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New Proposal to Divide Jerusalem Unites People Against It

An Israeli border officer at a checkpoint for leaving the Issawiya neighborhood of East Jerusalem. A group of liberal Israelis is promoting a plan to fence off most of Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods.Credit...Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

JERUSALEM — A new plan on how to divide Jerusalem’s Jewish and Arab neighborhoods has had the peculiar distinction of uniting people against it.

The contentious plan, promoted by a group of liberal Israeli Jews and adopted in principle by the center-left Labor Party, would unilaterally fence off most of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods and transfer responsibility for their 200,000 residents from City Hall to the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank.

Kicked off with advertisements under the heading “Saving Jewish Jerusalem,” the campaign’s almost jingoistic tone seems intended to appeal to the broadest Jewish constituency, including Israel’s growing political center and conservative “nationalist camp.”

Instead, it has been rejected at both ends of the political spectrum, as well as by Palestinian leaders.

The new campaign describes Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents as imperiling the security, demographic balance, standard of living and economy of the city. It argues that a majority of people 18 and under in the city are Palestinian and plays on fears raised by the recent surge of Palestinian attacks against Israeli Jews.

Ir Amim, a leftist group that advocates a status for Jerusalem as a dual capital of Israel and of a future Palestine, said the proposal was “detached from any understanding of the fabric of daily life in Jerusalem.” Without agreement from the Palestinian leadership, the group added, such a move would “lead to political, urban and humanitarian chaos.”

Moshe Arens, a former minister from the conservative Likud Party, wrote in a recent column that any such split “has become essentially impossible” and that stripping East Jerusalem Arabs of their Israeli residency permits “would be legally questionable and morally reprehensible.” Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called the proposal “racist.”

“Thousands of Jerusalemites will be separated from their schools, hospitals, religious sites and also their properties,” he said. “This plan clearly shows that even members of the so-called progressive Israeli camp are falling into the same policies of the Israeli right.”

Dividing Jerusalem, with sacred Jewish, Muslim and Christian sites at its core, has long been one of the most emotional and intractable issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel conquered Jerusalem’s Old City and its environs, along with the West Bank, from Jordan in the 1967 war. Then it expanded the city limits, taking in 28 West Bank villages on the high ground surrounding the city, and annexed the territory in a move that was never internationally recognized. Ever since, its leaders have claimed sovereignty over what they deem Israel’s “united capital.”

But the Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as the capital of their future independent state. They and much of the world see the developments that Israel has built in the annexed area since 1967, now home to some 200,000 Jews, as illegal settlements. These would remain within Israeli Jerusalem under the plan.

The vast majority of the city’s 300,000 Arab residents — about a third of Jerusalem’s population — chose not to apply for Israeli citizenship, but hold permanent residency status that entitles them to social benefits and to work and move freely throughout Israel.

International road maps for peace have long imagined Palestinian control of Jerusalem’s Arab areas and Israeli control of Jewish ones, with a special arrangement for the Old City and its surroundings. But this latest plan — which would remove about two-thirds of Jerusalem’s Arab residents by disconnecting populous outer neighborhoods like Beit Hanina, Sur Baher and Issawiya from the city — comes in the absence of peace talks and amid months of rising violence.

“We have to open a public debate and a parliamentary debate: What is it we want to keep?” said Shaul Arieli, a map specialist who took part in past peace talks and helped formulate the plan. Advancing a unilateral plan for Jerusalem as an interim measure, in the absence of talks for a permanent deal, he said, “shows the Israelis that nothing is holy.”

Mr. Arieli, a reserve colonel in the Israeli Army who participated in the 2000 Camp David negotiations, is among more than 30 Israeli public figures — veterans of the political, diplomatic and security establishments — who signed the campaign ads.

Haim Ramon, a former minister from Labor and the centrist Kadima Party who is the architect of the new plan, said that if the Arab residents ended their boycott of city elections, the next mayor of Jerusalem would not be Jewish. “If the Palestinians were clever, they would decide, instead of the knife, to use the vote,” he told reporters. “You cannot have a strategy that your enemy will be stupid forever.”

The long impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has given impetus to various Israeli proposals for unilateralism, usually involving withdrawal from part of the West Bank.

Such plans, calling for Israel to control its own destiny by defining its borders, aim to satisfy a majority of Israeli Jews, who want some kind of partition but do not believe that a full peace deal is attainable at present. They imagine that removing some settlements and reducing the amount of West Bank territory under occupation could take some international pressure off Israel.

But Mr. Ramon’s idea of shedding parts of East Jerusalem is causing confusion, even among supporters of other unilateral initiatives meant to hasten the two-state solution.

“Demographically, it’s a compelling argument,” said Michael Oren, a center-right member of Parliament who has proposed his own interim measures involving withdrawal from some settlements. “Israel has a strategic interest in maintaining a Jewish majority in the capital of the Jewish state.”

But, Mr. Oren added, “keep in mind that redefining who is a Jerusalemite is not the only way of addressing that.” Instead, he suggested, a government push to create jobs and lower municipal taxes could encourage more Israeli Jews to move to Jerusalem.

The Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem generally have a higher standard of living than those in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. But about three-quarters of Arab families in Jerusalem are below Israel’s poverty line, compared with about 21 percent of the city’s Jewish families.

Many of the Arab residents complain of years of neglect by both City Hall and the Palestinian Authority, which is headquartered in the West Bank and is barred from operating in Jerusalem. Unilaterally disenfranchising the Palestinian residents would require a majority vote of the Israeli Parliament to amend the basic law governing Israel’s hold over the city.

For the Israeli right, Jerusalem has long posed a conundrum, pitting security and demographic concerns against ideology.

When a wave of Palestinian stabbings began in October, the government erected concrete barriers between some Jewish and Arab parts of East Jerusalem to improve security. But after several right-wing ministers complained that the roadblocks suggested the united capital could be divided, just as the Palestinian leadership had been advocating for years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly ordered them removed.

Mr. Netanyahu and Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, argue that Israeli sovereignty guarantees the Arab residents a quality of life superior to that of Israel’s Arab neighbors. Naftali Bennett, the right-wing education minister, has declared the next school year “the year of united Jerusalem” to mark the 50th anniversary of the reunification of the city in 1967.

Part of Mr. Bennett’s plan is to increase school trips to Jerusalem from across the country. Proponents of the “Saving Jewish Jerusalem” campaign noted wryly that the schoolchildren were unlikely to be taken to Sur Baher or Issawiya, where few Israeli Jews dare venture these days. As Mr. Ramon put it, “Nobody would think to go to these places.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Rivals Unite to Condemn Fence Plan in Jerusalem. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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