Palestinians fear loss of family homes as evictions loom
JERUSALEM — When Samira Dajani’s family moved into their first real home in 1956 after years as refugees, her father planted trees in the garden, naming them for each of his six children.
Today, two towering pines named for Mousa and Daoud stand watch over the entrance to the garden where they all played as children. Pink bougainvillea climbs an iron archway on a path leading past almond, orange and lemon trees to their modest stone house.
“The Samira tree has no leaves,” she says, pointing to the cypress that bears her name. “But the roots are strong.”
She and her husband, empty nesters with grown children of their own, may have to leave it all behind Aug. 1. That’s when Israel is set to forcibly evict them following a decadeslong legal battle waged by ideological Jewish settlers against them and their neighbors.
The Dajanis are one of several Palestinian families facing imminent eviction in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem. The families’ plight has ignited weeks of demonstrations and clashes in recent days between protesters and Israeli police.
It highlights an array of discriminatory polices rights groups say are aimed at pushing Palestinians out of Jerusalem to preserve its Jewish majority. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem and the New York-based Human Rights Watch both pointed to such policies as an example of what they say has become an apartheid regime.
Israel rejects those accusations and says the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is a private real-estate dispute the Palestinians have seized upon to incite violence. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions submitted by the Associated Press. A top municipal official and a settler group marketing “residential plots” in Sheikh Jarrah did not respond to requests for comment.
Settler groups say the land was owned by Jews prior to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim such lands but bars Palestinians from recovering property they lost in the same war, even if they still reside in areas controlled by Israel.
Samira Dajani’s parents fled in 1948 from their home in Baka — now an upscale neighborhood in mostly Jewish west Jerusalem. After several years spent as refugees in Jordan, Syria and east Jerusalem, which was then controlled by Jordan, Jordanian authorities offered them one of several newly built homes in Sheikh Jarrah in exchange for giving up their refugee status.
“I have beautiful memories from this house,” says Dajani, now 70, recalling how she played with the other children in the close-knit neighborhood, where several other Palestinian refugee families had also been resettled. “It was like heaven after our exodus.”
Things changed after Israel captured east Jerusalem, along with the West Bank and Gaza, in the 1967 Mideast war, and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. The Palestinians want all three territories for their future state and view east Jerusalem as their capital.