10. Houses confiscated and taken over by settlers, physical attacks, and pervasive bullying in the Old City.

10). Settler occupation and abuse in the Old City of Jerusalem.

We emerged from Al Saraya Street for a tour of the old parts of the Old City.  Every week houses get confiscated and given to settlers, and the struggle to keep properties, especially in the Old City, has intensified in the past decade.  This is partly because the main owners of property are not the people who are living in a house, and there may be deficiencies in the documentation as to the rightful owner.  Settlers confiscate houses and then claim to have bought them, they just throw the inhabitants onto the street.  Then the homeless Palestinians have to go to the Israeli court to try to prove that they own the house, but often they can be found not to have quite the right papers, for example if there is a slight variation in the names cited in the deeds.

In 1967 a lot of Palestinian homes were confiscated under the ‘Absentee Property Law’ if the owners lived or had fled to other Arab ‘enemy’ countries: it was transferred to a custodian and then sold to Jewish settler groups.  On the other hand property in East Jerusalem owned by Jewish people before 1948 was used to house Palestinian refugees by the Jordanian authorities but they still paid rent to the owners, and after 1967 the properties were returned to the owners, who then allowed them to be used by settler groups., though some are still occupied by Palestinian tenants but they have no protection against eviction by the settlers.   The Old City Moroccan Quarter which was heavily damaged by bombing has been rebuilt as the Jewish Quarter, whilst the Arab Quarter is being progressively taken over as the “new Jewish quarter’ with aggressive displays of huge Israeli flags from taken-over buildings, and aggressive behaviour in the crowded streets, with jostling people whilst walking or riding electric bikes down crowded streets.

We were taken to see various houses in the Arab Old City where Palestinian inhabitants on the ground floors were being regularly abused by settlers living in houses overlooking them, who would throw down burning objects or acid, to defy the metal grilles that they had had to put up to stop large stones coming down.  In one house, the settlers above used the same entrance as a Palestinian family on the ground floor, whose young daughter had been attacked with acid thrown by the child of the settlers when sitting in the courtyard.  The Palestinian family went to court, but all the court decided was that the settler parents should apologise.

A police station was created by taking over a Palestinian home on the Via Dolorosa near to the Al Aqsa mosque, but the evicted family appealed successfully.  Later there was a violent incident on the street outside, nothing to do with the family inside, but this was used as a pretext for another eviction.  A large house in Al-Wad Street displaying large blue and white flags is occupied on the two top floors by settlers, and its Arab owners are forced to stay only on the ground floor and to share the same entrance, even though 1930 documents show that the house was purchased with 30 shares by the Arab family and  with 7 shares owned by a Jewish family.  At the Via Dolorosa 5th station of the cross we saw a house which was owned by Ariel Sharon, where he lived briefly having bought it when he was Minister of Infrastructure; it is now transferred to the ownership of a settler group.  A large tract of land near the northern wall of the city, which was owned by an absentee in 1967 so taken over and Sharon’s daughter now lives there with her guards.  In the Burj LaqLaq area near the north wall of the city there is a plot sold by the Russian Orthodox Church where settlers are hoping to build 400 flats, but this has not been done so far due to opposition from the Palestinian Authority.  Next to this is a large tract of land given over to a Palestinian recreation centre founded in 1991, which we visited - it is regularly subjected to Israeli harassment as it is such a large area - for example refusal of permission for cultural activities, and the shutting down of facilities near to the land where the new settlement is planned.  Funding comes from NGOs and from the EU.

It was hard not to notice in the narrow busy streets near the market and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque the brutal, bullying body language of the male settlers as they pushed their way through the throngs of people.  Although signs stated that it was forbidden to ride electric bikes in the old city, I saw settlers riding them through the crowd, right in front of the armed Israeli soldiers standing behind their small crowd-control barriers in the Via Dolorosa.