O Jerusalem
Does Israel’s
capital—with its large, activist, and growing ultra-Orthodox population—fairly
represent Israel?
By Liel Leibovitz
This week, as we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, the 43rd
anniversary of the city’s reunification after the 1967 war, I have a
confession to make: I can’t stand Jerusalem.
It’s a confession that would have saddened my great-great-grandfather, who left Slovakia for the Old City in the
19th century, as well as most of my family, who live there still. Out of
respect for them, I have spent most of my life keeping my predilections
to myself. My dislike for Jerusalem, I was sure, was predicated on all
the wrong reasons: because its restaurants were not as chic as Tel
Aviv’s, its stores not as trendy, or any number of superficial
considerations. Jerusalem, I felt, just didn’t represent me.
Looking at newly released statistics this week, I was dismayed to
find that the problem is deeper than that. Jerusalem, it is becoming
more evident, doesn’t represent the majority of Israelis.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, only 21 percent of
Jerusalem’s 774,000 residents are secular, less than half the national
average, and 32 percent are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, nearly
four times the national average. At a time when most Israelis look with
great pride at the country’s booming high-tech industry and rising
college graduation rates, 49 percent of Jerusalem’s students, enrolled
in ultra-Orthodox institutions, will fail to receive high-school
diplomas this year. This number is likely to continue to grow. And while
Israelis in general are entering the workforce in greater numbers,
Jerusalem is becoming increasingly impoverished: 60 percent of all
Israelis currently participate in the workforce, but only 45 percent of
Jerusalemites do. This number is likely to continue to drop.
The capital’s problems don’t end there. As has been widely
reported for some years, vast swaths of its choicest real estate
are being gobbled up by wealthy American Jews who, for the most part,
either keep the property empty as a second or third home or, in the case
of more religiously observant buyers, provide housing for
ultra-Orthodox families. Lamenting this change, some of the city’s
disgruntled residents told me in private conversations that Jerusalem
was now Israel’s most international and yet least cosmopolitan city.
Ramot Eshkol is a case in point. In the 1970s and 1980s, the northern
neighborhood was a bastion of secularism, home to authors like Amos Oz
and Meir Shalev and numerous others in Israel’s cultural and
intellectual elite. In 2004, an average three-bedroom apartment in the
neighborhood cost $100,000. Today, in part because of the influence of American buyers, similar three-bedroom apartments sell for half a million
dollars or more, and over 70 percent of the neighborhood’s 9,000
residents are ultra-Orthodox, many of them either American or supported
by American charity organizations. As the ultra-Orthodox moved in, the
neighborhood’s previous residents fled, grumbling that their old
neighborhood was no longer an exclusive, secular community. And with
prices in Ramot Eshkol skyrocketing, ultra-Orthodox families have
started looking for homes in nearby neighborhoods, moving there and
setting off similar population shifts in Ramot Alon, Bayit Va’Gan, Kerem
Avraham, and neighborhoods all over the city.
In and of itself, this process is not unique. Cities, after all,
change all the time, neighborhoods reinvent themselves, populations
drift out and others settle in. But real estate in Jerusalem is more
than just a series of transactions; it has become a contact sport.
In Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood north of the Old City,
American-backed settlers have successfully sued to retrieve property
that, historically, belonged to Jewish families forced out by Arab
violence in the 1930s and 1940s. Most Israelis found their efforts
appalling: If Jews, after all, pushed prior ownership as an admissible
reason to retrieve previously pilfered land, similar legal concessions
would have to be made for Arabs who left Jerusalem and Jaffa and Haifa
and Lod, a potential calamity for the Jewish state. Those concerned
primarily with Jerusalem’s boundaries, however, paid no heed to the
throngs of demonstrators—including authors, academics, and other members
of Israel’s mainstream—now congregating in the neighborhood each Friday
afternoon. They continued to build. With Florida millionaire Irving Moskowitz’s money, they erected another Jewish residential compound
in Sheikh Jarrah and cheered on as Eli Yishai, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox
minister of housing, announced a plan to build 1,600 units for Jews in
the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot Shlomo. Yishai’s announcement,
timed to coincide with Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Jerusalem,
sparked the most severe diplomatic crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations in at least two decades.
Reprinted with permission from Tablet Magazine. To read the rest of this article, please visit http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/33511/o-jerusalem/.