Those descriptions of the Holy City came as commentary on the lone Palestinian bulldozer attack in Jerusalem on July 2 and a similar attack twenty days later by a tractor. Both these attacks and an earlier bloody one on a Jewish seminary in March were used by Israeli officials to whip up a campaign of hatred against the native Palestinian Jerusalemites, which led Martin Sieff, defence editor, UPI news agency, to write on August 6: "A new front in the global war on terror has opened up in Jerusalem". He went on to add: 'both the U.S. government and the American media have been blind to the evidence staring them in the face'.

After occupying eastern Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government unilaterally declared the city "the eternal capital of Israel." It incorporated in the process a large Palestinian population within the city's boundaries and squeezed them out by an accelerating expansion of the Jewish colonial settlement, tightening the residency and building laws and taxation policies, and "Wall"ing them in into separated Palestinian cantons out of their native city altogether. Three other factors also are at play. These are Israel's neglect of urban development of the eastern sector, the transfer -oriented demographic policies against its Arab-Palestinian natives, and squeezing out the national Palestinian institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This resulted in creating what the Israeli security experts describe now as a "security vacuum" in the city, which is being filled by extreme violent elements, who are overwhelmed by political despair as the peace process remains deadlocked.

Israeli's former foreign minister Moshe Arens avers that the entire Arab population of Jerusalem 'cannot be wished away'. Writing in The Haaretz daily, he remarked "the policy of neglect is reflected in the gallery of portraits of former mayors that decorate the Jerusalem Municipality: Kollek, Olmert, Mordechai Ish-Shalom, Gershon Agron, Yitzhak Kariv, Zalman Shragai, Daniel Auster, as if their Arab predecessors had not existed".

The most blatant example of this neglect is the Shuafat refugee camp. It is within the Jerusalem's municipal limits for the past 41-years, thus, in a manner of speaking, qualifying Israel to join the Arab states as a host of Palestinian refugees.

Systematically depriving Palestinian Jerusalemites of political representation is aimed at what Israeli security experts' claim as the "Hamasization" of the grassroots popular resistance to the Israeli occupation. Hamas had won a landslide victory in the January 2006 legislative election, which was a direct result of closing the PLO - led institutions as much as it was the result of the dead end the PLO's peace strategic option faced. The ensuing dual PLO-Israeli crackdown on Hamas following the breakout of the inter-Palestinian divide, especially after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007, paralyzed the national Palestinian institutions, polarized the Palestinian society and created a territorial as well as a political de facto separation between the Strip and the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is neither accurate nor historically honest when he recently said: 'Whoever thinks the basic pattern of life in Jerusalem can continue with 270,000 Arabs in east Jerusalem must take into account that there will be bulldozers, trucks and private cars, and no way of preventing terror attacks of this kind." He may be loath to admit that since Hamas' electoral victory in 2006 bulldozers were used only to demolish Palestinian homes or to expand the illegal Jewish colonization of the city. The Israeli - made "security vacuum" in Jerusalem is self - inflicted and Olmert himself, or whoever would succeed him, holds the Palestinian key to offset it

Nicola Nasser, Syndicate Features