Tag: Silwan

Organizer admits City of David endangers Arab homes

Akiva Eldar | Ha’aretz

5 October 2009

A video tape made during a guided tour of the archaeological excavations at Silwan (the City of David) near Jerusalem’s Old City walls reveals how Elad, the association that runs the dig, works together with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Jerusalem municipality to dig under the homes of Arab residents.

In the tape, made a year ago, the founding head of Elad, David Be’eri, says: “At a certain point we came to court. The judge approached me and said, ‘you’re digging under their houses.’ I said ‘I’m digging under their houses? King David dug under their houses. I’m just cleaning.’ He said to me, ‘Clean as much as possible.’ Since then, we’re just cleaning; we’re not digging.”

Be’eri goes on to describe an excavation method in which “we built from the top down” and “everything’s standing in the air” [due to the removal of fill]. “Then [the engineer] says, you have to shut the whole thing [because of danger of collapse]. I tell him, ‘are you crazy?'”

In February a pit appeared on the steps connecting the upper part of the village to the lower sections. Three months later, the plaza, beneath which Elad is conducting its intensive excavations, began to collapse.

A tour participant told Haaretz that she also heard Be’eri say he usually leaves a narrow entrance to a dig, and invites inspectors to crawl in. He said most of them make do with a look from the outside.

As for construction of the visitors’ center, Be’eri was also recorded as saying: “You dig and you dig … and one day … we found a rounded corner. We said this is a pool … there’s an 18-meter-high mountain here, above it are Arab houses. And I want to get to the bottom of the mountain, to the pool, to find it. How can I get there? We started to dig carefully, and support ourselves with metal struts that hold up the mountain and the houses. We found ourselves with five kilometers of welded iron inside. It’s crazy. The cost of iron went up because of us.”

“We bought two rooms, this one and the one beneath … and I started to build the visitors’ center,” Be’eri also said. “What can be done with two rooms? Nothing. So … we broke the wall into the mountain … All this space was a mountain filled with earth … the Israel Antiquities Authority came and I told them, ‘we’re renovating…’ At night I would move the terrace. They [the Antiquities Authority] would come in the morning and say, “Hey, it didn’t look like this.”

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority has authorized Elad to run the site, encompassing some of the most extensive excavations in Israel in recent years.

At the beginning of the 1990s, a Justice Ministry probe discovered that one of the buildings handed over to Elad, the Spring House, administered by the Custodian of Abandoned Properties, had been rented to Elad for NIS 23.73 per month. Elad also paid 3,000 Dinars to the Palestinian who lived there, to get him to leave.

Two weeks ago, the High Court of Justice rejected two petitions by Silwan residents against all the bodies involved in excavations under their homes. In her ruling, Justice Edna Arbel cited the public interest in revealing thousands of years of Jerusalem’s history. However, Arbel also said: “The importance of studying the past does not cancel out the interests of the present. It cannot preempt the right of the residents to live securely and cannot overcome the rule of law.”

The Israel Antiquities Authority did not respond to this report by press time. Elad responded that due to the lateness of the request for a response (in the early hours of Sunday afternoon) it was unable to respond.

Five new house demolition orders issued in Silwan, East Jerusalem

Alternative Information Center (AIC)

10 August 2009

Israeli forces issued five new house demolition orders in the al-Bustan section of Silwan in East Jerusalem on Wednesday, 5 August, injuring eight Palestinians in the process and seizing the identification card of Musa Odeh, a member of the al-Bustan Committee working to non-violently oppose the demolitions.  Authorities also deployed tear gas to prevent residents from confronting the soldiers ordering the demolitions.

The orders augment the 90 demolition orders already standing in Silwan, a densely populated village located on the southeastern slopes of the Old City of Jerusalem.  The area, which is located near the biblical site of Siloam and which houses approximately 55,000 residents, was annexed by the state of Israel in 1967; since then, the Municipality of Jerusalem has nearly uniformly refused Palestinian residents building permits to develop the neighborhood, typifying Israeli urban planning policy in East Jerusalem for the past 42 years.  In 2004, a directive was issued from the Municipality’s building supervision department to demolish all the homes in Silwan in order to build the “King’s Valley” archaeological park, which is currently under the administration of the fundamentalist settler group Elad.  If completed as planned, the Silwan demolitions would constitute the largest scale demolition program in the city of Jerusalem since the leveling of the Maghrebi quarter the night after Israel’s seizure of East Jerusalem in 1967 in order to build today’s Western Wall plaza.

Taking over Jerusalem

Matt Kennard | The Guardian

5 August 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document their inevitable eviction. Well, last Saturday at 5.30am the Israeli border police did come and forceably evict them (so forceably that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross.

Sheikh Jarrah is in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when visiting Jerusalem as the Quartet’s “Peace Envoy”. When you look out of the Hanouns’ window, you can see Blair’s hotel 30 metres away; Blair can probably see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. He has said nothing.

The most disturbing fact about Israel’s eviction programme is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to build new illegal settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could do so. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem.

The Hanoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun’s father was a refugee from the nakba (or “the catastophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948). The Jordanian government gave them the property in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home.

As in other parts of East Jerusalem, Maher was offered payment if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he said to me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.”

Across the way, there is a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman now lives after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when their house was violently repossessed with the help of more than 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s US election victory). After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused money to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she said from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.”

I don’t know what happened to this women in the eviction on Saturday night, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration is that they are much more honest about their colonisation programme than their “centrist” predecessors. The Netanyahu administration is now willing to get rid of some “outposts”, in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu is just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Maher agrees: “I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” he said.

The next stop in this attempt to cleanse the putative future capital of Palestine of its indigenous population is the Bustan area of Silwan which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three-hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in Biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in 960 BC.

In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that the lore was true. Now, the Israeli government wants to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archaeological theme park. Eighty-eight houses are due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians.

Israeli police deliver East Jerusalem demolition orders

Ma’an News

5 August 2009

Eight Palestinians were injured when they were assaulted by Israeli forces who delivered demolition orders in the Al-Bustan neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Jerusalem Police used tear gas to disperse residents who confronted the Israeli officers serving five demolition orders in the densely populated neighborhood, where there are already 90 standing demolition orders.

Israeli police also seized the ID card of Musa Odeh, a member of the Al-Bustan Committee, a popular organization dedicated to peacefully opposing the demolitions.

Al-Bustan is part of the Silwan area, in a valley next to Jerusalem’s Old City. The Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipal government says it intends to level the neighborhood and build a park.

Israeli authorities contend the Palestinian houses were built without construction permits, which are rarely issued to Palestinians. Some of the structures, however, were built before Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967.

The international community does not recognize Israeli control over East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank.

Two-day-old Silwan info center in jeopardy

Abe Selig | The Jerusalem Post

26 July 2009

“We built this place last Sunday, and on Tuesday, the police arrived with orders to knock it down,” said Ahmad Qara’een, as he sat inside the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, a 35-sq.m. covered wooden deck erected by residents of east Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood.

Qara’een does not dispute the lack of a building permit, although he does maintain that the center was built on privately-owned Palestinian land, with the consent of its owner.

The issue for Qara’een and his colleagues, who built the center to disseminate information about Silwan they say is not made available to the tourists who throng the area, is what they see as a double standard. A number of structures belonging to Jews in Silwan – some only a few doors down from the center – also lack permits, but the city has not issued demolition orders for them.

“It’s like a state within a state here,” Qara’een said. “The settlers get to do what they want, but we can’t have anything. It’s like the law doesn’t apply to them.”

The Jerusalem Municipality on Sunday disputed Qara’een’s assertion that the center had been slated for destruction, telling The Jerusalem Post, “They were not given demolition orders, just a notice that their building is illegal. Furthermore, the municipality is working in all areas of Jerusalem to enforce the law when it comes to illegal buildings.”

Still, Qara’een and others at the Wadi Hilwah Center said that permits were not the issue.

“This has nothing to do with permits,” said Nihad Siam, who works with Qara’een. “It’s all about politics and the desire of the government to shut us up and push us out of here.”

Silwan’s Wadi Hilwah neighborhood has emerged as one of the main points of friction between east Jerusalem’s Palestinians and Jewish residents, who are increasingly moving into eastern neighborhoods of the capital.

Silwan, just outside the Old City, has seen a rise in Jewish residents in recent years, many inhabiting homes purchased by the Elad and Ateret Cohanim organizations. Additionally, the city has drawn up plans to raze a significant number of homes in the area to begin work on a City of David archeological park – a move residents like Qara’een and Siam said would “turn the neighborhood into Hebron.”

“Is it my fault that I was born here?” asked Qara’een. “Is it my fault that King David walked here over 3,000 years ago? Why should I have to pay the price?”

A report released on Sunday by Peace Now, however, stated that “the hasty response of Israeli authorities to the opening of the makeshift Palestinian information center clearly points not only at the discriminatory use of law enforcement against Palestinians in East Jerusalem but also at an effort to silence the voices of the local residents.”

The report goes on to say that the “City of David Visitor’s Center, which is approximately 50 meters away from the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, and was established by the Elad organization, includes mobile and non-mobile structures including a shop, a cashier’s office, general office space and bathrooms.

“An application for a permit for these structures was submitted by Elad in November 2007, but was rejected by the municipality,” the report says.