Some 150,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem neighborhoods on the eastern side of the Israeli-built wall snaking in and out of Jerusalem and the West Bank continue to live in a legal and administrative limbo. The political orphans of East Jerusalem are not allowed to be connected to their Palestinian leadership but are also not part of the Israeli political system even though the latter decides, unilaterally, what happens to them. This was recently reiterated by the Israeli Knesset.

While much of the attention was given to a law passed Jan. 2 requiring 80 out 120 Knesset members to agree to any changes to the boundaries of Jerusalem, another part of the original bill was of much more direct interest to the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. The New York Times reported Jan. 2 that right-wing Knesset member Naftali Bennett, leader of HaBayit HaYehudi, had unexpectedly decided at the last moment to remove a clause that would have made it easier to redraw the map of East Jerusalem.

The Times reported, “The surprise move came around 3 a.m., when members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition stripped from a bill they were about to enact language that would have made it easier to exclude Palestinians from the map of Jerusalem.” The move left the status of Kufr Aqab, Shuafat and other Palestinian neighborhoods in the city unchanged.

The decision appears to have been made for tactical reasons. According to the Times, right-wing Israeli officials, fearing that a left-wing government might one day take power, did not want to make it easier for such a government to create a separate Palestinian municipality to be called al-Quds by using administrative powers rather than the Knesset's legislative process.