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The first Palestinian in Jerusalem’s City Hall?

Western observers interested in Jerusalem can be forgiven for thinking the most politically significant building in this city is a low limestone edifice featuring American flags and Marines — the embassy opened in May by the Trump administration to international fanfare and criticism. But anyone attentive to the fate of this place in the summer of 2018 would be advised to look past the embassy to an obscure structure a half-mile to the south.

This building has no flags at all. Instead there are Arabic books on a wheeled shelf in the lobby, a few boys with soccer haircuts and girls with hijabs, and a modest sign welcoming you to the community center of Sur Baher.

It’s there, in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sur Baher — a four-minute drive from my Jewish Israeli neighborhood of Talpiot — that you can find Ramadan Dabash, the center’s chairman, who’s running a renegade campaign for a seat on Jerusalem’s City Council.

In a city where more than a third of the 860,000 residents are Palestinian, there should be nothing strange about Dabash’s candidacy. But a victory in the October 30 election would make him the first Palestinian representative at City Hall — and the personification of a political shift that isn’t making headlines.

Dabash, a civil engineer, was born in Sur Baher a few months before Israel captured it in a war with Jordan in 1967. Unlike the West Bank, which was placed under military occupation pending a peace deal with the Arab world, east Jerusalem was declared by Israel to be part of Israel proper.

That meant people here, including the Dabash family, were given residency status and access to Israel’s systems of universal health care and social welfare. They were allowed to apply for citizenship and vote in municipal elections. But nearly no one in east Jerusalem did either of those things, seeing them as an unacceptable “normalization” of Israeli control.

For the past 51 years, Dabash and the other Arab residents of Jerusalem have lived an ambivalent and disadvantaged political existence. In the last election in 2013, according to City Hall, not even 2% of them cast a ballot.

This has helped keep Jerusalem’s Palestinians in limbo and has contributed to a gap that’s clear to anyone who spends time in the city’s Arab neighborhoods, which are neglected, crowded and unsafe. Eighty-three percent of children in east Jerusalem are poor, according to Israeli government statistics, twice the rate in the city’s west.

That reality, Dabash says, is why he’s flouting his community’s political taboo to run.

“Fifty-one years is enough,” Dabash told me a few weeks ago in one of the classrooms at the community center he helped found four years ago. “We can’t be left hanging between heaven and earth.”

The Palestinian Authority, based in nearby Ramallah, sees participation in Jerusalem elections as a form of collaboration. Last month a council of Islamic clerics banned any involvement. Dabash says he has faced backlash in the form of hostile phone calls and messages on Facebook and WhatsApp groups, where he’s tarred as a “traitor” or a “collaborator” — epithets that carry a threat of violence.

But he’s determined to forge ahead, armed, perhaps, with the striking results of a poll released this year, that found 58% of Jerusalem Palestinians support voting. Just 14% said they were opposed.

About 7,000 votes are needed to win a seat, depending on turnout. Because Jewish residents here are split acrimoniously between mainstream Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox, if Palestinians have even a few seats, they’ll control crucial swing votes. But pundits who’ve predicted Palestinian turnout in previous elections have been wrong. History and national sentiment mitigate against it, and there’s a big difference between supporting the idea of voting and actually showing up on Election Day.

Dabash is not a leftist. He quoted the Quran throughout our conversation. He didn’t seem like someone who’d be comfortable at a coexistence conference funded by European nongovernmental organizations, but rather like a guy you’d want to run your union — a blunt operator who’d give an opposing negotiator a hard time.

To explain why he’s running, Dabash pulled out his smartphone to show me photos of a nearby kindergarten overrun with mice and cockroaches. He pointed out the window toward Har Homa, a Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem, which has the kind of facilities that Palestinians can only dream of. In all of Arab Jerusalem (he slammed the table for emphasis) there isn’t a single municipal pool. They need teachers, classrooms and jobs.

The way Dabash sees it, the chances of a peace deal are nil. With Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic State group and the Syrian War all within a three-hour drive from here, an Israeli pullout isn’t happening anytime soon. To get things done, Dabash has been willing to play ball not just with Israelis but with the Israeli right, the only real political force in this conservative city. Last year, he even went so far as to briefly join the Likud party. The political cost of this approach is high: The closer he gets to Israelis, the more suspect he becomes in the eyes of his potential voters.

He points to the community center, which is funded by Israel, as proof he can work the system and get results. “Israel says it’s Jewish and democratic,” he said. “I say, OK, show us your democracy.”

Over the past five years or so, watching from west Jerusalem, it’s been clear that remarkable changes are afoot in the city’s human landscape. Not long ago, it was unheard-of to see Palestinian salespeople in Israeli stores. Now it’s commonplace. Palestinian enrollment at Hebrew University is up dramatically, as are requests for Israeli citizenship. The number of east Jerusalem wage earners employed in west Jerusalem is now estimated at close to 50%. The trend is driven not by good will but by economic interests: by demand for labor in Jewish Jerusalem, and by a lack of better options for Palestinians.

The city remains unequal, there are periodic acts of terrorism and there’s no reason to be sanguine about the future. But at the same time, worlds that have long been distinct are moving closer together. All this helps explain why dark predictions of violence at tense moments, like the embassy opening, have failed to materialize.

It was against this backdrop that the community center opened in Sur Baher, a place where many residents have traditionally had ties to Hamas. The center’s birth was telling. Shortly after the opening ceremony, attended by Mayor Nir Barkat, residents opposed to normalization set it on fire. Others then repaired the damage. These days it draws a few hundred people every week.

The community center also marks a trend on the Israeli side, namely a willingness to invest in Arab residents. In May, the government allocated $560 million to projects in east Jerusalem. If all that money gets where it’s meant to go, it will be the largest single investment in Palestinian Jerusalemites since Israel took control a half-century ago.

Following all of this makes you more aware of the peculiarities and paradoxes on which the city rests. One, for example, is that the movement on the Israeli side is coming not from the conciliatory left but from the nationalist right. The left traditionally hoped that one day east Jerusalem would be transferred to Palestinian rule and wouldn’t be Israel’s problem — hardly an incentive to invest. The right, on the other hand, believes the whole city must remain under Israeli control, and thus has an interest in making a united city more viable.

The new investment, for example, was passed with the backing of Zeev Elkin, a hard-right Likud politician who’s also the most likely candidate to become Jerusalem’s new mayor on Oct. 30. Dabash says he’s happy to work with Elkin, or with “anyone who’ll help us.”

When I toured Sur Baher and adjacent neighborhoods with an Israeli municipal manager, he showed me a site where a 140-classroom school complex is under construction. He was proud to tell me that the city got the project approved with the cooperation of the local Palestinian PTA, which is associated with Hamas. When I raised my eyebrows, he shrugged. If you’re willing to do business only with friendly liberals, you won’t find many in Jerusalem, on either side.

No one was signing a peace agreement. Everyone just wanted the kids to have a school.

(Matti Friedman, a journalist, is the author of the memoir “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.”)