Word: seidemann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...difficult nationalistic conflict into an even more volatile religious conflict. In today's desperate atmosphere, any real or perceived damage done to the nearby Islamic holy places could help spark another Palestinian uprising. "In responsible hands, Jerusalem is a message of peace from Beirut to Baghdad," said Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who tracks East Jerusalem settlements. "But in irresponsible hands, it's a nuclear bomb that can send shock waves throughout the region...
...follow the Stations of the Cross. Try as one might, it is not possible to count out the lanes of the Old City so that each of them is controlled by only one faith, one ethnicity. (Clinton proposed "shared functional sovereignty" for the Old City.) Dividing Jerusalem, says Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer and expert on Jerusalem affairs, is "a political impossibility and a historical inevitability. It will take microsurgery, and I'm afraid the politicians will go at it with a hatchet...
...been that way since the start of the al-Aqsa intifadeh, the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings that raged from 2000 until 2002, when Israelis started closing off the Palestinian territories. "The intifadeh was like a centrifuge that flung Arabs and Jews apart," says Seidemann. For Arabs in the city, the divisions have exacerbated the bitterness of 40 years of Israeli rule. Through a combination of purposeful neglect by Israelis and a refusal by Arabs to deal with municipal authorities (doing so might compromise the phantom sovereignty of Palestine, Arab leaders say), the eastern side of Jerusalem is withering like...
...Israelis, they fear that annexation of East Jerusalem by the current thuggish Palestinian leadership would lead to a spillover of the chaos and murderous political feuds that plague the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with rival militias fighting over spoils in the holy city. A new "Berlin Wall," says Seidemann, would devastate those who live in East Jerusalem. The average yearly income on the Arab east side is $4,000. That is far lower than the $19,000 a year earned by a typical Israeli in the west of the city, but more than twice as much as the average...
That straightforward bias toward life holds a lesson. Arabs and Jews will always view the past--and their city--in different ways. "The Israelis," says Seidemann, "will always look at 1948 as Independence Year, and the Arabs as [the time of] al-naqbah--the disaster." For Jews, 1967 was the moment that an undivided Jerusalem came under their jurisdiction for the first time since the Romans destroyed the temple; for Arabs, it was the year of another calamity. But whether they like it or not, Arabs and Jews are destined to live in the same small city. Alian, the volunteer...