Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Khaled al-Saidi, right, said his family bought land in E1, between East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, in the 1990s. The Israelis have told him to leave.
AL ZAYYEM, West Bank — They buried Rabi al-Essawy 14 months ago on land his family owns not far from this village, between East Jerusalem and the large Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim. Mr. Essawy, 65, was a member of an important clan, and thousands attended his funeral.
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accelerated planning for housing units inside E1, but so far the only significant building is a police station.
But Mr. Essawy’s grave is in a parcel of land known as E1, a largely empty patch of the West Bank that is among the most sensitive pieces of real estate in an intractable conflict that is fundamentally about the land. The Israelis mean to annex E1 — short for East 1 — and they do not want Muslim graves to complicate future plans to build more settlements here.
Israeli authorities have ordered the family to remove Mr. Essawy’s remains and bury him in the village cemetery, just outside E1.
The fight over Mr. Essawy’s grave is a tiny skirmish in the long, intensifying battle over this parcel of land, a fight that speaks to the seemingly insurmountable differences, hostility and distrust between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It also stands as a symbol of the failure of negotiations as each side tries to outmaneuver the other with unilateral actions, and the international community is left on the sidelines to do little more than express discontent.
“It’s a big deal because for both sides, it looks like it’s in the heart of their dreams,” the columnist Nahum Barnea wrote in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “Nobody’s innocent here. Everybody’s trying to force his will on the other side.”
Israel sees E1, only 4.6 square miles and largely rocky desert, as the stone in the arch that connects East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed, to Maale Adumim, one of the biggest of the so-called settlement blocs, with a population of 40,000. Israel says it intends to keep Maale Adumim in any peace settlement, hoping to swap land with any future Palestinian state. In fact, it was Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party who in 1994 attached E1 to the municipality of Maale Adumim.
For the Palestinians, E1 is seen as essential if they are ever to achieve a viable independent state with East Jerusalem as their capital. Palestinians say they need the land to preserve a workable, practical connection between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and to build housing for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. As important, the Palestinians contend, E1 is central to a crucial north-south route through the West Bank from Ramallah to Bethlehem.
Israeli officials argue that a system of protected roads and tunnels through E1 could allow Palestinians passage. Palestinians say that Israelis could instead use such roads to travel between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, where many of the settlers work. Israeli officials also argue that the West Bank is not obstructed farther to the east, and that Palestinians can drive north-south closer to the Jordan River; Palestinians say that the Jordan Valley is too far out of their way and that Israel has said it will demand a security presence there in any case.
And of course the Palestinians, like the United States and most other nations, regard all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 boundaries, including in East Jerusalem itself, as illegal or as “obstacles to peace.” They regard Israeli assertions of “consensus” on keeping three main settlement blocs in the West Bank as self-delusion. Washington, however, does accept the principle of land swaps to accommodate demographic changes on the ground, but always subject to final agreement between the parties.
E1 has been contentious for years, with Washington warning various Israeli governments not to start building there. But E1 burst back into the forefront recently after Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, won United Nations General Assembly approval to recognize Palestine as a nonmember observer state. Mr. Abbas pressed ahead despite warnings from the United States and Israel that such an action would be a unilateral step in violation of the 1993 Oslo Accords that set up the supposedly interim Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Abbas won handily in the General Assembly on Nov. 29, in a 138 to 9 vote. Even Germany, a strong Israeli ally, abstained. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded with a three-part riposte. He withheld taxes collected on behalf of the Palestinians to pay down their electricity debt to Israel. He announced final approval for the construction of 3,000 more housing units in East Jerusalem and existing settlement blocs — beyond the 1967 borders, but within current settlement lines. And finally, he accelerated planning for the construction of up to 3,400 housing units inside E1.
E1 on West Bank is Empty but Full of Meaning
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E1 on West Bank is Empty but Full of Meaning
