A concrete barrier being erected between an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem and an adjacent Jewish neighborhood was ordered demolished Monday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because it implied a de facto division of Jerusalem.
The barrier was being put up between Jebel Mukaber, from which several Palestinian terrorists have emerged in recent weeks to attack Israelis in Jerusalem and elsewhere, and the neighborhood of Armon Hanatsiv, which has been subjected to frequent firebomb attacks by residents of the Arab neighborhood.
Netanyahu made his decision after several cabinet members, including Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, objected that the creation of a barrier could set a dangerous precedent regarding the preservation of Jerusalem as an open, united city under Israeli sovereignty.
Following the 1967 Six Day War, Israel tripled the size of its capital, Jerusalem, by expropriating territory that had belonged to Jordan. A central motif of all Israeli governments since then has been the preservation of a united Jerusalem. Although police and the Jerusalem municipality have said that the barrier is temporary and was being deployed only according to security needs, the government has now decided that the ideological aspect is more weighty.
"We must protect homes by initiating offensive operations against terrorist infrastructure and incitement, not through fortification," said Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. To separate neighborhoods with security fences, he said, would be "a prize for terrorists".
Meanwhile, Israeli citizens were looking after their own protection against "lone-wolf" terrorists who have killed eight Israelis and wounded dozens of others in more than 30 random attacks during the past three weeks. According to the Haaretz newspaper, the number of persons applying for gun permits has increased by 5,000 percent since the current round of violence began. A number of terrorists have been stopped by Israeli civilians carrying weapons.
On the Palestinian side, say Israeli officials, 18 knife wielding attackers have been killed and some 40 others have died in clashes with Israeli troops in widespread demonstrations across the West Bank and on the Gaza Strip border.
In an attack Sunday in the central bus station of Beersheba in Israel's south, a bedouin killed an Israeli army sergeant and wounded 11 other persons before himself being shot dead. Mortally wounded was an Eritrean asylum seeker who was mistaken by security forces as a second terrorist and shot. An incensed crowd prevented ambulance crews at first from taking the Eritrean to hospital. When he arrived he was pronounced dead. Netanyahu called on the Israeli public not to take the law into their own hands if they are not being directly threatened.
Earlier in the weekend, three Palestinians were shot dead in Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Hebron after they allegedly tried to stab Israelis. One was a 16-year-old girl from Jebel Mukaber who stabbed and slightly wounded a policewoman. The policewoman shot her dead.