'Judaising' of Jerusalem continues

MIDDLE EAST: Palestinian children formed a conga line behind a youth from Italy pushing a boy in a wheelchair. It snaked around the cobbled tree-and-tent shaded courtyard to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm in a jumble of Arabic and Italian.

One lad strummed a guitar, another rapped a drum, a blonde girl swept up a toddler and joined the gleeful melee.

On the veranda of the office block, work-camp volunteers from a dozen countries were taking a break, the girls from painting the cottage housing the library and kindergarten, the boys from tending the garden and playing fields adjacent to the northeast corner of the crenelated stone block wall of the Old City.

To the east lay the silvery green slope of the Mount of Olives, to the south the golden half sphere of the magnificent Dome of the Rock gleamed in the morning sun.

The community centre is located on a 2¼-acre plot of prime real estate in the neighbourhood called Bourj al-Luq Luq, or Tower of the Pelican.

Although the land belongs to the Khalidi and Darwish families, who have Ottoman deeds of ownership, Israeli settlers attempted to take it over in 1991 to build 200 housing units for themselves.

The people of the quarter responded by staging a sit-in night and day for three months.

"The area is the only open space in the Old City where Palestinian children can play and their parents can find refuge from their cramped and crowded homes," said Dyala Husseini, chairman of the centre's board.

"Women sewed and stuffed vine leaves and courgettes, men fought off the settlers, cleared the grounds and refurbished the cottage."

Eventually the Israeli municipality declared the centre a green zone, postponing the take-over until a more propitious moment.

Today the centre has a football field, a basketball and tennis court, a playground, a bicycle and skateboard path, sports centre and garden as well as the original library and kindergarten.

The centre also holds activities for women and the handicapped and organises summer camps for the children of the entire Old City.

But below the playground the Israeli Ministry of Housing is preparing for the construction of 30 housing units for settlers belonging to the militant national religious Ateret Cohanim group.

The ground plan shows blocks of flats abutting the wall from Herod's Gate to the centre, and a synagogue with a golden dome looming above the wall.

Both require special permission since such constructions violate the building code. Hind Khoury, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, said a letter of complaint has been sent to Unesco because the project will change the character and demographic of the Old City.

Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions is convinced that the project will go ahead "sooner rather than later, especially since the government is trying to please the settlers" in the wake of the withdrawal from Gaza.

Meir Margalit, a former member of the Israeli municipality, said: "The aim is to 'judaise' Jerusalem. That is how we speak of it in Hebrew. The Zionist approach is this is our country exclusively, only ours. No other people has a right to be here."

The Palestinians are "here by sufferance, not by right."

He said that if they contest Israel's policies, they could suffer "transfer".

Such settlement projects are also intended to "foreclose on a peace agreement with the Palestinians. There can be no deal without Jerusalem which is the front line".