Jerusalem mayor plays with fire in threat to Palestinian homes
The mayor of Jerusalem has threatened to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem if the Amona settlement is evacuated.
“Your Amona will bring back the intifada,” a Palestinian security source told Al-Monitor. “How come you can’t see that?”
He was referring to the Israeli right wing’s effort to prevent the court-ordered evacuation of the unauthorized settlement of Amona. According to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, extensive joint Palestinian-Israeli efforts in recent months to restore calm and prevent Palestinians from carrying out terror attacks in Israel could go down the drain, just for the sake of appeasing a few settler families in an unauthorized West Bank outpost built on privately owned Palestinian land. “This time we won’t be able to stop the violence, because popular sentiment will have changed,” he warned.
Several hours after that conversation on Nov. 16, it was reported that Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat was threatening to demolish Palestinian structures — illegally built and perhaps built on Jewish-owned land — in East Jerusalem unless the government prevents the evacuation of Amona. “If the Amona issue is not resolved, our hands are tied [by law], and we will be forced to demolish hundreds or thousands of homes in Jerusalem,” Barkat said. He added, “There should not be one law for Jews and another for Arabs.”
Barkat’s reference to “hundreds or thousands of homes” refers, of course, only to homes of Palestinians. Even as he spoke, the Jerusalem municipality was petitioning the courts to approve demolition orders for 14 structures housing some 40 Palestinian families in the Beit Hanina neighborhood. The city claims that the houses were built on private Jewish land administered by the state custodian.
