Sunday, August 11, 2002

Homes Lost and Found on Hill Where an Israeli Project Rises
Five years ago, Israel's decision to build a sprawling housing complex on a pine-covered hilltop in East Jerusalem temporarily brought peace negotiations with the Palestinians to a halt. The plan was condemned by the United Nations, criticized by the United States and bitterly protested by Palestinians and left-wing Israelis.

But in Jerusalem, the extreme, even the shocking, has a way of becoming as routine as a mortgage payment.

Now the project, called Har Homa, is becoming a reality of stark white stone and glass brick, a suburban dream hewn from a tormented landscape. A work still in progress, it is drawing together — or at least juxtaposing — the conflict's insiders and outsiders, its winners and losers, in a reluctantly shared enterprise that is as political as it is commercial. Like Jerusalem itself, it is a place that evokes the ache of homes lost, and the balm of homes found.

The Palestinian workers said they could make up to 100 shekels daily here — about $21 dollars — compared with nothing at all in the West Bank. As the conflict has ground on and Israel has sealed off Palestinian areas, the Palestinian economy has collapsed.

The men said other Palestinians did not criticize them. "Everybody knows that it's a settlement, but nobody asks you not to work," said one man, who gave his name only as Hassan, 30, the father of five. "They know the alternative: not to eat." Hassan lives half an hour away, but he stays at Har Homa for two weeks at a stretch to avoid getting caught.

Toward dusk one evening this week, a dozen Palestinian men were seen dashing from Har Homa, through a break in the construction fence, down the rocky hillside and toward the olive groves of the West Bank.

It's painful to see the Israeli police come here and arrest these people," said one of the guards, Salem Alkuran, 18, an Israeli Arab from Beersheba.

The Palestinian workers said they had been hired by Israeli Arabs serving as middlemen to Israeli Jewish bosses. Most said they spoke enough Hebrew to get by. Among themselves, the workers speak Arabic, and they talk politics.

Mr. Jahalin, the Palestinian laborer, said the only solution to the conflict was to establish a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. But Mr. Abu Tair, the electrician, differed. "These people are strangers," he said. "This is Muslim land, and an Islamic state should be established."

Mr. Alkuran, the Israeli Arab, spoke up. "We can live together," he said. "It's impossible to move the whole country."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/international/middleeast/11SETT.html?pagewanted=all&position=t

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