The document provides background information about the author's experience living in Jerusalem from 2013-2014 with his family. Some key details include: - The author and his family lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. - Living in Jerusalem exposed the author to the complex realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including tensions between Jewish settlers and Arab residents in Sheikh Jarrah. - During his time there, a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and burned alive in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, exacerbating violence and tensions. - The document reflects on the author's efforts to understand events from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives using different news sources.

1. conCERNed, 21/1/2015
NextLast year in Jerusalem

2. Who am I?
● An experimental particle physicist
● [anon] 1999-2003, [anon] 2003-now
● Since my return, co-convener of the
[anon] Group; previously [anon]
and other stuff
● A family guy
● Husband of a person in an
international career
● Father of a little girl (2.75 years old
now, 1.6 years old when this all
started)

3. Of course, I always had
also other interests
● E.g., history
● E.g., history of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict

4. Where, When, What, Why
● My wife got a job opportunity with [anon]
● Office in Ramallah, but Ramallah (as all the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, aka OPT) is flagged as "non-family
duty station"; therefore forced to settle in Jerusalem
● (Ironically, given that there are several orders of magnitude
more violence and daily risk in Jerusalem than in Ramallah)
● Position started in December 2013, supposed to last one
year with possibility of renewal
● But we left earlier: in September 2014 she started a job
based in Geneva and I started a convenership in my exp
● I got permission to spend 50% of my time in Israel/OPT
●
Nice occasion to collaborate with [anon]; two weeks per
month I was in Israel/OPT and spent Monday-Thursday at
the [anon], Friday worked at home

5. We lived here
kindergarten

6. Jerusalem has 800k
inhabitants
Israeli citizens are
64%, almost all Jew
30% of Jerusalem's
Jews are haredi (ultra-
orthodox) vs 8% in all
Israel; 20% secular, vs
42% in Israel (source)
East J has 460k
inhabitants, 57%
Arabs; they were
offered citizenship
upon annexation, but
almost all refused
Arabs of East J have a
special ID (permanent
residents), vote for
municipality (and PA),
can access Israeli
services and can drive
Israeli cars; can freely
move between Israel
and Areas A/B/C
Almost all Jerusalem
municipality is
encircled by The Wall
Some tiny Arab areas
are not, e.g., the
Shu'afat Camp (not to
be confused with
Shu'afat), leading to a
schizophreny with
interesting practical
consequences (e.g.,
who collects the
garbage? Ad interim,
United Nations do!)
Special ID can be lost
if real residence found
to be elsewhere or if
affiliated with terrorism

7. Israel claims all
Jerusalem as it capital.
Unlikely to be ever
recognized by the
international
community. Left-wing
parties compromise to
some extent.
Fatah and other
moderate Palestinian
parties claim pre-1967
East J as capital.
Unlikely that densely
populated Jewish
neighborhoods will be
evacuated. Creative
ideas about fences
and bridges have been
vaguely sketched
during past rounds of
peace talks.
Hamas and other
hard-line Palestinian
parties claim all
Jerusalem (and Israel)
Allegedly, before the
collapse of the latest
peace talks (2014),
John Kerry privately
inquired with
Mahmoud Abbas
(Palestinian Authority
president) whether he
could conceivably
accept Beit Hanina as
capital of Palestine
Politeness prevents
me from reporting his
reply verbatim
(Israeli right was also
outraged when Kerry's
proposal was leaked)

8. Rorshach plots
The very same maps are used either to show judaization/dearabization, or to
demonstrate that Arab built-up areas are allowed to expand too.
Not shown here: Jewish settlements inside Arab areas.
Recommended reading: F.Chiodelli, The Jerusalem Master Plan: Planning into the Conflict
(Download here)

9. How easy is to pass between West
and East Jerusalem?
● As easy as crossing a road
● Psychological boundary still strong for many people
● Managing to get our stuff delivered to our address in the
East by an Israeli shipping company was a saga
● DELL-Israel refused to send my replacement battery to an
address in the East
● Nesher company (mini-bus service to/from airport) refuses to
bring people to the East; but our street was deemed "safe"
● However, mixing is often observed
● Palestinians shop frequently in Jewish areas
● Israeli Jews shop seldomly in Arab areas
● Israeli Jews drive frequently through Arab areas

10. Terror attack, Nov.
Terror attack, Oct.
Two separate bus systems, but the tram
crosses West and East
● For a long tract it follows "Green Line"
● Generally hailed as tool for coexistence
● Criticized as serving mostly Jewish
areas, including those in the North-East
(which are illegal by international law)
● We used it a lot
Heavy vandalism
during July riots
and more recently

11. Shelters
(Discovered for practical reasons during the Gaza War, when Hamas
demonstrated its technical ability to target as far as Jerusalem)
User-generated
map, but fairly
complete.
Official and up to
date list (July 2014)
is here, from the
Municipality site
If you are in doubt whether you are in West or East Jerusalem,
check if there is a public shelter nearby ;)

12. Annexed but still Other
Residents in the Mount Scopus area were experiencing difficulties breathing because of tear
gas that was fired in clashes between security forces and Palestinians in Isawiya and Silwan in
East Jerusalem. (Ynet, link)
One may wonder about the breathing skills of residents in Silwan and Issawiya!
Map generated on http://t-j.org.il/JerusalemAtlas.aspx

13. Our neighborhood,
Sheikh Jarrah

14. We lived here
Friday's nanny
Above this line: Western consulates, upper-bourgeoisie
Palestinian landlords, well-paid foreigners
Below this line: HIC SUNT PEONES
Tomb of Simeon the Just
(Shimon HaTzadik)
Thisside:MeaShe'arim
(ultra-orthodoxneighborhood)
Thisside:SheikhJarrah
(Arabneighborhood)
Troubles between
locals and settlers
Friday's weekly protest
Nice Arab playground
Nice ultra-orth.
playground
Moreover, in 2014 the Jerusalem municipality announced plans for a 9-storey
yeshiva (Jewish religious school) somewhere in Sheikh Jarrah

15. A garbled story
(when your lawyer must be a historian)
● The alleged tomb of Simeon the Just (a High Priest
at the time of Alexander the Great) is a moderately
important religious place in Judaism
● 1876: Sepharadi Jew community buys (rents?) the
tomb site and some land around it, in what was
then a countryside with some Christian Arab villas
● 1891: housing units built for Jewish immigrants
● 1947-49: the 20 Jewish families abandon their
houses during the Civil War (47-48) and/or the First
Arab-Israeli War (48-49)
● Jordanians assigned the houses to Arab refugees
● 1967: those got "protected tenants" status by Israel
● Since 2008, bitter legal struggle based on property
documents from Ottoman Empire
Photo source: wikipedia
Exaustive source:
The Sheikh Jarrah
Affair - Yitzhak Reiter
and Lior Lehrs
(download)

16. ELAD is an NGO with strong political support from the Israeli right wing, whose mission is
to favour the Judaization of Jerusalem (cit.). They also manage archeological digs and a
popular turist visitor center (City of David).
They buy houses in Arab neighborhoods, through intermediaries. But they also seek all
possibilities to use existing laws (e.g., the Absentee Property Law) to evict Arab families
from their houses, where they encourage idealistic young families (cit.) to settle.
Sometimes settlers also make violent take-overs, or break into while the family is out,
during the intermediate time between the first judiciary decision and the appeal.
One house in Sheikh Jarrah is shared between the Arab family and the settler family
because take-over was incomplete.
Photo source here
(Author's blog here; a must-read)

17. "They fought the Law, and the Law won"
● Typical reasons for eviction are:
● Absentee Property Law
– Palestinians loose their property if they don't inhabit it
– One of the very few Israeli Laws that explicitely state a difference in
treatment between Jews and non-Jews (other example is immigration)
– Introduced in 1950 as emergency solution for the shortage of houses for the
Jewish immigrants and the claims from Arab refugees of 1947-49 to get back
their houses and land (estimated between 12%-70% of Israel's land - source)
● Building was built or renovated illegally, or it is dangerous
– (One of our nannies was in a legal battle over that)
– Israeli human rights NGOs (and Palestinians) point out that 96% of Arab
requests for building/renovation permissions are denied in East Jerusalem
● Military order / national interest (mostly in West Bank)
● Note: most Arabs keep their property despite blatant illegality
● My general impression is that most Israeli authorities try to avoid
conflict with Arab community unless there are "orders from above"

18. Flat priors and standard candles
● One of my constant frustrations with the news from Israel/OPT
is that the Israeli and Palestian sources diverge so much that, in
fact, sometimes you need to check time and location to be sure
that they are talking about the same event
● Often both stories sound equally coherent and realistic
● Obvious consequence: choosing a source means self-biasing
towards a side, typically for your a prioris on the conflict
● Obvious fix: always seeking opposite-side sources
● Typical risk of such fix: settling on a supposedly balanced
"middle point", assuming a flat prior between two narrations
● But is this prejudice any better than taking sides?
● After an example from the news, I will tell you about my own
"standard candle" (an unpleasant episode that I witnessed) on
which I calibrated one Israeli and one Palestinian source

19. "There is no Judge,
there is no Justice"
(Talmud, Avodah Zarah)
A preliminary investigation into Monday’s
killing of a Jordanian judge at the Allenby
crossing suggests the man ran toward an
Israeli soldier screaming “Allah hu Akbar”
(Arabic for “God is great”) and tried to
steal his weapon, according to the Israel
Defense Forces.
(Haaretz (!), link)
Mohammad Zayd (…), Zeiter and another woman
were late to return to the bus after the first Israeli
inspection point.
When they were returning, an Israeli soldier
pushed Zeiter, they started scuffling and Zeiter
was brought to the floor. Zeiter then stood up and
shoved the soldier, who in turn fired a shot that
barely missed Zeiter, Zayd said.
The soldier then proceeded to fire three shots that
hit Zeiter in the chest, leaving him dead on the
floor, Zayd added, explaining that he tried to
resuscitate Zeiter to no avail.
(Ma'an News, link)
This ugly story resembles dozens of others, but for two details: the
protagonist was citizen of an ally (although ethnically Palestinian) and
had a high social status. Jordanians were upset. Peres and Netanyahu
expressed deep regret. An independent inquiry was pledged. Days later,
a similar episode happened elsewhere and nobody cared.

20. An insignificant story
(unless you are the one who goes to prison)
● While coming back from shopping, we saw a big gathering of
Border Police and normal Police in front of a poor house close
to the Sheikh Jarrah mosque
● We joined a crowd of bystanders on the opposite side of the
street and were told that a boy had thrown a stone. We saw:
● Six or seven Arab boys lining up under machine gun threat by a
Border Policeman; several girls crying
● Border Policemen patrolling the courtyard of the house
● An Arab adult discussing in a loud voice with an officer
● All other adults sort of mediating
● At some point, two policemen grabbed the adult by the arms and
pulled him as if arresting him; tension instantly increased, and we
decided not to take risks
● The day after, we checked the online news in English

21. Israeli POV: emphasis on the stone effects. Palestinian POV: emphasis on
mistreatment of women, humiliation. Both reports inflate minor details.
Astonishingly, for Ma'an News the arrest of six boys (for how long?) and the
threatening of an adult are not worth mentioning!
Ma'an News
Ynet News

22. Lehava
● These stickers were ubiquituous in Jerusalem
● Being bilingual in Hebrew and Arab, I
imagined some sort of peace initiative
● Then I found a translation:
● Don't you even dare to think about a Jewess
● Lehava is a right-wing group whose mission
is to fight mixed unions, for religious reasons
● They claim they save young Jewish women
from abusive relationships (with Arab men)
● They made headlines when they harassed a
mixed couple who was going to marry in Jaffa
● Some of them recently set fire to the bilingual
school of Jerusalem, and now Lehava is
declared a terrorist movement by Israel

23. West Bank / Judea & Samaria
Areas A,B,C; The Wall; Settlements
Many useful maps can be downloaded from here (PASSIA)
The Wall is hated by the Palestinians and the Israeli Settlers, for symmetric reasons

25. The expression facts on the ground is frequent in Israeli political discourse, in reference to any
negotiation on future borders.
Israeli left-wing (which initiated settlements...) accuses right-wing governments to have imposed
facts on the ground beyond the point of no return, i.e., up to the point that no Palestinian State
could be viable (unless you call viable an archipelago of Gaza-like enclaves), and a bi-national
Israel with 50%-50% demographics is the only option left.
The dilemma for Israel is that the Zionist paradigm is the need for a Jewish AND democratic state.

26. Source: wikipedia
Note: there are many kinds of settlements. People living in Ma'ale
Adumim (practically a suburb of Jerusalem) usually have different
motivations than most settlers in the old city of Hebron (like this one).
All Israeli settlements are illegal by international law, and some small
ones even by Israeli law. Some of the latter are sometimes dismantled
by IDF (...but sometimes manage to get recognized by the State)
Oslo Sharon's unilateral disengament

27. Operation Brother's Keepers
● On June 13, three Israeli teenagers from a settlement
were kidnapped while hitchhiking in Area C
● Everybody, on both sides, seemed to assume that the goal
was a prisoners exchange
● For several days, Palestinian media kept saying that they
were "three soldiers"; the gesture of the "three Shalits" was
invented, as a reference to Gilad Shalit's famous exchange
●
Most intense Operation since the end of the 2nd
Intifadah
● 500 arrests, including journalists and PA parlamentarians
● 6 Palestinian deaths during clashes, mostly teenagers
● Government said that it was targeting only Hamas and
Hamas-linked organizations
● (I have private information that, if true, would contradict that)

28. Il giuoco delle parti
Officially, a moment of huge tension between Israel and Palestinian
Authority: Fatah and Hamas had just signed a historic agreement for
a Unity Government, and Netanyahu therefore accused Abbas of
being morally responsible of the kidnapping.
Officially, Abbas was outraged at the Israeli raids in Area A.
In reality, Palestinian Authority police was loyally helping Israel in
repressing Hamas in the West Bank. As it always does.

29. Things going out of control
● June 30: the corpses of the three Israeli boys are found
●
It turns out that police knew about their death since 1st
day
● July 1: wave of rage against Arabs in Jerusalem
● Newspapers report some instances of police intervening to save
Arab workers from angry mob
● Reports of harassment in the tram
● (Our taxi driver reports being victim of vandalism and harassment)
● July 2: a Palestinian teenager is kidnapped and burnt alive
● (A relative of one of our nannies)
● Police and Israeli media insist on the "feud between Arab families"
● One week of violent riots in all Arab neighborhoods
● Security cameras from a shop are finally taken seriously
● The culprits confess: it was Jewish terrorism; politicians apologize

30. Photo source: Haaretz

31. Photo source: Ynet

32. Thanks for you attention
And if you read Italian you are welcome to visit the blog
that I maintained during this experience

33. Backup slides

35. Religions of the Holy Land
This picture only contains the three main religions of Israel and the Palestinian Territories;
Druzes are also a significant minority, and the center of the Bahai cult is in Haifa

36. Christians in the Holy Land
● Significant minority
● 8% in West Bank and 1% in Gaza, 10% of Arab Israelis
● Better educated than Muslims on average
● One of the few places in the Arab world where Christians and
Muslims live together pretty well
● I could find some reports of tensions, but not comparable with
Lebanon, Egypt, etc.
● Several leaders of Palestinian nationalism were Christians
● Jewish extremists often target churches and Christian villages
(part of the "price tag attacks" phenomenon)
● Recently, IDF launched a recruitment campaign targeting
Christian Arab Israelis
● Important consequence: many scholarships and public jobs are
limited to people who did military service

38. Al-Haram ash-Sharif / Temple Mount

39. The rock at the center of the
Universe

40. The Wall

41. Shu'afat Camp

42. Shu'afat Camp

43. Check points

44. Golan Heights: occupied in
1967, annexed in 1981,
without international
recognition; not part of Eretz
Israel / Historical Palestine, its
relevance for Israel is mostly
military (similar to South Tyrol
for Italy in 1918); many
Jewish settlements; Israel
sometimes hinted that in
principle it could be given
back to Syria in exchange for
a convenient peace deal
West Bank: many refugees of
1947-49; occupied in 1967, never
annexed for demographic reasons,
original idea was to bargain with
Jordan a partial restitution in
exchange for peace (then peace
with Jordan was reached anyway);
very dense presence of Jewish
settlements; since 1993, Israel
agrees that part of it (not all) will
become part of Palestine, but not
before a credible peace deal;
Israeli right-wing calls for
annexation but without citizenship
East Jerusalem:
occupied in 1967,
annexed in 1980,
without international
recognition: all foreign
embassies (including
USA) are in Tel Aviv;
Palestinians claim
East J as their capital,
which is unthinkable
for majority of Israelis
Gaza: 60% of population comes
from refugees of 1947-49;
occupied in 1967, never
annexed for demographic
reasons; all settlements were
dismantled in 2005; no
agreement on whether it should
still be considered occupied;
exit visas and much
bureaucracy still have to pass
through Israel; the Gaza Wars
were wars in public speech but
anti-terror operations for the
State Attorney (source)