by PIERRE KLOCHENDLER
Badr Abu Ad-Dula at the entrance of his home. PHOTO/Pierre Klochendler/IPS
SHEIKH JARRAH, Occupied East Jerusalem, Sep 18 2012 (IPS) – “See the bullets from the 1948 and 1967 wars,” Badr Abu Ad-Dula says, showing the scars of the old frontline on the outer walls of the building where he and his family of 13 live. “Here’s the Jordanian outpost.” The elderly Palestinian points at a loophole, now a bedroom window.
Across the narrow street, a nondescript mound of corrugated metal and oxidised barbed wire marks the now non-existent border.
Ad-Dula’s house is located on the pre-1967 no-man’s-land between the city’s eastern and western sectors. Forty-five years on, the three-storey building has become one of the multiple frontlines within Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.
The five families who live there under one roof – 70 people all in all – are united against a common threat – that of eviction by an Israeli settler group called Nahalat Shimon whose purpose is to settle Jews in the neighbourhood.
During the Jordanian rule interlude (1948-1967), Palestinians – many of them refugees – were granted squatters’ rights in East Jerusalem houses under the jurisdiction of the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property, and replaced the former Jewish residents who’d vacated their homes and went to live on the Israeli side.
Ultra-nationalist Israelis invoke Israel’s Absentee Property Law imposed on the occupied part of the city in order to evict Palestinians from houses where they’ve now been living for decades.
Up the street, a Jewish activist comes out of an Arab house that, up until four years ago, was exclusively occupied by the Al-Kurds. Graffiti scribbled on the front leaves no doubt as to the bitter conflict that pitted the Israeli intruders against the Palestinian family. “Free Palestine – of Leftist scum”, it reads.
“Pro-Palestinian activists wrote their part; we added ours,” says Yaakov Fauci, one of the Jewish tenants who now occupy the front rooms. The Al-Kurds were relegated to the back of the house.
“(Israel’s) Supreme Court ruled in our favour,” he adds. “But the front is an illegal extension of the original construction in the back. It didn’t have building permits, and thus was in violation of the squatters’ rights agreement.
“So the Court ruled that the Arabs had to move out to the back. We actually moved into the illegal annex,” he says.
“It’s a strange situation – unprecedented in Israeli law, one might say: we legally live in an illegal building,” Fauci concedes, “but lots of strange things happen nowadays. It’s just a very bad situation.”
Inter Press Service for more