The Israeli Ma’ariv newspaper yesterday carried the headline, “Omar Square in Our Hands”. The accompanying article reported a shady business deal in which two large chunks of central Jerusalem land belonging to the Greek-Orthodox Church had been purchased, without knowledge of the seller as it turned out, by Zionist Jews (apparently not Israelis), whose intent was to “liberate the lands of Jerusalem”. Liberate from what? Obviously not from foreign rule, since Palestinians in Jerusalem are not foreigners, but native to the city, as well as under Israeli occupation. So it must be the Palestinian people. We are in fact not really talking of liberation here at all, but of ethnic cleansing, although it comes in such a seemingly innocuous and apparently lawful form as land purchase.

The Greek-Orthodox Church, however, then announced that it knew nothing of the sale. A Church source stated that one of the Church’s lawyers, who has now left the country with millions of US dollars, carried out the deal behind the back of Irinous I, the Jerusalem Patriarch. In another statement on Friday, the Greek Orthodox Church said the deal is “null and void” and threatened criminal action against the buyers. But deals like this have been attempted and carried out before, often involving bewildering arrays of middlemen.

The main danger now, from a human rights perspective (not just a Palestinian rights perspective), is that the shop-owners, and businesspeople, and others, who work and live in Omar Square, most of them Palestinians, will be evicted or otherwise pressured to leave because of their ethnicity or their religions. Omar Square is just inside Jaffa Gate, the main entrance to the Old City. This fear for the welfare of original Jerusalemites is well-founded. Because of dangers such as this, confiscation of land and even purchase of land by the occupying power is forbidden under international law.

Israel, the Jewish state, enacted its Jerusalem Basic Law, claiming the city had been “reunited” as Israel’s “eternal capital”, in 1980. The rest of the world has refused to recognize the annexation of the city, illegal under international law, and all countries with full diplomatic representation in Israel have kept their embassies in Tel Aviv. Thus, not only the new landowners but also the state of Israel believe they have something to gain by judaizing the city.

In recent years, the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews, especially Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, has not been as obvious, bloody, or dramatic in Jerusalem as elsewhere in Palestine, but it is no less intense. Outright land confiscations, or the construction of the Separation Wall (in Palestinian neighborhoods only), serve the Israeli authorities and the Zionists in their systematic attempts to rid the city of its Arab population.

Jerusalem is not reunited at all. It is cut in pieces by the Separation Wall. Its Palestinian population is treated in an entirely different way from its Jewish population. It is under Israeli occupation since 1967. There is no real self-rule for Palestinians here, despite the Oslo Accords and other agreements allegedly easing or limiting Israeli occupation rule. Recently, Israel attempted to reenact its controversial 1950 “Absentee Property Law”, legalizing the wholesale confiscation of non-Jewish land in Jerusalem. Only after an intervention by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was the reenactment attempt abandoned. When Palestinians voted for a new president last January, no Palestinians were more pressured by Israel to avoid exercising their democratic rights than the Jerusalemites. The former US President, Jimmy Carter, who monitored the elections, referred to this pressure as a “big problem”, although the western media and governments hailed the elections as “free and fair”. Israelis tried to make the world believe that only a few Palestinians exist in Jerusalem and that even fewer were interested in voting, and that those who finally did, did so in an absentee manner, as if they were not in Palestine.

In fact, nearly half of Jerusalem’s entire population is still Palestinian, but it is under an intensifying Israeli and Zionist ‘civilian siege’, a siege that includes 200,000 Jews in illegal settlements in and to the east of the city, situated on land either illegally confiscated, or illegally bought, from Palestinians and other landowners. Over the last decades Palestinians in Jerusalem have become encircled by non-Palestinians as they see their own land rapidly diminishing. Israel and Zionists have been doing their utmost to create facts on the ground which preclude a contiguous Palestinian state, especially one that includes the designated Palestinian capital, Jerusalem.

It is high time for the Palestinian National Authority to approach Jerusalem again as a top priority, and not only reactively whenever new attempts are made, whether by the state of Israel or individual Zionists, to ethnically cleanse the city.