A pogrom in the village of Enabus

By J. Zel Lurie

DELRAY BEACH, Florida–Sometimes you live too long and know too much. I celebrated my 96th birthday last week so I was around when East Jerusalem and the West Bank of Jordan were conquered by Israel in 1967.

I learned from an aide to Teddy Kollek what he and Moshe Dayan were up to when they tripled the size of Jerusalem. They did not expect that Israel would keep the West Bank. They expected a phone fall from King Hussein which would begin negotiations for its return. So the new city line of Jerusalem would be the frontier of the State of Israel.

No historian has ever mentioned this. None of the many books on Jerusalem which line my study have discovered this essential fact.

Hussein never called and the West Bank and expanded Jerusalem remained in Israel’s hands.

At first Israel and the media celebrated the reunification of Jerusalem. This was not strictly accurate because Abu Dis had been a section of East Jerusalem.

When Dayan and Kollek drew the new borders of Jerusalem, they excluded Abu Dis. Today a high 15 foot wall separates Abu Dis from its neighbors in East Jerusalem.

When it reports on East Jerusalem, the New York Times carefully notes that East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967. Annexed  is accurate but it annoys me because it presents a false picture. It does not tell the reader that East Jerusalem was tripled in size, that a score of West Bank villages to the East, South, and North of Jewish Jerusalem were urbanized overnight by adding them to Jerusalem.

What’s more is they suddenly became as sacred as the Temple Mount/Harm al-Sharif.  The Shjuafat camp of 1948 refugees was now a part of the eternal capital of Israel, never to be divided again. And so was Um Tuba and eit Hanina and Issawiye and Jebel Mukaber and  other West Bank villages. Which suddenly became Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

The quarter million Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have been paying city taxes but they have not been getting the services that Jewish neighborhoods get. Their schools are backward, and most important they are  not citizens of Israel. They have the status of permanent residents and if they live elsewhere for seven years, in neighboring Abu Dis for instance, they lose the right to return to their birthplace. 4,577 Arabs lost their residency rights in Jerusalem in 2008.

West Bank ProsperityIs Misleading
I am both happy  and, once again,  annoyed by the recent stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on the remarkable growth in business and jobs on the West Bank.  Prime Minister Salem Fayyed talks about an 11 percent increase in the GNP (gross national product) this year.

What these stories omit is that this growth is confined to Area A which is the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarim and a few other urban centers.  The evil occupation continues unabated on the vast majority of the land of  the West Bank.

The harassment of the Palestinian farmers by the Army and the armed settlers  has taken a new and diabolic turn. Here is what occurred last week in the village of Enabus as described by Adam Keller, the editor of “The Other Israel.” I quote Keller:

Exacting a Price

Enabus. I was there two years ago, to help with the olive harvest. A Palestinian village south of Nablus. Industrious, lively and hospitable inhabitants. A very steep mountain terrain. Not the most ideal of agricultural lands, but the people of Enabus do their best. They build terraces on the mountainside, plant olive trees even on the most tiny plot available.

This week uninvited guests arrived in Enabus. Settlers. They arrived in Enabus in the middle of the night, burned cars and also a tractor, tried to set a house on fire, threatened inhabitants with their guns. (The guns which had been provided to them by the army for “self defense”).

This was not because of something which the Enabus villagers had done. It was because the settlers are angry at Netanyahu’s “settlement freeze”. When settlers are angry at something which the Government of Israel is doing (or pretends to be doing), they are quick to “exact a price” from the first Palestinians they happen to encounter.

In fact, this is not the settlers’ own invention. This method is already centuries old. Historically, in quite a few countries people who were furious with the King’s latest decree took out their anger on the nearest Jews. In such places, this was called simply “a Pogrom.” –Adam Keller

Adam Keller’s little publication on line is the only one that bothered to report on what happened in Enabus. Similar pogroms by the settlers against their Arab neighbors have occurred. They have been ignored by the police and the army.

I hope this makes you as angry as it makes me. Write to Ehud Barak. Minister of Defense, Hakirya,  Tel Aviv, Israel. He is the ruler, the King,  of the West Bank. He can stop the settlers depredations if has the guts to combat them. The Israel Army will obey his order despite the recent minor revolt in its ranks.

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Lurie is a freelance writer based in Delray Beach, Florida