Israeli professor Yitzhak Reiter has said that the living conditions in Palestinian neighborhoods of east Jerusalem are in constant decline while Israel’s discriminatory practices and police violence against the local residents are on the rise.
In a recent interview conducted with him by Maariv newspaper Reiter a noted professor of Middle East Israel and Islamic Studies said that the Jerusalemites feel that the Israeli government does not care about them and consider them not part of the city’s population but it sees them as citizens who break the law all the time and thus there is a need to deploy security forces and barriers at the entrances to their areas in the city and restrict their movement.
He affirmed that the majority of Jerusalem’s Arab population lives in poverty and lack of hope in light of the low levels of infrastructure and the services provided for them adding that the Jerusalemites also feel legally insecure.
According to statistics he provided most of the residents in east Jerusalem are Muslims 64 percent of them under age 18 another 36 percent of them unemployed and 51 percent live below the poverty level.
Although they have Jordanian passports the Jerusalemites have no rights while the Israeli government enables Jewish groups with extremist ideology to take over east Jerusalem and gradually the Aqsa Mosque the professor said.
He also opined that the Jerusalemites became deeply pessimistic about the political process after US president-elect Donald Trump declared his intent to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem.
