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Will Barak stop "ethnic cleansing" of East Jerusalem?
The fight of a Jerusalem-born Palestinian scholar to keep his residency could prove a key test of the new Israeli government's commitment to peace.

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By Ian Williams

August 10, 1999 | People with high hopes for Prime Minister Ehud Barak's new Israeli government are looking anxiously at the case of Musa Budeiri, a Palestinian academic and Jerusalem native who has had his residency rights revoked. In effect, Budeiri is being told to go "home" to Britain, although he was born in Jerusalem, where his family has lived for centuries. Some Israeli and Arab commentators describe the policy that could force Budeiri and other Palestinians out of East Jerusalem as "ethnic cleansing, domestic style."

Ironically, Budeiri is head of the only graduate program of its kind in the Arab world, the Center for Israeli Studies at Al-Quds University. He was born in what became Israeli West Jerusalem in 1946, and the family moved to the east of the city when it was partitioned. In 1967, when Israeli troops took the West Bank, he was studying at Oxford University in Britain.

In 1971, Israel allowed Budeiri to return under the family reunification program, and gave him and his British wife Israeli identity cards. When Israel annexed East Jerusalem, it offered Arab residents Israeli citizenship. In common with the rest of the world, most Arabs refused to recognize the annexation, and refused the offer. As a result, if they want to travel, they have to do so with an Israeli document, a laissez-passer.

In 1980, Budeiri was in London on a sabbatical when he noticed that his laissez-passer was due to expire. The Israeli consulate did not renew it, and told him that he had to return on a foreign passport. He got a British passport through his wife, and the Israelis put a residency visa in it, renewable every three years.

It was not easy. I met him once in New York in 1990 and I can only describe him as disconsolate, after an unhappy visit to the Israeli consulate on Second Avenue to renew his visa. After negotiating with him via a remote video link through a closed door, the staff refused to let Budeiri in the office, and told him to go away. Budeiri's Israeli friends had to intercede to persuade the staff to relent and renew his visa the following day.

This summer, he went to renew the visa at the Interior Ministry in Jerusalem so that he could go with his family to London during the university break. The bureaucrats decided that he spent too much time abroad, so they would not give him a visa and revoked his residency rights. Officially, he has to leave by Aug. 22.

. Next page | Following in the footsteps of Nathan Sharansky



 

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