On March 6, 2008, Ala Hussein Abu Dheim, a resident of the village of Jabel Mukaber murdered eight students at Merkaz HaRav rabbinical college in Jerusalem. Abu Dheim was 26 at the time, and two years prior to the murder he started getting closer to Islam. As a resident of the eastern part of Jerusalem, he carried a blue identification card (an ID card reserved for Israeli citizens and permanent residents) and was even employed for a while as a passenger driver in Jerusalem. Four months later, in July 2008, East Jerusalem Palestinians carried out two vehicular terror attacks in the city center on Jaffa and King David streets.

The government of Ehud Olmert and his Kadima party was on its way out. Olmert, who was trying with all his might not to get bogged down by the various criminal cases in which he was embroiled, invested much effort at the time in achieving a diplomatic breakthrough with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As expected, the terror attacks generated political unrest and Israel reacted with arrests and the demolition of the terrorists’ homes. The issue of disengagement from the city's border neighborhoods (of which Jabel Mukaber was one) emerged then for the first time on the political agenda, with a clear and decisive call for it by a senior cabinet member.

That minister was Haim Ramon, then deputy prime minister from the Kadima party. At the cabinet meeting held after the vehicular terror attacks of July 27, 2008, he called for the outlying neighborhoods to be severed from municipal Jerusalem. “Anyone who thinks that the Jerusalem terrorism is a limited problem and that the demolition of one or another house will help is sticking his head in the sand, and the main question is: Does the government want Jabel Mukaber and Sur Baher [East Jerusalem neighborhoods] to be part of the State of Israel or not?” Ramon asked. “The interest of the State of Israel is to get rid of these villages and neighborhoods, which were never part of Jerusalem and which endanger the essence of Israel’s capital as a Jewish and Zionist city.” His remarks generated a storm on the right, as well as within Kadima, because the party platform opposed the division of Jerusalem.

Although both Ramon and Olmert only supported moving the Arab neighborhoods on the city’s eastern outskirts to the area of the future Palestinian state — whether in the framework of an agreement (Olmert) or as a unilateral move (Ramon) — they were accused of “dividing the city” as though they were planning to cut the city into two halves and to give up Israel’s most important national and religious symbols. In fact, they intended to cut off the Arab neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, which over the years, and especially after the second intifada and the construction of the separation fence, had become closed, explosive compounds, to such an extent that it was no longer clear whether they had any affiliation at all with the city and the state.