering to the appellants an option of "appealing again, after the plan gained ministerial approval" -- an option which was, in the event, to prove illusory.

By mid-1996 all legal hurdles were removed, and work on the project could have started -- but the public campaign, though not very intensive, was enough to make both Rabin and Peres cautious, particularly after having experienced the Jerusalem land confiscations fiasco in 1995. Thus, they prefered to let the Har Homa project hang in limbo, without the Interior Minister's signature which is legally required before work on the ground could begin.

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Netanyahu, during his first months in power, did not seem eager to change the status quo regarding the Har Homa Project. At the end of 1996, a senior official at the Housing Ministry told to Kol Ha'Ir weekly: "We have made all the technical preparations, but it is in vain. The Har Homa Plan is dead. Netanyahu does not want to touch it, he is even more apprehensive than the Laborites".

Was it all a charade, just designed to lull us into letting down our guard? Looking back on the past weeks, as this crisis was inexorably building up, it still does not seem so. In the early weeks, Netanyahu seemed ill at ease: trying to buy time, delaying the crucial cabinet meetings, talking about a symbolic Har Homa decision without a timetable, offering the hardliners other concessions such as the "settlement linkage" between Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim to the east -- potentially much bigger and far more devastating to Palestinians then Har Homa, but with an implementation date far in the future. Also, it seemed quite obvious that Netanyahu would have liked the Supreme Court to get him off the hook and issue an injunction which would prevent work on Har Homa from actually starting -- but the judges seemed to have no desire to pull the Prime Minister's chestnuts out of the fire.

On the other hand, several press items published in January, based on semi-official leaks to well-connected newspaper commentators, mentioned Netanyahu as having told his aides that a major confrontation with the Palestinian Authority was likely to erupt sooner or later. But it seems that he did not expect it so soon; in those newspaper articles it was expectated that 1997 would pass more or less smoothly in Israel's relations with the Palestinians, that the momentum of the Hebron Agreement would last at least that much.

The next crisis was not expected before mid-1998, the scheduled time for the third and last West Bank redeployment which -- as all commentators agreed -- could not pass without trouble, given the great gap between what Netanyahu intended to offer and what the Palestinians expected to get. Meanwhile, 1997 was expected to be, in the first place, a year of negotiations on the Syrian track.

The logical conclusion seems to be that the timing of the crisis was not chosen by Netanyahu but by his hardcore rebels, who wanted to derail the process before any more territory gets into Palestinian hands. And at some moment in the past weeks Netanyahu had apparently come to the decision to brazen it out, right here and now, and resolve his domestic crisis by creating an external one.

Possibly it happened on his visit to Russia, at which he by chance witnessed Yeltsin flexing his muscles and firing his entire cabinet. When Netanyahu went to Moscow, there was still much talk of delaying the start of work on Har Homa by some technical or legalistic pretext; when he came back he stated right in the airport "If we give in on this we have lost the Battle of Jerusalem" -- burning the bridges behind him.

Certainly, the right wing was correct in its estimate that the Labor Party opposition would fare badly in this crisis, being torn right down the middle and taking agonising weeks before they came to the conclusion of voting against the government in the Knesset debate on Har Homa. The zigzagging Labor position was finally worked out into an unconvincing formula: "It is Israel's right to build anywhere in United Jerusalem, but this is the wrong timing". It was easy for Netanyahu to comment that "if 'right timing' means a time when the Arabs would consent, then it will never be."

Adding insult to injury

President Clinton of the United States has much to answer for. Certainly, he did not want this crisis -- but he also did not exert all his power to prevent it. On the contrary, the U.S. mobilised its U.N. veto power on behalf of Netanyahu, and the President could only repeat again and again the impotent words: "I wish Netanyahu had not taken that decision" -- as if the whims of the Prime Minister of a small Middle East country and those of a hardliner nationalist faction in that country were a law of nature which the world's single remaining superpower was powerless to change. Was it the lukewarm attitude of the Labor Party which paralysed the President of the United States? At that time, Ha'aretz reported Netanyahu as telling Clinton of his sincere wish to continue the peace process, but asking for his "understanding" that "some concessions have to be made in order to appease the hardliners."

Instead of blocking Har Homa, the U.S. bent its ingenuity in attempts to devise some "fitting compensation" which Arafat might be expected to accept. At his Washington visit in the first week of March, the Palestinian leader was received with great warmth and an outward show of cordiality, getting the reception of a de-facto head of state and having the Palestinian Authority's relations with Washington conspicuously upgraded -- but denied any concrete help with regard to Netanyahu's settlement plans.

The first stage of redeployment, on the scheduled day of March 7, was supposed to do the trick. Netanyahu promised the Americans to be "generous"; he trumpeted the fact that he was going to give the Palestinians ten percent of the West Bank; the supposed enormity of the act was underlined by the outcry of the hardliners, and by Netanyahu's highly publicised struggle to get the redeployment approved in the cabinet (by ten votes to seven). It did seem to impress the general Israeli public, including many supporters of the peace movement. Surely, after such magnanimity the Palestinians would not make too much trouble over that little hill in Jerusalem, right? Wrong. Very wrong. The Palestinians were not even tempted. In fact, they were very angry and insulted by the offer.

The Palestinians noticed what the Israeli press overlooked -- that most of the territory Netanyahu offered them was already in their hands: they were parts of the "B" area, which is under Palestinian Authority control. True, in such areas the Israeli Army reserves the privilege of making occasional raids, a privilege greatly resented by the Palestinians, and which Netanyahu was now ready to give up. Neverhtheless, this could in no way compensate for the fact that Netanyahu offered a mere 2% of the "C" area which is still under total Israeli occupation. At present, "C" includes some 70% of the entire West Bank; simple arithmetic clearly indicates that a government which gives up only 2% of this territory in the first of three scheduled redeployments probably has no intention of ever disgorging the bulk of it.

The decision to go ahead with the Har Homa project, the meagre size of the proposed redeployment and the fact that both decisions were taken unilaterally by Israel all added up to one forceful conclusion: Netanyahu had no intention of giving the Palestinians something coming even close to their most minimal demands.

The arrogant manner of the Israeli negotiators, coming not to negotiate but to "inform" the Palestinians of the decisions taken unilaterally and unalterably by the Israeli cabinet, was infuriating -- leading the chief Palestinian negotiator Abu-Mazen, known for his moderation, to resign and refuse to participate in any further meeting. And for good measure, Netanyhu had his Police Minister, Kahalani, issue orders for the closing of four Palestinian offices in East Jerusalem. (These orders were later suspended and not implemented; Netanyahu might, indeed, have issued them just so as to be able to make a small concession.)

With the Palestinians rejecting scornfully Netanyahu's meager offer for redeployment, the idea of offering the Palestinans concessions in return for aquiescence in Har Homa was nearly killed; nevertheless, the Americans tried to put together a "package of confidence-building measures" which they still hoped might do the trick. These included opening the Palestinian International Airport and Sea Port in Gaza and allowing "safe passage" for Palestinians between The West Bank and Gaza Strip -- all of them matters of great importance which were already promised to the Palestinians in Oslo, but which Arafat could not possibly accept in return for what amounted to endorsement of Israeli settlement activities.

The Palestinians were even less impressed by Netanyahu's offer to "counterbalance" Har Homa by permitting 3,000 Palestinian families in East Jerusalem to build houses on their own land, a permission which was hitherto denied and which even now Netanyahu promised to grant "within the coming years".

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