Battle for possession of East Jerusalem goes on relentlessly

THE BULLDOZERS pushed their shovels on the wooded hill-top near Jerusalem, cutting white roadways into the chalk surface, toppling young trees planted since Israel occupied the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza in 1967.

These were pine trees all, three and four metres tall, leaning eastward, blown landward by the prevailing winds from the Mediterranean Sea. Against the pale morning sky to the south-east the white spire of the Church of the Nativity identified Bethlehem three or four kilometres away.

The Israeli settlement of Gilo is to the east, a blank cliff of buildings rising on the summit of the ridge of Judean bills. Lorries carrying slowly turning conical barrels of liquid cement moved along the roadway to the construction site up a steep and dusty slope. At the foot a Palestinian youth bent his back into lifting squared blocks of white stone on to a wall to contain the highway which will connect the new suburb of 6,500 "housing units" to Israel's "eternal capital".

The battle for possession of East Jerusalem, captured by Israel 30 years ago, goes on relentlessly day by day - a battle as important for the Middle East as the battle for Little Round Top, a very similar wooded hill at Gettysburg, in the American Civil War.

But the battle for this hilltop already has been won by Israel; a team from the Palestinian Authority, which said it would not negotiate with the Jewish state unless construction here ceased, met an Israeli team on Sunday in Cairo. Although little or no progress was made, the teams were due to meet again yesterday.

Mr Amos Radian, an Israeli diplomat seconded to the office of the Likud Party Mayor of Jerusalem, Mr Ehud Olmert, told The Irish Times that the best the Palestinians could hope to achieve was a slowing-down of work on the infrastructure, which is expected to take a year and a half at the present rate. Mr Olmert, he said, would not let the Prime Minister stop the work at Har Homa.

Israel had two reasons for building on this site, Mr Radian said "the scarcity of land" for affordable housing in the Jerusalem area, and Israel's need for a strategy to "close the southern boundaries of Jerusalem and prevent the Palestinian autonomy, from spilling over into the city.

While driving to the site, Mr Radian explained that Israelis and Palestinians had two main differences over the land. The first was over possession. On the one hand, there was the land Israel occupied in 1967, claimed in full by the Palestinians. This is called the "political land" by Mr Radian. On the other hand, there was land which Israel claimed due to the fact that before the 1948 war, it belonged to Jews who held title deeds.

The problem is that Israelis lay claim to lands in the West Bank and elsewhere, but Israel does not permit Palestinians to claim lands captured by Israel in 1948.

Second, Mr Radian said there was a wide cultural gap between Palestinians and Israelis over land use. Palestinians, he said, "preferred to keep land in private hands and build single-storey family homes on their land", while Israelis sought to "develop" their land into a business by building flats for housing the public. "The two peoples have a very different attitude and attachment towards the land," he said.

Asked why Israel could not make a deal with the Palestinians who do not want to redivide, as before 1967, but to share the city, Mr Radian reiterated the Israeli assertion that Jerusalem had never been the capital of any people other than the Jews, and said that sharing a capital city between two peoples had "never happened in history". It wouldn't work he added sharply.