Stopping Home Demolitions, Securing Jerusalem's Future

Look out from Mount Zion's observation point and you'll be "overlooking Biblical Jerusalem which sends visitors 3,800 years back in time to the days of Abraham, when the first foundations of the city were laid," reads the tourist brochure of the City of David ("Elad") organization. The tour begins from a vantage point with a scene both historic and familiar, the Western Wall, the dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque, and a hillside dotted with stone houses that look like they have been there for hundreds of years.
    
But that is not the whole story. Those stone houses form the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where a territorial battle has been raging for years and now threatens some 1,500 of Silwan's residents with homelessness. And the organization leading the tour is right in the middle of the battle.

Welcome to Jerusalem.

Silwan sits on the western edge of Palestinian Jerusalem, and just touches the old city's periphery. It was annexed by Israel in 1967, but remains an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, now home to approximately 50,000 residents. Jews did not live there until the early 1980s when David Beeri "cast his eye on Silwan," Meron Rapoport wrote in Ha'aretz. "The City of David is not populated," Beeri told his wife Michal, "we have to do something."

Beeri founded the Elad organization and set out to settle Silwan with Jews. He exploited a loophole in Jerusalem's municipal law that stipulates that absentee property--property deemed to be abandoned by its owners--would revert to the state.

But Rapoport found that Elad used "a very dubious implementation of the Absentee Property Law." "Dubious" because Beeri falsified information about properties that were not in fact abandoned. He also falsified his identity. "Beeri had his eye on the home of the Abbasi family. . . . David took a tour guide's card from his friend, placed his photo on it, put on the hat and the tag, and for a long time would take imaginary tourists on tours. . . . Slowly but surely he became friendly with Abbasi. In the early 1990s, the Custodian of Absentee Property declared the Abbasi home absentee property . . . and Abassi found David, the imaginary tour guide and imaginary friend, settling in his house while he, Abassi, was evicted."

Elad runs real tours now. Tourists are taken into tunnels that run underneath several Silwan homes to explore Jerusalem's biblical archeology. Elad also sponsors archeological digs. (Its excavations have sparked a separate battle with a group of Israeli archeologists who charge that Elad's findings are inauthentic and politically motivated.) One of its excavations was halted by Israel's High Court of Justice after it found that it had damaged the foundations of homes above it.

Elad also continues to try to expropriate Palestinians lands. "After 2,000 years, the City of David is returning to Jewish hands," Beeri told the Jerusalem Post. For the last five years, Elad has also been pushing a proposal to demolish 88 Silwan houses and apartment buildings--the homes of some 1,500 people--to be developed into a national park exploring biblical history.

This can be done, according to Elad, because these homes were built without a permit and are, therefore, illegal. This position is also supported by Jerusalem's new Mayor Nir Barkat, who reinstated plans to demolish the homes after they were held up for five years by court orders and international pressure. "For 3,000 years, that area has been green," Barkat told Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, "now there are 100 buildings that are illegal there. We want to return it to being a park."

The issue is not so simple, however. Palestinians are forced to build illegally because they are not granted permits; and they are not granted permits out of a policy intended to maintain a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. According to Ir Amim (City of Nations), an Israeli non-profit that works to promote coexistence in Jerusalem, "Israeli planning in East Jerusalem has almost invariably been driven by the calculus of national struggle, the goal of which is to maintain a large Israeli majority in the city. One way Israel has tried to achieve this is by artificially putting a cap on Palestinian development. . . . East Jerusalem is unique in that it is the only place in Israel where overlapping authorities for home demolitions are vested in-and exercised by-both the Jerusalem municipality and in the Ministry of Interior." Ir Amim explains that when, "then Mayor Teddy Kollek announced that he would not demolish homes . . .  the Interior Ministry--then under the sway of a right-wing government--set up a special enforcement unit in East Jerusalem, with the explicit goal of keeping up house demolitions."

Home demolitions could have an additional effect if an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal advances. A peace agreement will have to decide how Jerusalem, the chosen capital of both Palestinians and Israelis, will be divided. And Israel will have to relinquish unilateral control of some parts of Jerusalem that it conquered in 1967, likely including Silwan. If Jews settle there, especially if they refuse state orders to evacuate, this will complicate Israel's withdrawal from Palestinian territory--just as Jewish settlements in the West Bank will affect Israel's withdrawal from there.

Perhaps this is what Mayor Barkat meant when he told a crowd during his campaign  (in remarks posted on his website's blog) that "when I talk about building in Jerusalem, I don't just mean inside the city  itself, but also in Ma'aleh Adumim, Gush Etzion, Beitar illit . . . and Givat Ze'ev [West Bank settlements on Jerusalem's periphery]." In other words, his Jerusalem extends well beyond Jerusalem.
 
In any case, Barkat's policy of building Jewish Jerusalem by depopulating Arab areas is opposed by the United States. During her trip to the region earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed to the planned demolitions and said that, "This kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road map.'"

Clinton's intervention has at least stalled the demolitions. The State Department has asked for a clarification of Israel's intentions and is currently examining the Israeli Foreign Ministry's response.

But, as in so many other cases, the past is also likely to be prelude. A right-wing municipal government in Jerusalem, coupled with a right-wing Israeli national government, is unlikely to lay aside ambitions for a Greater, more Jewish, Jerusalem. Unless Secretary Clinton's words are followed by more words, and even action, Silwan--and the homes you see from Mount Zion--may be lost by the Palestinians who have lived there for hundreds of years.