Palestinians shift action to Ramallah, losing ground in east Jerusalem

By Said Ghazali, Associated Press

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM — The lights go out early in Arab east Jerusalem. After sundown, storekeepers along Salah Edin Street pull down their shutters and the few restaurants close for lack of customers.

Just 15 miles from east Jerusalem’s main shopping avenue, traffic jams the commercial district in the West Bank town of Ramallah, where dozens of stores, boutiques and discos have opened in recent months.

The shift in action to Ramallah is only one of many signs that the Palestinians are losing ground in east Jerusalem, which they hope to turn into the capital of their own state.

The new right-wing Israeli government recently revoked the residency permits of hundreds of Palestinians in the city and is preparing to start building another big Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem. At the same time, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has quietly shut several offices in Jerusalem, opting to avoid a showdown with Israel it feels it would only lose.

And plans to build Palestinian neighborhoods in east Jerusalem with $30 million from Saudi Arabia have been thwarted by Israel’s refusal to grant construction permits. So the Saudis have kept their aid, and east Jerusalem’s worsening housing shortage has forced thousands of Palestinians to move to the city’s suburbs in the West Bank autonomy zone.

Officials of the Palestinian Authority acknowledge that many of Jerusalem’s Arab residents no longer look to Arafat for help and instead try to move under Israel’s widening umbrella of services in a de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty.

“We are losing our credibility in the eyes of the people in Jerusalem because they see us as being unable to do anything for them,” said Anis Al Qaq, deputy director of the Palestinian Planning Ministry. “People cannot live on national dreams. They need food, health care and education,” he said.

Israel annexed east Jerusalem into its capital after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. Today, the city has 405,000 Jewish and 160,000 Palestinian residents.

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: No masthead or page date line is visible; the scan is cropped to the article. The story describes “the new right-wing Israeli government” (Netanyahu took office in June 1996), consistent with the slide date of 1996-07-21, but the printed date could not be read.

Cite this clipping

"Palestinians shift action to Ramallah, losing ground in east Jerusalem," The Star-Ledger, 21 July 1996. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1996-023. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1996-023