A Palestinian worshipper, barred by Israel from entering Al-Aksa Mosque, listens to the Friday sermon from outside the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City. (Maan Images)

On 8 February violence broke out at the Al-Aksa mosque, revealing underlying tensions. Jerusalem is the holy city of three religions, but Israeli government policy has always been to preserve its control over the city to prevent its division, so that East Jerusalem can never be the capital of a Palestinian state.

The main road from Tel Aviv runs fairly straight until past Ben Gurion airport. Then it starts to wind up towards Jerusalem, through hills captured by the Jewish forces in 1948 at the cost of much bloodshed. It enters the thrice-holy city from the west, at a height of over 700m above sea level. Israelis, like foreigners, have a wide choice of access routes. They can reach the city centre by many other roads to the north and south.

For Palestinians from the West Bank, access to the city is another matter. If they get through the internal checkpoints, they encounter the most brutal obstacle ever invented to control and restrict movement in the occupied territories: a 10m high wall that will soon completely surround the eastern part of the city, blotting out the landscape and blocking the traditional access roads. It cuts straight across historic highways from Jerusalem to Amman (Route 417) and from Jenin to Hebron (Route 60). For West Bank Palestinians, the monstrous concrete serpent is broken only at four points: Qalandiya in the north, Shuafat in the northeast, Ras Abu Sbeitan in the west and Gilo in the south. To reach these they have to make many detours, leave their cars and cross on foot. Palestinian vehicles, with green licence plates, are strictly forbidden in Jerusalem.

Colonel Danny Tirza, a settler from Kfar Adumim, was the Israeli defence ministry's man in charge of planning and erecting what is officially known as the security fence. The Palestinians call him the "second nakba" (1). Tirza promised his grandiose plan would include 11 Jerusalem checkpoints, rather like airport terminals. That was not our impression from a brief passage through Gilo checkpoint. Everywhere there were signs: "enter one at a time", "wait your turn", "leave this place clean", "take off your coat", "obey instructions". The corridors were enclosed by wire mesh on the sides and top, like tunnels through which animals enter a circus ring. No ringmaster, though.

The gate was fitted with a small light showing when to pass. A metallic voice instructed us to put luggage through a screening machine. A vague form could just be made out behind the tinted, reinforced glass panels. Finally, a human being: a slovenly soldier, with his feet on the table and an Uzi machine pistol across his lap, who checked identity cards, whispering or barking depending on their owners' faces. At the exit were signs in three languages reading "Welcome to Jerusalem" (still 4km away) and "Peace be with you".

A separate body

The 1947 United Nations partition plan declared Jerusalem a corpus separatum, a separate body, to be run under an international UN administration. That is still its only internationally recognised status. But after the 1948 war the city was divided between Jordan and Israel, which established its capital in West Jerusalem. In 1967 Israel conquered the eastern part of the city and subsequently annexed it. In 1980 a Basic Law proclaimed Jerusalem "complete and united", the capital of Israel. Since then, the policy pursued by all Israeli governments has been to preserve Jewish hegemony over the city and prevent its division, thereby preventing the birth of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

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Khalil Toufakji is head of the map and survey department of the Arab Studies Society and advised the Palestinian delegation during the Camp David negotiations. "Demography is the key," he said. "The Israelis' absolute priority has always been to impose a large Jewish majority. But Palestinians have grown from 20% of the population in 1967 to 35%, and they could be a majority by 2030" (2). The proportional increase is not just the result of differences in birth-rates. Many Jews have been forced out by unemployment, a housing shortage and an intolerant atmosphere created by pressure from the ultra-orthodox.

Now, a 60-year-old taboo has been breached. While the master plan for 2020 maintains the 70% to 30% population ratio, the planners envisage a more pragmatic ratio of 60% to 40% (3). Meron Benvenisti, who is a leading expert on Jerusalem (4), was indignant about this: "As if there could be a correct percentage. It's pure racism. We live in the only city in the world where an ethnic population ratio serves as a philosophy." Menachem Klein, an adviser at Camp David on the Israeli side, added more calmly: "The politicians fight and the pragmatists bow to reality. We are witnessing the greatest Israeli effort to annex Jerusalem since 1967."

The first tactic in this effort was the illegal extension of the city limits. Amos Gil, director of Ir Amim (City of Peoples), ran through the figures: "The Old City covers only 1 sq km. Together with the surrounding Arab quarters, it measured 6 sq km under Jordanian rule. In 1967 Israel incorporated 64 sq km of annexed West Bank territory, including 28 villages, increasing the area to 70 sq km. When the wall around East Jerusalem is finished, the enclosed area will measure approximately 164 sq km." The Safdie Plan for the development of West Jerusalem was strongly resisted on environmental grounds.

Meir Margalit, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), said: "There's a colour here that exists nowhere else.Political green." He told us how the late Teddy Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem at the time, had responded to protests from Ornan Yekutieli, former leader of the leftwing party Meretz, at plans to build the Har Homa settlement on the site of a fine Palestinian forest. "It's only green for the Arabs," Kollek had retorted.

Ayala Ronel, an architect, explained how environmental apartheid worked. "Dusty yellow areas strewn with rubbish" were declared green zones in order to prevent Arabs building on them, but were open to Jewish settlement.

Settlement as strategy

The second tactic of Israeli strategy is settlement. Shmuel Groag, an architect on the board of Bimkom, which campaigns for full involvement of the public in the planning process, summarised the process: "The first ring consisted of seven large settlements: Gilo, Armon Hanaziv (East Talpiot), French Hill, Ramat Eshkol, Ramot, Ramot Shlomo and Neve Yaakov. The second added two more: Pisgat Zeev and Maale Adumim. Then came a third ring of nine settlements: Givon, Adam, Kochav Yaakov, Kfar Adumim, Keidar, Efrat, Betar Ilit, Har Homa and the Etzion Bloc. Together they contain half of the 500,000 settlers in the West Bank."

Michel Warschawski is the founder of the Alternative Information Centre and a major figure in the pacifist movement. He takes activists on tours to see the "underlying principle of settlement: the creation of Jewish territorial continuity at the expense of Arab territorial continuity". Waving a sheet of paper falling apart from constant handling, he quoted the former mayor of the Karnei Shomron settlement: "The aim is to ensure that the Jewish population of Yesha (5) does not live behind barbed wire, but in a continuous Jewish population belt. If we take the region between Jerusalem and Ofra and add an industrial zone at the entrance to the Adam settlement and a service station at the entrance to Psagot, we will have a continuous line of Israeli settlement."

The third tactic is total control of the lines of communication in order to fragment the Palestinian space, reduce the mobility of the population and destroy any possibility of development. Israel has not only seized, renovated and widened the existing major highways. It has also built new roads to enable settlers to reach Jerusalem as quickly as possible, and a tramline is planned for the same purpose. The result is an impressive network of four-lane highways, lit up at night, along which the trees have been cut down, "dangerous" houses destroyed and protective walls erected in the name of security.

These bypasses linking the settlements are prohibited to Palestinian vehicles, which have to use poor-quality secondary roads that are badly maintained, if at all, and are sealed off by many fixed or flying checkpoints.

The "container" roadblock outside Abu Dis controls, and often closes, the last Palestinian highway linking the northern and southern parts of the West Bank. The road deserves its name of Wadi Nar (Fire Valley). In places it is so narrow that two lorries can hardly pass, even assuming they could climb and descend its dangerous winding slopes. Not far away, settlers from the Etzion Bloc and Hebron speed along the expressway Yitzhak Rabin built for them, without encountering a single Arab. This "apartheid that dare not speak its name", as Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat calls it (6), was graphically illustrated by Colonel Tirza's fluid traffic project: where Jews and Arabs had to cross paths, bridges and tunnels would prevent them seeing each other.

Alon Cohen-Lifschitz, an architect from Bimkom, showed us an example: "To disenclave the Palestinian villages of Bir Nabala and Al Jib, the Israelis are building 2km of road 10m below ground level, closed in and covered with a wire grating, plus two tunnels and a bridge." There was worse to come in segregation: a military order was issued prohibiting, from 19 January 2007, any Israeli or Palestinian resident from carrying a non-Jewish resident of the West Bank in his car. It provoked such protests that its implementation has been frozen.

The 'Republic of Elad'

The fourth tactic is infiltration of the Old City and the Holy Basin: repossession of former Jewish property, confiscation under the law on absentees and purchases via collaborators are proceeding quickly. Meron Rappoport, a journalist on Haaretz, calls Jewish settlement in the historic centre the "Republic of Elad" (7), from the name of the settlers' organisation to which the authorities have, unusually, delegated administration of the "City of David" (8). But the number of Arab houses flying Israeli flags, and armed bodyguards strolling in the streets, show that Silwan, al-Bustan (where 88 buildings are threatened with demolition), Ras al-Amud (Maale Zeitim) and Jabal Mukaber (Nof Zion) are also being taken over. The first two houses of Kidmat Zion defy the empty Palestinian parliament on the other side of the wall in Abu Dis. A look at the map confirms that these secondary growths form a continuous diagonal line of ethnic cleansing.

"Don't stop at the figures," said Fouad Hallak, adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation negotiating team. "The 17 settlement points in the Old City and its immediate vicinity contain barely 2,600 inhabitants out of 24,000, but they are part of a tenacious strategy of dePalestinisation."

Judaicisation, the fifth tactic of the strategy, begins with symbols. A Palestinian friend pointed out the way that the decor of the Jewish city is being imposed on Arab Jerusalem. "From the most spectacular manifestations, like the memorials to Israeli war heroes and the public buildings erected in East Jerusalem, to the most trivial: paving stones, lampposts and litter bins. Not to mention the street names." (Israeli Defence Force Square, Paratroopers' Street, Central Command Street, Central Command Square.) Another Haaretz journalist, Danny Rubinstein, said "the names were given after the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, apparently so the Arabs would understand who won" (9).

People in Paris had warned us that the Old City was emptying, and in 30 years it had never seemed so dreary. "The Israelis want to settle most of it and leave a few picturesque Arab streets for the tourists, like in Jaffa," said Elias Sanbar, the new Palestinian ambassador to Unesco. He had thwarted an Israeli attempt in 2000 to get the Arab Old City listed as part of Israel's heritage.

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