TeaThe dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque gleamed in the afternoon autumn sunlight as Zohair Rajabi looked out from his balcony toward the skyline of Jerusalem’s Old City. Christian pilgrims poured out of buses, while observant Jewish worshipers gathered outside the gates of the Western Wall.
The new flags are now flying a few meters away from Rajabi’s house. Blue and white and bearing the Star of David, they mark where residents were recently evicted from their homes by Israeli police. After more than 20 years of activism, Rajabi knows his days in Buton al-Hawa, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood less than a mile south of the Old City, will almost certainly be numbered.
“Yes, I am defeated. I am defeated. I am not only waiting for my house to be snatched away, but every house here is also waiting to be snatched away,” the 55-year-old man said.
Rajabi has lived his entire life in Batan al-Hawa. His house is a huge four-storey house built on land purchased by his grandfather in 1965. His brother and mother live on different floors with several children. Two of his relatives are seriously handicapped. If Rajabi’s request to make a final legal appeal in Israeli courts is rejected, all will have to move on, as everyone in Baton al-Hawa expects.
He said, “We know what the decision will be… but we are still going to fight. I think within a month all 52 of us will have to find somewhere else to live.”
Buton al-Hawa has long been a target of right-wing Israeli organizations working to consolidate Israeli control over parts of Jerusalem seized after Jordan’s defeat in the 1967 war.
One such organization is Ateret Kohanim, which describes itself as “the leading urban land reform organization in Jerusalem … working for more than 40 years to restore Jewish life in the center of ancient Jerusalem.”
The group argues that much of Button al-Hawa is located on the site of a village built by a charitable trust under Ottoman rule in the late 19th century to house poor Yemeni Jews. As tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine increased in the 1930s, the community was evacuated by British authorities and its residents were told they could return when peace was restored, but this never happened.
Lawyers working for the trust, which was reactivated almost 20 years ago, have successfully argued in Israeli courts that prior ownership of properties in Button al-Hawa should take priority over any subsequent purchases made by current residents or their parents or grandparents. A 1970 law gives Jewish people the right to reclaim property in East Jerusalem.
Trust possession of some buildings has also been obtained through deals with their owners, although the circumstances of these remain controversial.
Ateret Kohanim spokesman Daniel Luria said the organization, which housed about 40 Jewish families in Baton al-Hawa, was independent of the trust but had ties to it.
In recent months, there has been a sudden flood of evictions following several rulings by Israeli judges.
Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-based NGO operating in Baton al-Hawa, said Rajabi and his family were among 34 families, numbering about 175 people, facing “imminent displacement and settler occupation of their homes”.
If done, it could lead to “the largest expulsion and coordinated state and settler takeover of Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem since 1967,” said Ir Amim spokeswoman Amy Cohen.
Luria compared the current resistance to evicting residents in Button al-Hawa, which he calls Shiloah, to “Custer’s last stand.”
He said, “I sympathize but…they are trespassing on properties from which Jews were driven out in the 1930s.”
Rajabi blames the war in Gaza for the recent evictions. “The war is a big factor. If the war had not happened, you would probably only see one expulsion every 10 years instead of five in 15 months. The war has created an environment where you can have this…an environment of hatred,” he said.
Israel’s ruling coalition, the most right-wing government in its history, includes extremist ministers deeply committed to the project of expanding Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, which Israel has unilaterally annexed, as well as in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Palestinians make up about 40% of Jerusalem’s population of about one million. Maintaining a Jewish majority in the city has been a goal of successive Israeli governments.
In September, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel should annex 82% of the occupied West Bank.
Luria said he supports Smotrich’s proposal “a thousand percent.” He said, “When the Jews came back in 1948, it didn’t stop there, or in 1967… The Zionist dream is not over.”
Rajabi doesn’t know where he and his family will go if they are evicted. Three of his four children are teenagers and it would be difficult to find homes for all of them, he said, adding, “The government and the residents want us out of Jerusalem.”
On the walls of Rajabi’s home is a painting of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site and located in the Haram al-Sharif complex, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and currently the holiest accessible prayer site in Judaism.
Rajabi’s 15-year-old daughter Dahreen said the prospect of leaving her home made her sad: “Every stone here is a memory for me. I’m very worried that we will be divided as a family and I will be separated from my friends. But I’m taking my cat with me, no matter what.”
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