U.N. Finds 60,000 Palestinians Risk Eviction in East Jerusalem

JERUSALEM, May 1 -- Since he was a boy in the 1940s, Mazen Abu Diab has seen houses pop up steadily in the Bustan neighborhood of East Jerusalem, slowly filling a strip of land just outside the walled Old City with what are now about 88 homes.

Some were built with the proper permits. Others were not, particularly after Israel annexed the Arab neighborhood in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. But while Abu Diab, 63, acknowledges that some of the houses are unauthorized, he argues that the Israeli response -- the threatened demolition of dozens of buildings -- is an unfair slap at his community.

"I don't know what the Israeli government teaches a child by demolishing their home," he said.

On Friday, a United Nations report showed how deep and festering the dispute over housing has become. It estimates that as many as a quarter of the Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem have been built without permits, putting as many as 60,000 people at risk of eviction if Israel strictly enforces its rules on construction.

So far, home demolitions have occurred on a far smaller scale, averaging about 75 a year between 2000 and 2008. But the problem continues to mount because the number of building permits issued to Palestinians in East Jerusalem has remained stable at about 100 to 150 per year, providing about 1,100 fewer housing units than needed annually to keep up with Palestinian population growth, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs concludes in its study, which calls for a freeze on demolitions in East Jerusalem.

"Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem find themselves confronting a serious housing shortage caused by Israel's failure to provide Palestinian neighborhoods with adequate planning," the OCHA report says. "Because of the difficulties trying to obtain building permits from the Israeli authorities, and due to the lack of feasible alternatives, many Palestinians risk building on their land without a permit."

Israeli officials immediately rejected the U.N. agency's findings, with a Foreign Ministry official accusing OCHA of trying to influence a political debate that is beyond its humanitarian mandate.

The United States has tried to head off the possibility that the government of new Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will engage in extensive home demolitions in Bustan and similar neighborhoods. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned this year that such actions are "unhelpful" in advancing Arab-Israeli peace.

The office of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat issued a statement Friday denying "the accusations and numbers" in the report but acknowledging that Jerusalem faces "a planning crisis" in many neighborhoods, both east and west.

In an interview after Clinton's criticism, Barkat maintained that the city was trying to curb illegal construction regardless of where it occurred. Of the few dozen buildings demolished annually in the past few years, about one-third have been in West Jerusalem, according to figures supplied by Barkat's office.

But the political significance of demolitions is far more pointed in East Jerusalem, an area that Israeli land-use lawyer and activist Daniel Seidemann calls the "molten core" of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. While many Arabs firmly hope that East Jerusalem will serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state, many Jewish Israelis are adamant that the city should remain united and under Israeli control.

It is a battle being fought almost lot by lot, with Jewish settler groups and Palestinian legal organizations combing through Ottoman-era archives to try to prove ownership of particular parcels, Jewish philanthropists raising money to buy more properties, and many Palestinian residents left to worry, day by day, whether a pending eviction might be enforced.

Israeli policy, OCHA contends, has long favored Jewish settlement, with quicker permitting and higher density allowances helping the Jewish population in East Jerusalem to grow to an estimated 195,000. It is a demographic advance obvious from the Star of David flags unfurled outside new homes on the hillside above Bustan.

But it "is not part of some all-encompassing government plan to do this or that," said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "It is municipal policy."

Arab residents of East Jerusalem traditionally have boycotted municipal elections on the grounds that they are living under an occupation. "If they are not trying to influence the municipal policy from within, which they can do," Palmor said, "then they cannot complain."