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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Residents of Jerusalem’s Old City feel the sway of 1967 war

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JERUSALEM: The residents of Jerusalem’s Old City have felt the effects that seemingly arbitrary border lines can have on people’s lives more tangibly than most over the course of the last century.


“My dad said it was not worth building in Jerusalem,” says Nora Kort, sitting in her family’s museum in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.


The Wujoud Cultural Centre, with rich brocade seats and tables with intricate mosaic inlays, tells of the city’s Christian presence.


After 1967, “the family had a lot of difficulty, because they were afraid, number one, of losing everything,” explains the 54-year-old.


It has been 50 years since the Six-Day War, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, among other territories.


Some Arabs left the West side for the East side afterwards. Kort’s parents were some of them.


They brought only the expenses they were told they needed when they left, thinking they could come back.


Under Jordanian rule, she said, life was OK for her family.


But “in1967, it happened again,” she said. “Everything came to a loss.”


As in all conflicts, there were also those whose fortunes improved.


Esther Sternburg lives in what is now the Muslim Quarter, and she can see the Western Wall.


For the 19 years between 1948 and 1967, she and her parents, all born in Jerusalem, could not enter the Old City, where they had owned property.


Sternburg can barely speak as she recounts how her people finally saw their dreams of return come true after the 1967 war.


The “Jewish people are strong,” she says when asked how she feels when she is called a settler for living in East Jerusalem.


“We know it’s good for us to be here. It’s good for all, not just our Arab neighbours, but for the world,” she added. “We will solve all the problems of the neighbours. They see it. We clean the places.”


While the status of Jerusalem has been a sore point since even before the 1967 war, the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has prompted increasing international condemnation.


Though the war ended after only a few days, on June 10, 1967, its effects continue to be felt until this day.


Much of the Palestinian Territories remain under Israeli occupation, and a large security wall, marked with the occasional military checkpoint, is a constant reminder of their limited freedom of movement a half-century on. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stressed to US President Donald Trump during his trip to the West Bank city of Bethlehem last month that East Jerusalem must be the capital of any Palestinian state.


The idea that the 1967 war reunified Jerusalem is laughable to Kort.


“There is nothing that advocates the word reunified unless the walls are knocked down,” says Kort. “How can you feel reunited when you are considered an alien, not a citizen — I pay taxes, I go through the system, yet I find lots of difficulties,” as a Palestinian woman.


Khader Salameh, a Muslim historian whose family fled the village of Zakariya after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, believes there is no future for those in the West Bank or the other Palestinian Territories.


“Maybe you need [to ask] a religious man,” he jokes when asked about the future of Jerusalem in 20 years.


“Everything is going backwards.” — DPA


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