JERUSALEM — A day after a Palestinian construction worker’s deadly rampage in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday called for reviving the practice of demolishing the homes of attackers’ families, and his chief deputy proposed cutting off some Arab neighborhoods from the rest of the city.
Israeli Jews expressed anxiety about security, and Palestinians wondered what the violence will mean for their already tenuous position in society.
On Wednesday, a Palestinian drove a huge earth-moving vehicle over cars and into buses, killing three Israelis and leaving a swath of wreckage on a main Jerusalem street before security forces shot him to death.
The attacker, Hussam Dwayat, 30, of east Jerusalem, had no problem moving around the Jewish part of Jerusalem. After Israel captured the Arab section of the city in the 1967 war, it gave residency and Israeli ID cards to the Arabs who lived there, giving them freedom of movement around Israel.
The attack brought calls to reconsider at least some of the benefits the 250,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem receive from the Israeli government.
“I think we have to be tougher in part of the measures that we take against terrorists, especially terrorists who are part of our internal fabric of life,” Olmert said at an economic conference at the Red Sea resort of Eilat. “If we have to demolish houses, we will demolish houses. If we have to revoke social rights, we will revoke social rights. It’s inconceivable that we are slaughtered and they will have all the privileges that our society grants our citizens.”
Israel in 2005 stopped demolishing the homes of Palestinian attackers after the military determined that the tactic did not work as a deterrent.
Olmert’s dovish vice premier, Haim Ramon, proposed cutting off the attacker’s home village and others in east Jerusalem, where about 50,000 Arabs live, by rerouting the West Bank separation barrier to put the villages outside Jerusalem’s boundaries. It was a rare call by a senior Israeli official to effectively redivide Jerusalem, reflecting concern that preventing attacks by Jerusalem’s Palestinians is virtually impossible.
Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1967 to 1979, said most Palestinians in the city value the benefits linked to Jerusalem residency.
“The majority cherish their status. They would not try this (such an attack),” he said. “There is no way you can generalize, but the majority of east Jerusalemites would like the status quo to continue.”
