Palestinian families slated for eviction while Jews set to move in to former synagogue
[Silwan, East Jerusalem] – Abdullah Abu Nab, wearing traditional Arab garb, a long white jalabiyya, greets visitors to a “protest tent,” a black tarp stretched over a concrete patio next to his stone house in the Batan Al-Hawa neighborhood on a slope outside the ancient walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Abu Nab, his wife and their two children, are waiting to be evicted from the home where his family has lived since 1948. His brother Sabri, the father of ten children, also received an eviction order last month.
“I am living under great tension,” Abu Nab said. “You don’t know when they (the Israeli police) will come. It’s usually in the middle of the night. My father was a refugee in 1948 and now I will be a refugee.”
He said his family had been renting the home from the Palestinian owners, but 15 years ago the Jerusalem District Court recognized that the land belonged to a trust called Hekdesh Benvenisti.
In the late 1800’s, the Abu Nab home was a synagogue for a community of Yemenite Jews, most of whom fled the area after the Arab riots of 1929.
Ateret Cohanim is a right-wing Israeli NGO which is spearheading expanding the Jewish presence in this east Jerusalem village. “It is very sad that Arab squatters are living illegally in a 130-year old synagogue,” Daniel Luria, the spokesman for Ateret Cohanim told The Media Line. “Three times the Israeli justice system has ruled that it’s a holy site, and the Arabs are meant to leave. If I was living in a 130-year old mosque, I wouldn’t last a week.”
He said that today there are 13 families and 20 yeshiva (religious seminary) students living in the neighborhood. According to Luria, the land is owned by the Yemenite trust and at its height in the early 1900s there were 144 Yemenite families living in this neighborhood. The Palestinians counter that the Abu Nab family has lived in the house for decades and should be seen as “protected tenants” who cannot be removed according to Israeli law. Abdullah’s brother Sabri, who lives nearby, says Ateret Cohanim has offered him $1.7 million dollars to move, but he has refused. A third brother, who has since died, did accept a similar offer.
“The Abu Nab family has been living here for almost 70 years,” Palestinian lawyer Mohammad Dahle said. “They have a rental contract and they should be protected. Those who claim they own this property have to prove it.”
Today, about 55,000 Palestinians live in Silwan. As part of east Jerusalem, the Jerusalem municipality is responsible for all services from garbage pickup to lighting to education. The narrow alleyways here are lined with garbage, and the cinder-block walls covered with graffiti and pro-Palestinian slogans. Palestinian officials say that while Palestinians make up more than one-third of the population of Jerusalem, less than ten percent of the city’s budget is spent on services for them.
Palestinians see the Abu Nab case as symbolic of a wider Israeli attempt to take over large sections of this village. In the past few years, more than 400 Jewish Israelis affiliated with right-wing NGO’s like Ateret Cohanim or Elad, which runs the large tourist center of the City of David at the entrance to Silwan, have moved in to the area. That center offers tours of the area and briefings to thousands of tourists explaining that is believed to be King David’s city of 3,000 years ago.
In other parts of Silwan, Jewish groups have bought the homes from the Palestinian owners, often at prices far above market value. A total of 500 Jews live in Silwan today, protected by security guards funded by the Israeli government. Legal ownership is often confusing, says lawyer Mohammad Dahle. Land documents from the Ottoman Empire are often imprecise, using landmarks to dictate boundaries of legal ownership.
In addition, he said, while Jews can try to “recover” property from areas that Israel acquired in 1967, Palestinians have no way to try to reclaim their properties dating back to pre-1948 Israel. The Abu Nab family, for example, had a house just below the area of the Jerusalem Cinematheque less than a mile away, and have no way to attempt to enforce their claim.
Palestinian officials say that Jewish efforts to expand their presence in Silwan will make it more difficult to return to any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
“They want to change the demographic situation in the whole city, and make it a Jewish ‘holy basin,’ Ahmed Rwaidy, in charge of the Jerusalem issue in the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said. “They are trying to transfer Palestinians out and put settlers here instead. That would make a political solution impossible.”