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Jerusalem, undivided?
In an irony that seems to be lost on Israeli pundits and politicians, Jerusalem Day — the commemoration of the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem — is again heralded this year with hand-wringing and warnings over the very nature of the reunification: Arabs and Jews living in one city, undivided.
The national holiday, marked according to the Hebrew calendar, falls this year on June 2.
In its annual report released today, the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies says that the Arab population of Israel’s largest city has grown to 256,820, or 34 percent. Continuing a decades-old trend, more people left the city (18,750) than moved there (12,360). The vast majority of these people are understood to be Jews.
Jerusalem, compared with cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, is much poorer, far more religious, and has far fewer private sector jobs.
In a recent op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post headlined, “Make Jerusalem a livable city,” Colette Avital, deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, calls for more employment training programs, affordable housing and government spending on cultural programs in Israel’s capital city, as well as government incentives for biotechnology and new media companies to move there.
Two-thirds of the 40,000 university students living in the city plan to leave after graduation, she writes.
Since 1990, 284,850 Jerusalemites have left the city, compared with the arrival of 174,560, leaving a net migration loss of 110,290, according to the Jerusalem Institute study.
Palestinians, who live on the east side of Jerusalem, have few options to leave. They are bound by family ties, grinding poverty, and Israeli laws that make it difficult for them to live elsewhere.
Those who fret over their growing presence, however, take comfort in these statistics, included in today’s report: the fertility rate among Arab Jerusalemites decreased to 4.0 births per woman over her lifetime in 2006 from 4.3 in 2000, while increasing among the Jewish population to 3.9 in 2006 from 2.7 in 2000.
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