Jerusalem

The Economist has a big feature on Jerusalem, and it's not pretty:

Jerusalem is still essentially two cities—not just in population and economic ties, but also in municipal policy. In a recent book (“Discrimination in the Heart of the Holy City”, International Peace and Co-operation Centre, Jerusalem, 2006), Meir Margalit, an Israeli peace activist and former city councillor, has detailed the differences.

Arab Jerusalemites, now about 33% of the city's residents, get just 12% of its welfare budget, even though their poverty rate is more than double that of Jewish residents. They get 15% of the education budget, 8% of engineering services, just 1.2% of the culture and art, and so on. Overall, their share of the services' budget is under 12%, meaning a four-to-one difference in spending per person between Jews and Palestinians. In countless other things, from the number of garbage containers on the streets to the employment rates at city hall, there is a massive disparity in favour of the city's Jews.

These numbers from an activist, I won't take them as gospel. But why do I suspect the Israeli government hasn't released a similar comparison of services? In any case, the Economist's story is worth reading, and to me is a fresh glimpse into the moral failure that has defined Israel's occupation of the West Bank.