Dividing Jerusalem would mean bringing Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Force 17, and the Tanzim into the Arab-controlled parts of the city, a group of Jerusalem Arabs warned Saturday. 

Members of the group, headed by Zuheir Hamdan, one of the mukhtars of the Sur Baher neighborhood, met over the weekend to discuss the Labor Party's new platform, according to which the city would be divided. 

Echoing former prime minister Ehud Barak's proposals at the botched Camp David summit in the summer of 2000, the Labor program says that in a peace deal, Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem will fall under Palestinian rule and Jewish areas will remain with Israel. Under the platform, the Temple Mount either will come under joint administration or be governed in another mutually acceptable arrangement. 

"It's strange to see that many Israelis haven't drawn the lessons from the events of the last two years," Hamdan told The Jerusalem Post. "An Israeli withdrawal [from east Jerusalem] would bring all the gunmen of Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Popular Front to Damascus Gate, Mount Scopus and Mount of Olives. They will turn Jerusalem into Gaza." 

Hamdan, who spearheaded a campaign against the division of Jerusalem during the Barak government, said he now planned to launch a similar drive "to explain the dangers involved in bringing the Palestinian Authority into the city." 

Last week the PLO's representative in Jerusalem, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, warned that dividing Jerusalem would be impossible within eight years because of Israeli investment in the construction of Jewish neighborhoods and new roads. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PA has been talking about sharing an undivided and open Jerusalem, a move that would not necessarily result in building a fence along the former armistice line. 

After consulting with several community and clan leaders in Arab neighborhoods, Hamdan, who says he is not affiliated with any political group, called for a meeting on Saturday, which was attended by some 50 people. "No one wants to go back to the pre-1967 era," Hamdan explained. "If Labor wants to withdraw from each place where there are Arabs, then why not leave Nazareth, the Negev, and the Triangle, where hundreds of thousand of Arabs live. The Labor ideology is a racist one because they are telling Israeli voters 'Let's get rid of Arabs.'" 

Hamdan, who was shot and seriously wounded last year after attacking the PA and Arafat in a series of interviews with the local and foreign media, dismissed claims that the 200,000 Arabs of Jerusalem wanted to remain under Israeli sovereignty merely to retain their rights to payments of the National Insurance Institute and other social, health, educational, and economic benefits. 

"The Arabs in Jerusalem pay taxes like the all other citizens of Israel and that's why they are entitled to the payments," he emphasized. 

"No one is doing us a favor by giving us unemployment payments because this is our money. Besides, the problem is not only economic. I believe the majority doesn't believe in Arafat's corrupt and tyrannical rule. Look what he's done in Lebanon, Jordan, and now in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has brought one disaster after another on his people." 

Another mukhtar involved in the initiative against dividing Jerusalem told the Post that he and his colleagues plan to hold a series of meetings with Israeli officials and politicians to brief them on the position of the city's Arabs. 

"We are also going to send messages to US President George Bush, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdallah telling them that Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque don't belong to Arafat," he said. 

"We will tell them that there should be a referendum among the Arabs in Jerusalem so they would be able to decide on their own future," the mukhtar said. "We won't accept a situation where we are led like sheep to the slaughterhouse." 

In a separate development, the PA on Saturday strongly denied an Israeli newspaper report according to which Arafat has removed Nusseibeh from his job as the holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in the PLO. Arafat spokesman Nabil Abu Rudaineh described the report as "untrue."