JERUSALEM — Zuheir Rajabi’s living room television shows neither movies nor news: the only images projected on his huge flat screen come from 10 surveillance cameras set up around his modest house in East Jerusalem.
Rajabi lives in Silwan, a poor neighborhood just outside the Israel-annexed Old City of East Jerusalem, made up of dusty alleys strewn with trash, with power cables hanging low on their poles.
The 49-year-old mustached Palestinian told AFP the surveillance footage gave him a sense of protection in case Jewish settlers harass him or clashes with Israeli police again broke out outside his door.
“This piece of paper proves that my father bought this land from a Palestinian in 1966,” Rajabi said, waving an Arabic document from the Jordanian authorities who controlled East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel seized it for the Six Day War.
“But Israeli courts don’t want to hear about it,” the father-of-four said with a groan, sitting in his living room with orange and gray walls.
Rajabi has been locked in a five-year legal battle with three Israelis – Yitzhak Ralbag, Avraham Sheferman and Mordechai Zarbiv – who represent a trust registered in the name of Rabbi Moshe Benvenisti who claims ownership of the land where his home is located.
Benvenisti’s administrators cited 19th-century documents from the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Jerusalem before the British Mandate began in 1920, showing that Silwan’s land belonged to the trust.
The trust rented plots from Yemeni Jews, who lived in the area until they were driven out by the Arab riots of 1929 and 1936.
In 1970, Israel passed a law allowing Jews to recover property they lost in or before 1948, the year Israel was founded which also saw authority over East Jerusalem shift from British control to Jordanian control.
In cases where the former Jewish landowners in East Jerusalem or their heirs were not available, Israel granted the administration of land rights to a government entity called the General Guardian.
In 2001, the General Guardian declared that the Benvenisti Trust was the rightful owner of two plots in Silwan, one of which Rajabi calls her home.
Rajabi, who heads the local branch of a Palestinian community organization that runs recreational activities, is set to face Ralbag, Sheferman and Zarbiv again in court on December 22.
As with most houses in Silwan, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the southern wall of the old city can be seen from Rajabi’s house, which has been extended over the years from its original two rooms.
He claims he was offered a substantial cash payment to vacate the property, where he has lived since the late 1960s.
He also told AFP that the Israeli state had “offered to build us a house in other areas of East Jerusalem, and we refused.”
City of David
Rajabi’s case is not unique to the Silwan district.
Like all East Jerusalem, it is considered occupied Palestinian territory by a large part of the international community. Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem has not been recognized by most nations.
In the 1980s, settlers began to settle in Silwan, which is in a land where – according to Jewish tradition – King David established his capital about 3,000 years ago, making the area sacred ground. in Jewish history.
There are now several hundred settlers in Silwan, among the estimated 50,000 Palestinians.
Jewish homes in the area are recognizable by Israeli flags flying on their rooftops and modern facilities like a fully enclosed basketball court that poorer Palestinian residents would find it difficult to afford.
Although not all cases are documented, the anti-occupation group Peace Now says 700 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are threatened with deportation.
The expansion of settlers in the area does not appear to be simply the result of individual families seeking to live in what Jews call the City of David.
Critics of the Silwan settler movement allege that it is supported by a spectacularly well-funded campaign to transfer Palestinian land to Jews.
‘Ideological real estate’
A thick filing cabinet planted on Rajabi’s dining room table documents an Israeli legal process he says is biased against the Palestinians.
“It’s a political issue and all branches of the Israeli government are conspiring together,” he said.
Israeli anti-occupation groups claim that Benvenisti’s administrators are agents of the well-funded settler organization Ateret Cohanim, which says its mission is “to make Jewish life in Jerusalem flourish.”
A 1992 report by the then Labor-led Israeli coalition government found that the collaboration between the Guardian General and groups like Ateret Cohanim was plagued by “conflicts of interest”.
The report made recommendations to resolve these conflicts, which activists say have been ignored.
Ateret Cohanim rejects any suggestion that he is trying to drive out the Palestinians.
The group is simply focusing on one type of transaction in particular, its manager Daniel Luria told AFP.
“We are doing ideological real estate. We don’t force anyone to sell, we don’t go door-to-door (but) if an Arab wants to sell, we’re not going to say we’re not interested, ”Luria told me.
Turkish support
It is taboo among Palestinians to sell to settlers.
But Peace Now chief Hagit Ofran said for Palestinians in East Jerusalem “it’s very, very difficult to compete with the endless budget of groups like Ateret Cohanim” or the extremist settler organization Elad.
Pro-settler groups are ready to give “millions for a small piece of land,” sums almost impossible to pay for Palestinians, she told AFP.
Russian oligarch and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich controls companies that have donated an estimated $ 100 million to Elad, according to a September BBC investigation.
Abramovich – who obtained Israeli citizenship in 2018 – has not publicly discussed his contributions, and Elad declined to comment on his donors.
While the Palestinians are financially overwhelmed, they are not fighting alone.
Turkey’s International Development Agency (TIKA) has, according to its website, “restored many local homes and shops in an attempt to alleviate the hardships facing the Muslim community in East Jerusalem as a result of the Judaization policy. ongoing by Israel ”.
Contacted by AFP, TIKA declined to provide details of its activities in East Jerusalem, but Ankara has become a global player active on behalf of the Palestinians.
Battle for “every inch”
Abdelhalim Shaloudi received an eviction order from his 70 square meter (750 square foot) home in Silwan in 2003.
“I no longer sleep at night,” the father of four told AFP.
Shaloudi said the lawyers recommended by the Palestinian Authority – based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank – cannot compete with the costly legal effort of settlers in Israeli courts.
But for now, he has no choice but to wait and hope.
The Wadi Hilweh Information Center-Silwan, founded by Jawad Siam, is an organization that attempts to retaliate against the settlers.
Its offices are just a few yards from the City of David Archaeological Center, an Elad-controlled site that was teeming with tourists before the coronavirus pandemic.
“I created this center to keep the name ‘Silwan’ alive,” Siam told AFP.
“We are trying to adopt the same (real estate) strategy as them,” he said, meaning to urge the Palestinians to immediately fill the vacancies in Silwan, in the hope of limiting the places for the expansion of settlers.
“But we are not up to the task,” he conceded. “They stalk us on every square inch, on every square of empty land. ”
‘Never give up’
Settlers generally reject the premise that Jews have taken over land that historically belonged to Palestinians.
Jewish mother of seven, Nira Rabinowicz, 36, who is Rajabi’s neighbor, says they are not there “to be against the Arabs”.
“Our children are educated and understand that they (Silwan’s Arab neighbors) are not the enemy.
“We are here to build Jerusalem and see the Israeli people return to Jerusalem,” she said.
The settlers regard Jerusalem, east and west, as the eternal capital of the Jewish people and a place that the Jews themselves have repeatedly been forced to flee through the centuries.
“There were no Arabs living in Silwan before 1882,” said Luria, referring to the year the Yemeni Jews arrived.
“So if they claim they were there before the Yemenis arrived, let them (have) the audacity or the arrogance to say so,” he told AFP.
“They have no facts. I have the facts… The only people who can claim title (of property) are the Jews. ”
Disputes over historic or even ancient land claims are a perennial feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But history aside, it is not clear whether the modern settler strategy of expanding the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem at the expense of the Palestinians is doomed to succeed.
Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer who founded the Israeli anti-occupation group Ir Amim, pointed out what he called the moral bankruptcy of legal strategy.
He noted that the 1970 law only applies to Jews who claim land in East Jerusalem.
It offers no recourse to Palestinians who may have lost land, especially those who lost their homes in West Jerusalem during the creation of Israel and the conflict that followed.
He also stressed that much of the world considers East Jerusalem to be occupied.
Under international law, “the transfer of a civilian population from the occupier and the displacement of the occupied are illegal,” he said.
Bar-Ilan University political scientist Menachem Klein noted that despite inferior services and poor infrastructure, Palestinians remain attached to East Jerusalem.
Their insistence that the region be the capital of their future state is unwavering, he said.
The Israelis may wish the Palestinians “to leave the city”, but that wish ignores the fact that Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian “identity”, Klein said.
“This is their city. ”
And Rajabi made it clear that he was not going anywhere.
“I will defend myself until the last possible moment. I can’t imagine a second person else living in the house, ”he says.
“I’d rather die here than give up. ” — AFP
