Kayed Rajabi, who is largely unmarried, spends most of his time on the family’s roof gazing at Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is located across the Silwan valley during his final days in the only home he’s ever known. “Smoke, smoke, smoke”, Rajabi says anxiously, a cigarette in his hand. That is the only thing we can do.
A street sweeper for Jerusalem’s municipality, Rajabi has stopped going to work, afraid his family might be thrown out of their home while he’s out. Both his children and those of the other families facing eviction have stopped attending school. Everyone is terrified about what might happen if they leave their homes for even a moment – while trying to have a last precious few moments together.
“I’m fifty years old. I was born here”, says Rajabi as he looks across the valley of Silwan. In this house, I opened my eyes. My laughter, my sadness, my joy, and all my friends and loved ones are in this neighbourhood”. The pigeons in the coops he and his brother care for on their shared roof squirm him while he is quiet for a moment.
After a moment, he resumes. They want to raze the house I dreamed up in a second and install a settler in our place, which is all I remember. This is an enormous pain in the heart, a pain you can’t imagine.
They want to erase memories, not buildings or real estate, because they are not building or property that will be destroyed.
“Continuous psychological pressure”
At the turn of the new year, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected final appeals by 150 Palestinians across 28 families in the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood of Silwan facing eviction from their homes.
According to Israeli NGO Ir Amim, approximately 700 residents of the neighborhood, which includes 84 families, are currently facing imminent forced displacement. This would be the largest coordinated expulsion of Palestinians from a single neighborhood in East Jerusalem since 1967, when Israel’s occupation first erupted.
Twenty-four homes belonging to the extended Rajabi family alone are subject to eviction orders, affecting 250 people.
The Israeli execution office under the Ministry of Justice issued official letters to the 28 families on January 12 requesting that they leave their homes in 21 days. The family of Khalil al-Basbous, a neighbour of the Rajabis, has already been forcibly evicted from their home as a result of the latest court decision.
The rooftop of Rajabi and his younger brother Wa’il, 44, with its view over the Al-Aqsa Mosque has been a meeting place for family and neighbors to gather for breakfast and tea as long as they can remember. You’d find 50 of my family members coming here, and we’d fill the neighbourhood with our celebrations of Ramadan and Eid, “recalls Rajabi.
He rattles off the names of all the relatives and friends who were previously ordered to leave their streets and homes for the past two days.
” The memories were so sweet before the settlers came, “says Rajabi”. Our neighbors, who were replaced by the settlers, have the best memories, the best neighborhood, and the best neighbors.
A commotion starts outside the house terrace as he speaks. It is the settlers who recently replaced his lifelong neighbours, the family of Abu Ashraf Gheith. Before returning to the rooftop, he has his eyes open from adrenaline as he fights with them and their armed security guard.
Peering over at Al-Aqsa, he takes another puff of his cigarette.
He describes his former neighbors as “the Gheith family, they were like family to us.” We all loved each other. We opened our eyes together after we were both a couple growing up. We used to play, me and their sons and daughters.
After being thrown out of their homes so easily, I cried every day.
Now, settlers occupy all the homes bordering Kayed and Wa’il’s building. Wa’il remarked, “We are constantly under psychological pressure from the settlers.” “We are not living”.
The simple apartments for Rajabi and his brother include a kitchen, a small living room, a bedroom for their respective wives, and a second bedroom for their numerous children in the same building where they live with their mother. “This house isn’t a villa, it’s not a palace”, says Rajabi. “But here, we’re content and at ease.” The most incredible thing is to sit here, and your eyes fall on Al-Aqsa Mosque”.
For years, Rajabi, his brother and their family have walked to the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque every week for Friday afternoon prayers – at least until recently, when their living situation went from dire to a “death sentence”, he says.
Eight other nearby families have been forced to leave their homes since November, frequently in violent circumstances, and Israeli settlers have effected the neighborhoods’ empty homes right away, causing hysterical celebrations.
These recent evictions mark a rapid acceleration of the forced displacement which has been taking place for years now in the neighbourhood.
Displaced – yet again
Impoverished Yemeni Jews made their way to the area of modern-day Batn al-Hawa, which is located on a hill south of the Haram al-Sherif complex, home to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the 19th century.
While good relations reportedly existed between Jews and Muslims within the neighbourhood at the time, bouts of violence in the 1920s and 1930s in East Jerusalem made movement outside the neighbourhood dangerous, compelling these Yemeni Jewish families to leave. Over time, local Palestinians eventually took over the area entirely.
Just before the 1967 war, which saw Israel seize control of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, the Rajabi family was living in the Sharaf neighbourhood in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Before violence broke out in that area in 1966, the Jordanian government issued an ultimatum to the Rajabis to leave. They fled to nearby Batn al-Hawa, buying land there from the existing Arab owners. The occupying Israeli government replaced the Sharaf neighborhood with the modern-day Jewish Quarter after the war in 1967.
The long-dormant Benvenisti Trust, established in the 19th century to manage land and property in the Batn al-Hawa region and provide homes to Jewish Yemeni families, was revived by Israeli courts in 2001.
The Israeli courts appointed two representatives from the settler organisation Ateret Cohanim to oversee that trust, which was historically entitled to buildings in 5.5 dunums (1.36 acres or 0.55 hectares) of land that today comprise dozens of family homes – despite the lack of any connection between these individuals and the Benvenisti Trust or the Yemeni Jewish community that had once been there.
Following Israel’s conquests in 1967, these court decisions were based on Israeli laws, which permit the return to Jewish-owned lands seized before and after the 1948 war regardless of any connection to the original inhabitants. Such rights are expressly denied to the many more Palestinians who also lost their homes in the aftermath of the wars in 1948 and 1967, including the Rajabis and other families in Batn al-Hawa.
Zuheir Rajabi, 54, the leader of the Batn al-Hawa community council and cousin of Wa’il and Kayed, remarked, “You’re turning these people away from our homes of 60 years.” “So where are our lands, our homes in Katamon, Jaffa, Haifa, the Jewish Quarter, that we were forced to leave”?
One of the main Israeli initiatives aims to replace Palestinians with Israeli settlers by moving them from East Jerusalem. Earlier, the organisation offered to buy homes from families in this working-class neighbourhood for millions of dollars apiece. Nearly all Silwan residents rebuffed. Then, as it fought through Israeli courts to assert control over the land and its buildings, Ateret Cohanim began sending eviction letters to families in Batn al-Hawa in 2015.
Homes ‘ for the poor ‘
Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher for the Israeli non-governmental organization Ir Amim in Jerusalem, claims that if there were no poor Jewish families in need, other poor families would occupy these areas. But “the homes]in Batn al-Hawa] are given to ideological settlers, not to Jewish families that are poor”, notes Tatarsky. The Palestinians who are expelled are, of course, living below the poverty line. So this is a very direct, explicit contradiction to the way the trust is supposed to function”.
Multiple irregularities were discovered in the Ateret Cohanim-controlled Benvenisti Trust as part of the official investigations launched this year by the Israeli Registrar of Charitable Trusts, including the revelation that all financial transactions took place through the Benvenisti Trust’s bank accounts rather than the Benvenisti Trust. “It’s very clear that the trust is just a cover for the actions of the settler organisation”, says Tatarsky.
However, Ateret Cohanim has unabatedly worked to forcefully evict the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood. After rebuffing earlier attempts to buy them off, by Zuheir Rajabi’s account, the families in the neighbourhood have spent “hundreds of thousands of shekels” in court since 2015, attempting to reverse or at least delay eviction proceedings.
While declining to address some of the specific issues relating to Ateret Cohanim’s involvement in the Batn al-Hawa properties, Daniel Lurie, Ateret Cohanim’s executive director and international spokesperson, claimed that the current actions against Yemenite and Sephardi Jews are “righting an historical injustice by barbaric violent Arabs]and the British [in a known Jewish neighbourhood] in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Taking hate-filled violent Arabs out of any neighbourhood]based on Supreme Court rulings] or from Israel is a good thing”, his statement said.
The most recent court ruling, which rejected the final legal appeals filed by the 28 families that are currently evicted by the start of February, including Zuheir Rajabi’s, has now rounded off the proceedings.
“We’re truly exhausted”, says Rajabi, the community representative, inside his home, which is slated for eviction in the coming days. His eyes sway as he speaks as his security cameras’ video feeds travel through his home.
“We’ve been in the courts for 12 years with no results. Nothing [positive] happens for the Palestinian Arab citizen, despite the fact that everything is implemented in the interests of the settlers and the extreme right wing. It’s impossible”.
‘ They scatter us, cut us up like salad, grind us up ‘
Wa’il Rajabi claims that he is unsure of where his family will go when their home is being forcibly evicted in the coming days. Few of the low-income families here do. He declares, “We will remain steadfastly in our homes until our last breath.”
According to Wa’il Rajabi, who earns 9, 000 shekels per month, also working for the Jerusalem municipality, rent for any available homes in East Jerusalem is a minimum 5, 000 to 7, 000 shekels per month, with another 1, 000 shekels going towards electricity and water. How will you live on 2, 000 or 3, 000 shekels? What are you going to eat? What will you be drinking? What are you going to dress your child in? How will you instruct him? How are you going to go to and from work? Wa’il, the breadwinner for a family of nine, called it unreasonable. “They sentenced us to death”.
The neighborly and family bonds are being severnned as the neighborhood’s families are being forced to evict one by one, which is now moving at a much faster rate. “It feels like the community is ending”, says Wa’il.
His brother, Kayed, claims, “We were all together here, but now you don’t know where one lives: one is in Beit Hanina, one is in Shu’fat, and one is in Ras al-Amud.” “They scatter us – cut us up like salad, grind us up”.
Parents spend their nights calming their children as they deal with their nightmares about violent settlers attempting to evict them from their homes during this traumatic time.
“Sometimes I joke with them, laugh with them, tell them stories, just to make them stop being scared, to stop thinking, to ease their stress”, says Wa’il. They’ll always return to the same subject no matter how we finish the story, I know in the heart of the matter.
Every second feels precious but fragile in the children’s final moments together. “I wish we could live peacefully and play like before”, laments 11-year-old Joury, Wa’il’s youngest daughter, on the family rooftop.
When armed border patrol officers walked into their impromptu football game one afternoon, one of the young girls she plays with was cartwheeling.
Moments later, a family of Israeli settlers, accompanied by armed security, passed right by them.
Another Israeli settler threw garbage at the children when they were playing in the street, according to Joury. “We defended ourselves”, she says. The settler contacted the police, they said. So since that day, we have not been able to play. The police will come in and assault and humiliate us if we stay there, and do the same.
The children spend these last days asking their parents the same questions:
Why do they require us to leave our homes? Where will we go”?
However, their parents are unable to provide any assistance for them.
However, in their last days together, the children snatch what time they can together on the stairs in front of Wa’il and Kayed’s home, playing football or paddle games.
