Palestinians fear loss of homes as evictions loom
Housing dispute behind weeks of protests and clashes
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, emptynesters with grown children of their own, may have to leave it all behind on August 1. That’s when Israel is set to forcibly evict them following a decades-long legal battle waged by ideological Jewish settlers against them and their neighbours.
The Dajanis are one of several Palestinian families facing imminent eviction in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of east Jerusalem. The families’ plight has ignited weeks of demonstrations and clashes in recent days between protesters and Israeli police.
It also highlights an array of discriminatory polices that 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 Yorkbased Human Rights Watch both pointed to such policies as an example of what they claim has become an apartheid regime.
Israel rejects those accusations and says the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is a private real-estate dispute that the Palestinians have seized upon to incite violence. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions submitted by AP. 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 upmarket neighbourhood 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 neighbourhood, where several other Palestinian refugee families had also been resettled. “It was like heaven after our exodus.”
Things changed after Israel captured east Jerusalem, with the West Bank and Gaza, in the 1967 Mideast war, and annexed it in a move not recognised internationally.
The Palestinians want all three territories for their future state and view east Jerusalem as their capital.
In 1972, settler groups told the families that they were trespassing on Jewish-owned land. That was the start of a long legal battle that in recent months has culminated with eviction orders against 36 families in Sheikh Jarrah and two other east Jerusalem neighbourhoods. Israeli rights groups say other families are also vulnerable, estimating that more than 1000 Palestinians are at risk of being evicted.
The Dajanis and other families have been ordered to leave by August 1. A Supreme Court hearing in the case of another four families that was to be held today was postponed for at least a month.
If they lose the appeal, they could be forcibly evicted within days or weeks.
Israel views all of Jerusalem as its unified capital and says residents are treated equally. But east Jerusalem residents have different rights depending on whether they are Jewish or Palestinian. Jews born in east Jerusalem are automatically granted Israeli citizenship, and Jews from anywhere else in the world are eligible to become Israeli citizens.
Palestinians born in east Jerusalem are granted a form of permanent residency that can be revoked if they spend too much time living outside the city.
They can apply for Israeli citizenship but must go through a difficult and uncertain bureaucratic process that can take months or years. Most refuse, because they do not recognise Israel’s annexation.
After 1967, Israel expanded the city’s municipal boundaries to take in large areas of open land where it has since built Jewish settlements that are home to tens of thousands of people. At the same time, it set the boundaries of Palestinian neighbourhoods, restricting their growth. Palestinians say the expense and difficulty of obtaining permits forces them to build illegally or move to the occupied West Bank, where they risk losing their Jerusalem residency.
—AP