27th June 2011
Nir Nahshon, 28, was driving to his home in Jerusalem when the GPS sent him on a bad turn, and accidentally directed him into the east Jerusalem Palestinian Neighborhood Of Issawiya.
As he entered the village, a boy of 12 started shouting "Jew, Jew" in Arabic, and a mob instantly formed, pelting his car with bricks and stones.
He was rescued by one of the village Elders (Mukhtar) and his sons, and suffers from a relatively minor head injury.
The Palestinian residents of Issawiya, a village of about 12,000 (2006) in north east Jerusalem, are not Israeli citizens, but because they are within the municipal borders of Jerusalem they are given permanent residency and blue ID cards by Israel.
The population of Jerusalem is roughly 500,000 Israeli, mostly Jewish, and 250,000 Palestinian, mostly Muslim, to a total of about 770,000.
The Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem, given residency but not citizenship, customarily refuse to take part in Jerusalem's municipal elections. A Palestinian who leaves Jerusalem for more than 7 years loses their residency status and can never return.
The Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem suffer from lack of planning and investment by the municipal council they refuse to acknowledge, lack of schools and facilities, and in recent years the forced separation from surrounding villages caused by the security barrier (which in Jerusalem has much more to do with politics and real estate than security). The lack of planning causes many to build illegally, which in turn causes conflict when authorities destroy illegally built residence.
Information about Jerusalem can be found in Ir Amim, and B'Tselem. Ir Amim also does free tours of East Jerusalem with an emphasis on the security barrier and its effect on the city - highly recommended!
There is a great deal of justifiable frustration and mistrust.
But there are no excuses.
Hebrew, English links.
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