By Abdul Raouf Arnaout
JERUSALEM (AA) - Since occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has seized 87 percent of the city while trying to assert control over the remaining 13 percent.
On Dec. 6, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, sparking a wave of protest and condemnation from across the Arab and Muslim world.
Jerusalem remains at the heart of the Middle East conflict, with Palestinians hoping that East Jerusalem might eventually serve as the capital of an independent Palestinian state.
East Jerusalem, which contains the Old City, includes 17 neighborhoods in which more than 323,000 Palestinians live -- roughly 40 percent of the entire city’s overall population of about 850,000.
According to Palestinian figures, over 35,000 Palestinians now live in the Old City, which is subdivided into Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters.
The Old City’s Jewish quarter, meanwhile, is home to roughly 2,900 Jewish Israelis.
Visitors to the Old City will find countless markets (souqs), which for centuries have served as Jerusalem’s commercial centers.
Before the Israeli occupation in 1967, the city’s “Jewish Quarter” had been the Palestinian neighborhood of Al-Sharaf.
- 13 percent
According to Khalil Tufakji, director of maps and geography at Jerusalem’s Arab Studies Society, Israel has appropriated over 87 percent of the territory in East Jerusalem.
“This has been for the purpose of establishing [Jewish] settlements and institutions in the city while classifying what remains as ‘green zones’ in which construction is prohibited,” he told Anadolu Agency.
“Palestinians are left with only 13 percent of East Jerusalem, which the Israeli authorities have consistently tried to wear down and isolate,” Tufakji said.
Since 1967, Tufakji explained, Israel has built 15 Jewish-only settlements in East Jerusalem which are currently inhabited by more than 220,000 settlers.
The most prominent of these are the settlements of Ramot, Gilo, East Talpiot, Ramat Eshkol, Pisgat Zeev, Har Homa, French Hill and Ramat Shlomo.
"These were built on Palestinian land with a view to curbing the expansion of the city’s Palestinian population and ensuring Jewish demographic superiority," Tufakji said.
“Israel has intentionally built these settlements in Palestinian neighborhoods such as Ras al-Amoud, Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Sawwanah,” he added.
"Settler groups, meanwhile, have confiscated dozens of Palestinian homes in these neighborhoods,” he said.
The Israeli government also maintains several official institutions in East Jerusalem, including the Internal Security Ministry in the Sheikh Jarrah district and the Justice Ministry and Central Court on Salah al-Din Street.
- ‘Residents’
Notably, the government officially classifies Palestinian Jerusalemites as “residents” rather than “citizens”.
"Israel deliberately classifies Palestinians in Jerusalem as ‘residents’ in order to facilitate their gradual expulsion from the city," Ziyad Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights, an NGO, told Anadolu Agency.
"According to official Israeli data, the Israeli Interior Ministry has deprived 14,595 Palestinians of the right to live in the city since 1967,” he said.
Unlike what happened to Palestinians following the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Hammouri explained, Israel did not impose citizenship on East Jerusalem’s Palestinians after the 1967 occupation, but rather made it optional.
East Jerusalem’s Palestinians, however, have generally refrained from requesting Israeli citizenship.
"Only a few thousand Palestinian Jerusalemites have acquired Israeli citizenship for various reasons -- because they work for official Israeli institutions, for example, or to facilitate travel,” Hammouri said.
In 2002, Israel began building a massive separation barrier across the West Bank, effectively cutting Palestinian neighborhoods off from the rest of East Jerusalem.
"The wall cuts the neighborhoods of Kafr Aqab, Shuafat and Anata off from East Jerusalem so that it becomes necessary to pass through Israeli checkpoints to access them," Hammouri said.
Now, he added, over 140,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem live in areas located behind the wall, “depriving them of basic services and restricting their movement due to the preponderance of checkpoints”.
- No building
Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have adopted a policy of limiting the number of Palestinians in East Jerusalem by refusing to issue building permits, according to rights groups.
Building permits are issued by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality, elections for which are generally boycotted by the city’s Palestinian residents.
“The municipality makes it difficult for Palestinians to obtain building permits with a view to limiting the city’s Palestinian population," Mohamed Abu al-Homs, a member of a committee devoted to tracking settlement activity in East Jerusalem, told Anadolu Agency.
"The municipality has razed dozens of homes in Issawiya in recent years -- and in other East Jerusalem neighborhoods -- and is threatening to demolish more," Abu al-Homs said.
"Many of the city’s Palestinian residents, therefore, must resort to building without permission,” he added. “Meanwhile, permits are freely doled out for Israeli settlement building in Jerusalem."
According to Tufakji, roughly 20,000 housing units in East Jerusalem have been built without permits as a direct result of Israel’s draconian policy.
"What’s more,” he said, “20,000 additional apartments are needed in Jerusalem to absorb the natural increase of the [Palestinian] population."
"Since the early 1970s, Israel has tried to bring the Palestinian population of Jerusalem -- both east and west -- down to 22 percent," Tufakji said.
"They have put the current ratio as high as 39 percent and they desperately want to reduce it," he added.
The international community, meanwhile, never recognized Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 or its decision to annex the entire city in 1980.
- 'Status quo'
Jerusalem contains several celebrated holy sites, most notably the Al-Aqsa Mosque -- Islam’s third holiest site -- and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
For centuries, custodianship over -- and access to -- these holy sites has been governed by a "status quo," which has remained in place since the Ottoman era and was maintained during the British Mandate period and the subsequent period of Hashemite rule.
Since 2003, however, Israel has allowed Jewish settlers to enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in large numbers, prompting right-wing Israeli leaders to call for the compound’s partition into Muslim and Jewish halves.
Azzam al-Khatib, head of the Religious Endowments Authority’s Jerusalem office, told Anadolu Agency that -- despite the longstanding “status quo” -- the Israeli government sought to establish a foothold in Al-Aqsa.
"We have repeatedly urged the Israeli government to stop allowing the [Jewish] extremists into the mosque compound and to refrain from interfering in the authority’s administration of the holy sites,” he said.
“But the government has consistently failed to respond to our requests, which has led to the deterioration of our circumstances," al-Khatib added.
Jerusalem’s Christian communities, meanwhile, also complain of Israeli police restrictions on their historical access to Christian holy sites.