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.
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 . 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.”
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.
The decision set off a critical reaction, especially in Washington and Europe. Many countries called in Israeli ambassadors to complain. But there was confusion, too, with some critics presuming that construction would go ahead in E1.
Israeli officials explained later that any construction in E1, if it happened at all, was many years away, and that the move on E1 was “symbolism against symbolism” — a symbolic response to a symbolic recognition of statehood. But the new planning for E1 is also “a warning to the Palestinians that E1 is now in play if they do further outrageous acts,” one senior official said. “We don’t exclude the possibility that E1 moves from symbolism to something real — the prime minister has raised the stakes and put E1 back on the table.”
Mr. Netanyahu himself told the German newspaper Die Welt that “as far as our future action is concerned, it depends on the Palestinians.” He added: “In any case what we’ve advanced so far is only planning, and we will have to see. We shall act further based on what the Palestinians do. If they don’t act unilaterally, then we won’t have any purpose to do so either.”
But he has also argued that there is a political consensus in Israel that E1 should be used for more Israeli settlement, that previous governments agreed with him, and that the Labor Party, under Mr. Rabin, authorized E1.
E1 is also not the only contested plan. On Monday, a planning committee gave final approval to build 1,500 units in the East Jerusalem settlement neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo — the development that was announced as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. visited Jerusalem in 2010.
For now, the only significant Israeli construction in E1, which is largely state land, is a regional police station. Built in 2008 high on a hill, it overlooks the village cemetery where Yusra al-Qaisi, believed to be 75, was buried last week.
Khaled al-Saidi, 33, was among the mourners. He is a Bedouin whose family has lived on this land, he said, for more than 80 years; more important, and unlike most of the Bedouins here, his family bought the land in the 1990s. Still, he has been told by the Israelis to move; the house of his brother, Ali, has already been destroyed, because it was supposedly in the path of a future security zone.
“Here I’m on the edge of the security zone and there I’m also in the way of your settlement,” he said. “Where do I go? I just want a place for my sheep to go.”
On the opposite hill, near the police station, the authorities of Maale Adumim set up a menorah, their efforts to light a candle defeated by the wind. But the mayor of the settlement, Benny Kashriel, said that he believes that after 18 years of delay and hesitation, the Israeli government might finally be ready to authorize construction in E1.
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