Irish Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire has accused Israel of 'ethnic cleansing' at a news conference in east Jerusalem. The municipality plans to tear down some 90 Arab homes. The Israelis claim the homes were constructed or renovated without permits. Palestinians say the demolitions are part of a strategy to force them out of east Jerusalem.

A confidential EU report obtained by the UK Guardian makes the allegation that Israel is "actively pursuing the illegal annexation" of east Jerusalem.

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has described the demolitions as "unhelpful."

If the demolitions go ahead it will leave 1,500 people homeless and will be one of the largest forced evictions seen in east Jerusalem. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, since 2004 Israeli authorities have demolished more than 400 homes.

Mairead Maguire's concerns relate to a pattern of systemic discrimination in east Jerusalem. A simple visual tour of Jewish and Arab neighborhoods makes it evident that municipal efforts are clearly biased in favor of Jewish areas.

A Guardian article Worlds Apart describes Jerusalem's divisions and inequalities:

Most of Jerusalem's Jews never cross the "green line" - the international border that divided the city until 1967 - and many of those that do go only as far as the Wailing Wall to pray. If more Israelis were to travel deeper into the city they claim as their indivisible capital, they would encounter a different world from their own, a place where roads crumble, rubbish is left uncollected and entire Palestinian neighbourhoods are not connected to the sewage system.

According to the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, Jerusalem's Jewish population, who make up about 70% of the city's 700,000 residents, are served by 1,000 public parks, 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries. The estimated 260,000 Arabs living in the east of the city have 45 parks, no public swimming pools and two libraries. "Since the annexation of Jerusalem, the municipality has built almost no new school, public building or medical clinic for Palestinians," says a B'Tselem report. "The lion's share of investment has been dedicated to the city's Jewish areas."

Palestinians in East Jerusalem, often the city of their birth, are not considered citizens but immigrants with "permanent resident" status, which, some have found, is anything but permanent. In the old South Africa, a large part of the black population was treated not as citizens of the cities and townships they were born into but of a distant homeland many had never visited. "Israel treats Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem as immigrants, who live in their homes at the beneficence of the authorities and not by right," says B'Tselem. "The authorities maintain this policy although these Palestinians were born in Jerusalem, lived in the city and have no other home. Treating these Palestinians as foreigners who entered Israel is astonishing, since it was Israel that entered East Jerusalem in 1967."

There has long been a concerted effort on the part of Israeli authorities to control the demographic balance in Jerusalem in favor of Jews. This however doesn't involve forced removal of Palestinians, so much as the use of rules and red tape to hamper their expansion.

The limited amount of Palestinian construction permitted is restricted to Arab areas. Moreover land in east Jerusalem was taken (some 35%) and various financial incentives were then offered to encourage Jews to build there. These policies demonstrate a consistent effort to restrain Palestinian growth, while facilitating Jewish development whenever possible.

To give an example by way of stats ... in the 1990's for every new residence built in Arab neighborhoods, 12 were built in Jewish areas. Building permits are routinely denied on the basis of race. There is no other way to put it. If Palestinians go ahead and build anyway they risk having their homes demolished.

Hidden land grabs go on and often fly beneath the radar of media attention. If Palestinians forfeit property that has been designated "enemy territory" (a reference to the 1967 war), the state confiscates the land and in most cases it is transferred to Jewish owners. So-called "enemy territory" includes most of the the West Bank.

In the more recent period, stats show that the Jerusalem council issued 1,695 building permits in 2004. Only a fraction of these - 116 in total - went to Arab areas in East Jerusalem.