Northern Ireland Arts and Culture Minister Nelson McCausland has defended his call for a sympathetic voice for Israel at the Belfast Festival at Queen’s by stating that a shared future demands “balance, fairness and inclusion; you can’t have a shared future based on exclusion and discrimination.” For once I totally agree with the minister and so in the spirit of inclusion I would like to provide readers with facts, not opinions, on discrimination in Israel’s self-declared capital, unified Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, half of which is occupied territory that has been illegally annexed, Israel gives Jewish residents citizenship but denies it to Palestinians. Palestinians only have residency rights – this means their existence in their home city is by grace, not by right -they can not vote for the government and their residency can be revoked at any moment.

According to the Israeli Human Rights organisation B’Tselem, over 13,000 Palestinians have had their right to live in their home city revoked since 1967. Amongst them is the Head of the Anglican Church in Palestine, the Right Reverend Bishop Suheil Dawani who as recently as 5 March 2011 had his residency revoked. Perhaps however, he could join in with one of Mr McCausland’s gospel choirs.

But discrimination does not end there, the courageous and widely respected Israeli Committee Against House Demolition records that planning permission for Palestinians to build houses in their capital city is almost impossible to obtain; they estimate that despite a shortfall of some 25,000 housing units in the Palestinian sector of the city the Israeli authorities grant only between 50-100 building permits a year. The result has been that many Palestinians have been forced out of necessity to build homes without permission and then take the risk that these will be demolished; and since 2000 over 700 have been whilst a further 20,000 stand at risk of demolition.

The same of course is not true for Jewish only housing and up to 2003 90,000 Jewish houses had been built in East Jerusalem, most with public money.

I could go on about other aspects of discrimination in Israel’s capital, for example that there is a shortage of 1,500 classrooms for Palestinian children and that the school drop out rate stands at 50%; that the Palestinian sector is deliberately denuded of basic amenities like libraries, parks, postal and garbage services, or that more than 90% of Palestinians living outside the city cannot even visit their capital, but Mr McCausland would probably find this unbalanced. So in the interest of giving a sympathetic perspective let me give the views of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu on the need to settle Jews in the occupied Palestinian sector of the city.

In 1996 he proclaimed, “The battle for Jerusalem has begun and I do not intend to lose it.” Testifying before the UN last Monday 21 March 2011, Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine outlined what this battle has meant: illegal Israeli “settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with forcible eviction of long residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation that can only be described, in its cumulative impact, as a form of ethnic cleansing.”

Truly I am surprised Minister McCausland wants us to hear a sympathetic voice for ethnic cleansing.

Richard Irvine
Co-ordinator, Palestine Education Initiative