Sunday...and every Sunday, the Palestinian leadership and the municipal elections in Jerusalem between entrapment and negligence!

The social media circulated a message addressed by the lawyer, Walid Abu Tayeh, to the President, Mahmoud Abbas, asking him... "Your blessing and approval of the participation of the people of Jerusalem in the Jerusalem municipal elections." Brother Walid explains in his letter that he was born in Nazareth and holds Israeli citizenship, and that he has been a resident of occupied Arab Jerusalem for 44 years. In his letter, he says that he has decided to run in the municipal elections that will be held next October.

These are some, but not all, of the reasons he mentions in his letter and for which he decided to run for the presidency and membership of the Jerusalem Municipality:
1. Resilience and survival, preserving the Palestinian presence, and stopping displacement.
2. Preserving housing and property rights, work, the Palestinian narrative, and the acquired rights of the people of Jerusalem.
3. Stop demolishing homes and stop confiscating lands.
4. Collecting building permits and building new Arab neighborhoods.
5. Preserving Islamic and Christian holy places
6. Transforming the municipality into a political and legal platform for the justice of our national cause
7. Because the only beneficiaries of our non-participation are Israel and the Jewish residents of Jerusalem, who alone have the municipality’s revenues, which reach every year no less than seven billion dollars, and it is the Israelis alone who dispose of the resources of East and West Jerusalem, and the Israelis do not want anyone to share the pie with them, and the Jerusalem municipality It earns a net profit, after expenses and costs, from the people of East Jerusalem, not less than two billion dollars annually.
8. Coexistence in peace in an open Jerusalem, east and west, is a model and a mini-sample of a one-state solution in historic Palestine, in addition to the idea of ​​an international Jerusalem with Bethlehem Corpus Separatum. "
end quote.

Although the above is a priority demand for every Palestinian, it is naive to believe that participation in the municipal elections can achieve any of its provisions.

Scenarios for participation in the elections
In any case, the debate over participation in the municipal elections in occupied Jerusalem is not new. Rather, it has been discussed in every municipal election cycle since the eighties. The Meretz movement was urging the Palestinians from Jerusalem to participate in the municipal elections, and some of them reached the point of blaming the Palestinians for his failure in the elections. In the last two decades, it was noticed that some Palestinians from Arab neighborhoods ran for candidacy, but none of them succeeded, because there is a national consensus in the city against participating in the elections, because Arab Jerusalem is an integral part of the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Participation in elections conducted according to Israeli law constitutes acceptance. And a legitimization of the occupation and an acknowledgment that Jerusalem is subject to Israeli legal jurisdiction.

On the other hand, there is a marginal minority that says that municipal elections are not political or national elections, but rather service elections, and that any resident of Jerusalem has the right to choose the municipal council that provides services to him, and that the presence of Palestinians in the municipal council will protect the rights and interests of Jerusalemites, including some of what they included. Brother Walid Tayeh's aforementioned message.

If we dealt with the subject theoretically, we would say that there is logic in both points of view and we tried to balance them to choose the best, but the theoretical does not agree with the application and reality.

What will happen is that the religious Jews and the extremist nationalists and racists will take advantage of the talk about the participation of the Palestinians in the elections to incite against them and urge the Jews to go to the polls with their masses to save Jerusalem from the Arabs, while the Arabs do not have such an opportunity and will not be able to move the masses of Jerusalemites towards the polls for political and national reasons. The aforementioned, and then, even if the Arabs win some seats, the majority will be in the hands of the Jewish members, and we will come out with a municipality that is a thousand times worse than the current municipality, while we will be before the world as we have given legitimacy to the occupation municipality and we have normalized the occupation and its laws in Jerusalem. Therefore, any action from which it may be understood that the Palestinians will participate in the Israeli municipal elections must be avoided.

Accordingly, there is no value or practical benefit for the Palestinians of Jerusalem from participating in municipal elections that are conducted according to Israeli law. The municipal elections in Jerusalem must be politicized and viewed from a purely political perspective, not a service perspective.

Dealing with reality
On the other hand, there are those who believe that it is possible to deal with the status quo in Jerusalem, but without involving the Palestinian national movement in the city, the leadership of the PLO, or the Palestinian Authority in these elections, and without giving Israel the luxury of claiming that the wall of refusal to participate in the elections has collapsed, or giving the opportunity To the right and Jewish extremism to exploit Arab participation to urge Jews to go to the polls in a provocative manner. Brother Lawyer Walid Tayeh, although he has been residing in occupied Arab Jerusalem for 44 years, as he says, is, as he says in his letter, an Israeli by birth. Although I do not have accurate statistics, the sources that I was able to find say that the number of Israeli brothers who reside in Jerusalem permanently ranges between 11-15 thousand, and there are about twenty thousand residents of the part of Beit Safafa that was subjugated to Israel. Since 48, they hold Israeli citizenship, and there are also Jerusalemites who obtained Israeli citizenship, and there are conflicting estimates about their number. While some say that their number does not exceed 15,000, others insist that their number exceeded 30,000, and that obtaining Israeli citizenship was being done discreetly. . It can be said that there are about fifty thousand Arabs residing in Jerusalem who can participate in the municipal elections without political embarrassment.

They add that, therefore, there is a possibility to participate in the municipal elections, whether on a single list or on a coalition list with the Meretz movement. Whether it is alone or in coalition with Meretz, it should not present itself as a Palestinian list and not search for its legitimacy in the corridors of the boycott in Ramallah, and not burden the Palestinian Jerusalemite community with the burden of its work, and it should present itself as an Israeli-Arab list. In the context of talking about the hypothesis that there are about fifty thousand Arabs in Jerusalem who hold Israeli citizenship, it is necessary to take into consideration the possibility of a number of Jerusalemites joining them for personal purposes related to their places of work, as happened and is happening with some employees and workers since the beginning of the occupation as workers and municipal employees or those exploited by their employers They blackmail them into voting for the employer's party. I do not rule out that the Arab List will work for such people to vote for it, and I do not see the interest in shedding light on such people, but rather ignoring them.

An independent municipality... and the revival of the Jerusalem Municipality
Finally, some may challenge the necessity of reviving and activating the Jerusalem Municipality Council, while recalling that the main problem facing Jerusalemites is the problem of organization and building permits, and that the Jerusalem Municipality has no control over that. However, the issue of the Jerusalem Municipality is greater than just responding to the Israeli municipal elections, and it is an issue It is multifaceted, and reviving the trust is a vital matter of very high political and moral value, and I hope to address it in an upcoming article soon.

In conclusion, I say:
It is not permissible for the Palestinian leadership to interfere in the Israeli municipal elections in Jerusalem, and it must adhere to the traditional position that we used to adopt, which is that we reject the occupation and refuse to give legitimacy to the application of the occupation laws to occupied Arab Jerusalem.
There is no harm in the participation of the Arabs of the interior who hold Israeli citizenship in the elections, as this is a matter related to them, with the emphasis that their participation is not a Palestinian participation, but rather in their capacity as Israeli citizens.

Finally, the Palestinian leadership must draw up a plan, promote it, and work to make it a success in international forums, striving towards its implementation, based on the argument that municipal elections are service elections, and demands that Israel refrain from the Israeli municipality’s control of East Jerusalem as an occupied land that is still on the negotiating table as one of Final status issues, and enabling the citizens of Arab Jerusalem to elect a separate municipal council for Arab Jerusalem with an independent budget and financial responsibility with full powers, including planning, construction, education and social activities, while expressing readiness to participate in a coordinating council that coordinates between the two municipal councils in the two parts of West and East Jerusalem as a preparation step The atmosphere for any future settlement of the issue of Jerusalem. Achieving the existence of such a municipal council under the ceiling of the current situation and on a temporary basis does not contradict with reviving and activating the Jerusalem Municipality as an extension of the legal status that existed before the 1967 occupation, which removed the Secretary and disrupted the work of the Municipality Council.