By ILANA GOLDBERG
After more than two years, the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Sa’ed is finally able to exhale.
Earlier this month, the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court granted the appeal of the Sheikh Sa’ed Neighborhood Committee and five residents of the village, filed in opposition to the security barrier.
The court canceled the requisition orders that had been issued to build the barrier and the court’s appeals committee ruled that the planned route of the security barrier would cause disproportionate harm to the daily lives of the residents, in part because it would separate Sheik Sa’ed from other neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.
According to a press release issued by B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, this is the first time that a court has voided a section of the separation barrier around Jerusalem.
In reaching its decision, the Appeals Committee, headed by Judge David Gladstein, rejected the state’s argument that the village’s residents constituted a security threat. The Appeals Committee recommended that the barrier be built east of the neighborhood, in a manner that would enable the residents to continue to gain access to east Jerusalem.
Jebl Mukaber is one of the numerous east Jerusalem villages annexed by Israel immediately after the Six Day War.
“This [annexation] was done very hastily, under pressure that the world was going to force us to give back the West Bank,” attests Hillel Bardin, a retired computer programmer from Hebrew University.
Perhaps due to this haste, the Israeli authorities didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that the new border arbitrarily included six neighborhoods of Jebl Mukaber within Jerusalem and left one neighborhood, Sheikh Sa’ed, on the “other” side of the Green Line, in the West Bank.
Yet until recently, the Green Line had little effect on the lives of the residents of Sheikh Sa’ed. Most residents of the other neighborhoods of Jebl Mukaber hold blue ID cards, which grant them Jerusalem residency status, and the residents of Sheikh Sa’ed hold the orange ID cards issued to the West Bank, but they also had Israeli permits to go into the city and a long-guaranteed right to Jerusalem services and utilities.
Jebl Mukaber functioned as one organic entity, which was just as well since Sheikh Sa’ed sits directly west of the topographic chasm, the Kidron Valley, with nothing but steep slopes on its far side.
But after the first intifada, the Oslo Accords, and the waves of terror in Jerusalem and throughout Israel, travel between Israel and the West Bank became difficult and often impossible for Palestinians. As the security barrier was built, life in the tiny village of Sheikh Sa’ed became increasingly untenable.
