Follow-up to the Judeofascists' demographic scrape....
wcc-coe.org
Excerpt:
The Complex Reality on the Ground
The Barak government has continued its predecessor's policy of seeking to negotiate from faits accomplis. Consequently, the atmosphere on the ground has continued to change even as the negotiations are going on, making any withdrawal from Jerusalem or its surroundings more difficult still.
Israel's rather harsh measures against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem have continued during the sixteen months of Barak's governance. He has exploited his good relations with the Clinton Administration to evade implementing signed agreements. He has expanded Jewish settlements and finished what Netanyahu could not even begin, namely the encirclement of Jerusalem through construction in the Abu Ghneim suburb, that had strained Arab-American and American-Israeli relations during Netanyahu's tenure. House demolitions still continue as well. Thirteen more houses have been demolished since May 1999.
Confiscation of Identity Cards. The confiscation of identity cards from Arab residents of Jerusalem also continues, with 2,200 withdrawn over the last three years. Some 900 cases of confiscated identity cards were reported in 1999 alone, affecting 2,466 citizens. Nineteen Palestinian citizens were deported. Of the thousands of IDs withdrawn only 78 were returned.
However the policy of exclusion has backfired. Instead of reducing the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem, that population in East Jerusalem has increased to unprecedented levels. Palestinians have flooded into the city in the last few years to escape the Israeli measures of ID confiscation. By comparison, the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem has increased to 180,000 in this period. The number of Palestinians in Al-Quds has tripled since 1967 in spite of Israeli confiscation of as many as 100,000 identity cards and the demolition of an estimated 2000 homes. Today, some 233,000 Palestinians reside in the city and 40,000 more are outside the city boundaries awaiting permission to
re-enter. Even in the highly contested Old City, there are 27,000 Palestinian inhabitants and only 2000 Israeli inhabitants.
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