Israeli Cabinet Approves Barrier Separating Parts of Jerusalem

WASHINGTON – Israel’s Cabinet approved plans yesterday to separate four Palestinian-Arab neighborhoods from Jerusalem by extending through its capital the route of a barrier dividing the Jewish state from most of the land it won in the 1967 Six-Day War.Israeli officials said yesterday that the new route of the security barrier, comprised largely of chain-link fence and barbed wire but with some concrete sections, will leave 55,000 of Jerusalem’s 240,000 Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank side of the divide.Residents of four Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem – Kfar Akab, Anata, Kalandiya, and the Shuafat refugee camp – will now have to commute through 12 proposed checkpoints to enter the city. The route of the new barrier will also separate the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim from the rest of the West Bank.The Cabinet yesterday also decided that the construction of the fence through part of Israel’s capital be accelerated to meet a September 1 deadline. This month, Israel began the evacuation of Jewish settlements and military outposts in Gaza, making the former champion of his country’s settler movement, Prime Minister Sharon, the first prime minister to cede formerly settled lands to the Palestinian Arabs.While Mr. Sharon has insisted the security barrier will not reflect the final borders of a future Palestinian state – and launched his 2000 campaign by deriding an offer by his predecessor to rend Israel’s capital – the decision yesterday by his Cabinet symbolically marks an abandonment of the Jewish state’s claims to all of the territory inside the municipal boundaries of its capital.“This is a major decision because, for almost four decades, the consensus view of Israelis and Jews abroad is that Jerusalem is Israel’s eternal unified capital,” the director of the American Jewish Congress’s Council for World Jewry, David Twersky, said. “This wall calls that position into doubt.”The Associated Press reported that the Cabinet said it sees “great importance in the immediate completion of the security fence in the Jerusalem area, in order to improve the level of personal security for the residents of Israel.”The vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, agreed. “Finishing the fence in an expedited way is an essential move to protect against the possibility and probability of increased attempts at violence after the disengagement is completed,” he said yesterday. “We know that suicide bombers have carried out a lot of atrocities in Jerusalem.”Israel began building the fence in 2002, nearly two years into the Palestinian uprisings known as the second intifada. Since construction began, its route has been changed after decisions from the country’s high court. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled the fence was in violation of international law.The favored tactic in the war by the Palestinian side has been the deployment of adolescents strapped with explosives into Jewish population centers. The current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has been a longtime critic of this strategy and campaigned this year on promises to achieve Palestinian independence through negotiations. The incidents of suicide bombings have dropped precipitously in part, Israeli security officials have said, because the fence has made it harder for suicide bombers to enter pre-1967 Israel.Mr. Hoenlein, when asked whether this could signal the end of Israel’s claims to all of its capital, said, “Jerusalem is not an issue on the table and won’t be in the foreseeable future.” He added: “This does not prejudge what the final outcome of the rest of the discussions will be. The prime minister in recent statements has made it clear that Jerusalem will remain united. The political status of Jerusalem does not change because of this decision.”Palestinian-Arab leaders yesterday criticized the Israeli Cabinet’s decision as a hindrance to future negotiated settlement. “I don’t think that with such measures Israel serves peace nor does it serve its security,” Mr. Abbas told reporters in Israel. “What Israel is doing is in fact putting obstacles on the path of peace.” A senior adviser to Mr. Abbas, Saeb Erakat, called the decision a “catastrophe,” evoking the word most Palestinians reserve for the 1948 war that created the Jewish state.

Israeli Cabinet Approves Barrier Separating Parts of Jerusalem

Israeli Cabinet Approves Barrier Separating Parts of Jerusalem

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