The New York Times · New York, New York · 18 October 1999

CP-1990-029

A Gain for Arabs in East Jerusalem

By JOEL GREENBERG

Scan 1586 × 1066 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Oct. 17 — Interior Minister Natan Sharansky announced today that he had ended an Israeli policy that had stripped thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem of their right to live there.

Human rights groups and Palestinians have condemned the practice as a “quiet deportation” that they say was intended to curb Arab population growth in East Jerusalem, whose future is to be determined in talks between Israel and the Palestinians on a permanent peace.

“This was an impractical policy that served no purpose, and I’m very happy that today we are stopping the policy,” Mr. Sharansky said in a radio interview. “As someone who believes that Jerusalem must remain under Israeli sovereignty, we must look after the human rights of all citizens, including those who live in East Jerusalem.”

Israel says East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed, will remain part of its indivisible capital. The Palestinians claim the area as the capital of their hoped-for state. Since 1967 the Interior Ministry has stripped about 5,400 Palestinians of their residency rights in Jerusalem, according to Interior Ministry figures.

This has restricted their entry to the city and deprived them of Israeli health insurance and social security benefits. The figures show that about half of the actions were taken in the last three years, when the rightist Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in power.

Palestinians who had moved to West Bank suburbs of East Jerusalem in search of housing, or who had traveled abroad for studies or work and could not prove that they had been in the city for seven consecutive years, were told that their residence had been revoked and were ordered to leave.

The ministry asserted that by moving their “center of life” outside East Jerusalem, they had lost the permanent resident status granted by Israel to the city’s 200,000 Arabs. But Mr. Sharansky declared in his remarks that those days were now over.

“The Interior Ministry is beginning to carry out a new policy, under which we will not search how many years a Jerusalem resident was in Jerusalem and how many years he was absent,” he said. “Those who wish to continue to be residents of the city,” Mr.

Sharansky said, “but in the past spent a few years in Kuwait or other countries where they were working — we do not use the pretext that they were not here to cancel their residency.” Palestinian officials welcomed the policy change and urged Mr. Sharansky to restore East Jerusalem residency to Palestinians whose rights had been revoked.

Ziyad Abu Zayyad, a representative of East Jerusalem in the Palestinian legislative council, said the new Israeli policy would ease the daily hardships of his constituents. “It has humanitarian meaning,” Mr. Abu Zayyad said. “I hope this will put an end to the policy of ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: DATE PROBLEM. No masthead survives — the clipping is trimmed to a rule, the headline, the byline and three full text columns, with no paper name and no page date line. The dateline reads “JERUSALEM, Oct. 17”, which fits an Oct. 18 paper, but the year on the slide label (1990) cannot be right.

The story reports Natan Sharansky acting as Israel’s Interior Minister (he held that office from July 1999), describes the Netanyahu government in the past tense as having been in power “in the last three years” (Netanyahu was Prime Minister 1996-99), and quotes a representative in the Palestinian legislative council, a body that did not exist until 1996.

The internal evidence points to 18 October 1999, nine years after the labelled date. `date` is left unchanged at 1990-10-18 as instructed. Date corrected 1990-10-18 to 1999-10-18. FILED YEAR WRONG BY NINE YEARS. No masthead or page date line survives; the only printed date is the dateline 'By JOEL GREENBERG / JERUSALEM, Oct.

17 - Interior Minister Natan Sharansky announced today that he had ended an Israeli policy that had stripped thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem of their right to live there.' Three details fix the year beyond doubt.

Natan Sharansky was Israel's Interior Minister only from July 1999 to July 2000, so an October dispatch naming him in that post can only be October 1999. The story refers in the past tense to 'the last three years, when the rightist Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in power' - Netanyahu was Prime Minister from June 1996 to July 1999.

And it quotes 'Ziyad Abu Zayyad, a representative of East Jerusalem in the Palestinian legislative council', a body first elected in January 1996. None of this can be 1990. A same-day dispatch of 17 October appears in the next morning's paper, 18 October 1999 - the filed day and month are right and only the year is wrong.

No date is printed on the clipping; the date is fixed by what the article reports, at the precision the evidence supports, and is not guessed beyond it.

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