The case of Sheikh Jarrah’s evictions – better said, forced expulsions – dates back at least to 2009. And no, it is not a mere question of “real estate”. We are witnessing only the most recent part of a long story. As an inhabitant of Jerusalem from 2003 till 2012, reporter and expert of MENA region political contemporary history, I expected since then the eruptions of violence provoked by Israeli settlers’ activity in the core of the Palestinian neighbourhoods in Occupied East Jerusalem. Especially around the Old City’s ancient walls and perimeter, settlers’ far right associations followed a precise strategy of occupation though real estate, in Silwan, Ras al Amoud, Sheykh Jarrah, Abu Tor. Settlers used the same strategy inside the Old City, especially in the Christian and Muslim Quarters.
The text hereafter is part of my book on Jerusalem (Jerusalem without God. Portrait of a Cruel City, American University in Cairo Press, 2017). It explains in details both the Israeli governments’ strategy on Jerusalem after 1967, and the religious ultranationalist settlers’ policy.
A GAME OF RISK
The multiplication of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem has not been enough to increase the proportion of Israelis to Palestinians. Over more than forty years there has in fact been a constant diminishment—in terms of percentage—of Israeli residents and a simultaneous growth in the Palestinian population: from 74 percent Israeli in 1967 to 64 percent in 2010, while the number of Palestinians is always increasing even to the point of reaching 36 percent of the total population of Jerusalem, despite the ever more stringent limits to which the Arab community is exposed. Family reunification was reduced to a minimum after the Knesset passed extremely restrictive legislation. Weighing as heavily as a rock on Palestinian residents is the threat of being deprived of the Jerusalem identity card—blue ID revocations have increased exponentially in the last fifteen years, with a record 4,672 residential documents annulled in 2008 alone. Added to the ever more restrictive legislation are the de facto expulsions from Jerusalem of Palestinians living in neighborhoods divided from the city in 2003 after the construction of the Separation Wall.
It is not so much the shift in the demographic balance of Jerusalem that represents the real change in recent years. Rather, the political and human panorama of Jerusalem has experienced its most obvious change with the breakthrough onto the scene, to an important degree, of new promoters of the Israeli strategy for the future of the city. Settlers belonging to the most radical fringe vehemently support their own specific master plan, that is, a real estate policy profoundly different from the one conceived by Teddy Kollek.
The mayor of Jerusalem had a meticulous strategy: it was necessary to build Jewish settlements wherever possible in East Jerusalem, but they had to be separate from the Palestinian ones in order to preserve within the Jerusalem mosaic a manifest and clear separation between the communities. Jewish quarters beside Palestinian neighborhoods, ‘monoethnic,’ homogenous, without ever giving way to a sort of ‘melting pot’ town in order to avoid friction and tension between the groups. In a way, Kollek wanted to modify the demographic balance of the city without detaching from the politics of separation followed by the British during the thirty years of their mandate. The model was that of the Old City: distinct neighborhoods, defined by their religious affiliation, side by side but never mixed. Kollek’s idea permeated the urban landscape, and Jerusalem today is the city that the most famous mayor of the Holy City worked for. Since fifteen years ago, things have changed faster and faster due to the increased presence of a different kind of Israeli citizen and Jerusalem inhabitant: the radical settler. The strategy of the settler organizations in fact is extremely different and can be summarized in a single sentence: “the land must be redeemed,” give back the promised land, Eretz Israel, to the Jews.
The call to “redeem the land” has translated into the violent entry of colonies into Palestinian neighborhoods. On the stage of Jerusalem, therefore, Israelis are playing two different roles. The Israeli municipality of Jerusalem and the national government continue to seize land and plan settlements in the eastern side of the city. Meanwhile, the settlers fight a different battle, for houses. They are not houses to be planned and built. They are houses, often old houses, inhabited, inherited, lived in. Settler organizations are making their way inside Palestinian neighborhoods through the courts, legal documents, old property deeds. At Sheikh Jarrah, at Silwan, at Ras al-Amud, all strategic suburbs around the walls of Suleiman the Magnificent in the eastern part of Jerusalem, Israeli settlers have decided to break up the homogeneity of the Palestinian areas. In this way ethno-political identity overcomes the compromise, because it is absolute.
It is as if, during recent years, there could have been maps on the desks of town planners and settlers like military maps used by generals in battle. Directories of real estate properties became the troops used to fight trench warfare that is both long and imposing. The simple conquest of a trench, that is, a building, an apartment, or a piece of land, is crucial to the future conquest of the entire neighborhood, from one quarter to entire sectors of East Jerusalem. In this real version of the Risk board game, it is enough to look at, to observe visually the pennants of the new, small ‘conquered’ quarters to understand the strategy that anticipates the inclusion of Israeli buildings and settlements inside the most populous Arab quarters. From south to north, Jabal al-Mukaber, Silwan, Ras al-Amud, the Mount of Olives, Sheikh Jarrah, Beit Hanina, they are all neighborhoods that surround the Old City to the east like a crescent, and connect Jerusalem with the West Bank. For settlers, gaining access in these areas is strategically the first step in cutting Jerusalem off from the West Bank and driving the Palestinian population further away in the direction of Bethlehem and Ramallah.
The goal is the same, pursued through different and more violent means: to strengthen even further the Israeli side of the demographic balance. Despite all the consequences of the case, including the exponential increase of internal tensions in Palestinian neighborhoods, little by little settlers seize a house and set in motion the security forces around the building on which they have placed a big Israeli flag, surrounding it with barriers, barbed wire, and video cameras. From that moment, clashes, even physical, are the order of the day. The small intifadas of Palestinian neighborhoods mark the nights and days in an explosion of violence and the sound of hurled stones, dealt with harshly by the police and the army, always inclined, for example, to arrest the minors who are throwing stones, young boys scarcely eleven or twelve years old.
The increase in violence has not stopped, nor does it stop the settlers. They are much more ideological and radical than those living in the large settlements in the northern areas of the West Bank, near Nablus. Anyone who in 2009 took up residence in a little house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a couple of steps from what was the 1948–1967 seam line, near the American Colony, the most charming hotel in the city, is prepared for anything. Entire families have been forcibly evicted from Sheikh Jarrah’s houses as part of a wider strategic plan on specific East Jerusalem neighborhoods. As explained by an official United Nations source, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Palestinian Occupied Territory, “in a number of cases, property expropriated by the Israeli authorities through a complex system of legal, administrative and institutional mechanisms has been leased or transferred to settler organizations.” Or, “settler organizations have made use of the Israeli legal system to lay claim to property allegedly owned by Jewish individuals or associations in the occupied territory prior to 1948.” Israeli courts in a high percentage of cases have ruled in favor of such claims, while efforts by settler groups “have intensified in recent years and are often accompanied by attempts to forcibly evict Palestinian families and communities to make way for new settlements.”63
The property documents often date back to the nineteenth century or the early years of the twentieth century, when there were no diplomatic pencils crossing through Jerusalem and the city had not been split in half. They state that the former proprietors of the houses were Jews. Whether true or forged, the documents risk taking the lid off the Pandora’s box of Jerusalem real estate. If, in fact, the mechanism of claiming houses were to be triggered, Palestinians would be able—in front of international courts, for example—to regain possession of their properties to the west of the Green Line. Whole (now historical) neighborhoods were built by the Palestinian middle class, that is, by rich families that decided to leave the Old City, especially between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and open themselves up to modernity. These areas are extremely interesting from a real estate point of view, consisting of high-quality Arab houses, among the most valuable on the housing market. For the time being these houses cannot be claimed retroactively by their Palestinian owners, even if they are in possession of notarized or registered documents. By means of the Absentee Property Law of 1950, Palestinian houses, land, and properties were transferred into the possession of the Custodian of Absentee Property, meaning the possession of the state of Israel. It did not take long for them to be placed on the private market. This double standard is contested by human rights organizations, both Israeli and Palestinian, once again united for fear that it will open a chapter of unforeseen outcomes. For settler organizations to reclaim retroactively real estate to the east would also mean that the question of Palestinian real estate to the west would be raised. These were once upper-class properties that bear weighty names such as those of the Nusseibehs, the Dajanis, the Husseinis, and the Nashashibi—some of the most important names of the Palestinian nobility.
The settler associations, however, do not seem afraid or worried about the danger of opening a Pandora’s box by their legal actions. For more than forty years they have increasingly enjoyed the Israeli state’s support, that of the Knesset, the ministries, and the bureaucracy apparatus, at different levels and sizes. In more recent years they have expressed blatantly their own ‘road map,’ evoking in this way the term used by the international community for the path of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The road map in the settlers’ version is simple: it is written by God in the Torah, and it is more powerful than the political one. This is the position of Daniel Louria, one of the leaders of Ateret Cohanim, and it is the same for the other associations that, with similar tools, seek to ‘redeem’ as many houses as possible in the Palestinian districts of Jerusalem.
More than thirty years old, Ateret Cohanim is involved in the restitution claims of old Jewish properties. They buy properties that they claim were formerly owned by Jews, and restructure apartments. In other words, they are a real estate agency that specializes in a very specific area: East Jerusalem, or rather the areas of Jerusalem where the majority of the Palestinian population is living. Daniel Louria, Ateret Cohanim, and a dozen similar organizations have a precise political goal. They want to bring Jewish life and customs back to areas of Jerusalem where the inhabitants nowadays are all Palestinian. “For the Jewish people, the heart of Jerusalem from the religious, historical and traditional point of view is the Temple Mount and the surrounding area: The Mount of Olives, the City of David, the springs of Gihon, the Temple Mount itself. All that area that has an Arab majority today has been the most important site for the Jewish world. And we are bringing back our roots.”64
The ‘redeemed’ buildings in Palestinian neighborhoods are all structured on the same pattern: small fortresses standing apart, with obtrusive armed surveillance. It is easy to identify them, because Israeli flags stand out from the roofs, often enormous banners that are meant to convey to the world, especially to the inhabitants of the area, that the situation has changed. Nothing is as it used to be. Take for example Abu Tor, a neighborhood considered in many respects a mixed one. It lies between one of the attractions of the city outside the ancient walls, the King David Hotel, and the secular and gentrified residential district of the German Colony. Abu Tor has remained in some respects as it used to be in the 1967 period: Jews on one side, Palestinians on the other, and in between the memory of a border that, until the Six-Day War, separated Israel from Jordan. The physical boundary no longer exists. The one in social and daily life remains. Invisible. Ateret Cohanim’s building is the exception: a small two-story house, a wall, an iron gate, a private armed guard inside a large guardhouse, a monitor, and a walkie-talkie. The security is paid for by the Israeli government, according to Louria. In other words, what they live in the settlers’ buildings is an armored life. They think it will be their daily life until one day they reach their goal: the ‘redemption’ of all Eretz Israel.
The map of Daniel Louria and his Ateret Cohanim already shows many flags, not only at Abu Tor but even in the Muslim quarter of the Old City. Also the former general and prime minister Ariel Sharon took up residence there, walking distance from the Via Dolorosa. Ateret Cohanim’s fortified houses are now in the entire ring of neighborhoods around the ancient walls. Louria’s organization shares the same map as Elad, another association mostly concentrated in the Silwan area, just outside the walls of Suleiman the Magnificent, along al-Aqsa Mosque. Elad manages and supervises the so-called ‘City of David,’ an archaeological site, cultural center, and diamond point in a public archaeological park that the Israeli authorities are planning and that may drive Palestinian inhabitants out of Silwan.
The map is one of the extremely detailed and useful maps by OCHAOPT.