Census preparations at peak, Israeli police on alert
Palestine, Politics, 12/9/1997

How many Palestinians live in East Jerusalem is a question Israel does not want anybody to be able to accurately answer. At least not before it finishes the purification process it started to rid East Jerusalem of as many as possible of its Palestinian residents.

Israel doesn¹t want any Palestinians to be counted and therefore has deployed beefed-up police forces in the city as of the early hours of Tuesday to prevent the Palestinianian government from undertaking a census of residents in East Jerusalem. Israeli police believed the census would start on December 9 to mark the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation in 1987, but the census is slated to start officially on Wednesday.

The question of Jerusalem, one of the crucial issues left over for the final status negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, has come to the front again with the census once Israel decided to prevent the Palestinian government from including East Jerusalem Palestinians in it. The reason, Palestinians argue, is that Israel wants to minimize the number of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem before the start of the final status talks in order to change the demographic equation in its favor. In this respect, Palestinians recall, hundreds of East Jerusalem residents had their identity cards confiscated because they lived beyond the so-called municipal boundaries of the city.

Yet Palestine was determined to carry out its census in Jerusalem, along with areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the 1995 Palestinian elections for the legislative council and presidency, East Jerusalem Palestinians were allowed to vote and the Palestinians insist that including them in its census is entirely legal and does not contradict the spirit of the Oslo Accords. ³No agreement has ever stated that Palestine is forbidden to attend to Palestinians, including those who live in Jerusalem,² said Hassan Abu Libda, head of the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics.

Other officials in the bureau refused to say openly what method their representatives would adopt in conducting the census in East Jerusalem and said they would rather leave the matter until later in the week. The belief among some of them is that a sort of clandestine operation might take place in areas heavily guarded by Israeli police, like the city center, while a more public operation can take place in the East Jerusalem suburbs like Al Ram, Dahiyat Al Barid and other Palestinian villages scattered around the city.

³I addressed this matter in a letter to the prime minister several weeks ago. There is coordination between the police and us, and we will support the activities of the police in order to prevent illegal activities,² said Ehud Olmert, the mayor of West Jerusalem, who has been a driving forced behind a number of decisions and measures taken by the Israeli government in East Jerusalem over the past year and a half, including the opening of the tunnel underneath the Al Aqsa Mosque and the building of the new Jewish settlement of Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghaneim.

Following a decision by the Israeli government to stop the Palestinian census in Jerusalem, threats were issued to residents of the city if they cooperate. Israeli officials did not hesitate to threaten that identity cards of Palestinians who participate in the census might be confiscated or their businesses shut down. The Palestinian government, meanwhile, stressed it would not jeopardize the residents of East Jerusalem and as such would not demand full details of their identity card numbers of other details that might help the Israeli authorities in pinpointing some victims for retaliatory measures.

Previous Stories:
  2nd redeployment is approved but no lines   (12/1/1997)
  Bloodshed inevitable in Jerusalem says minister   (11/24/1997)
  New Palestinian census causes clash over Jerusalum   (11/20/1997)

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