Silwan: When David Becomes Goliath
Reageer (0)by Elena Hogan
18-8-2010
Fakhri Abu Diab abruptly interrupts the interview as an alarming swell of whistling rises up from the streets. He stands up and walks out of the “Al Bustan Center” tent, a makeshift wooden structure draped in black canvas and covered with blown up photos depicting moments of the neighborhood’s popular struggle in the occupied East Jerusalem area of Silwan, the supposed site of the City of King David, the David who faced off Goliath.
Small children yell and the whistling amplifies as three, then four, Israeli military jeeps screech to a halt in front of the tent. A half-dozen soldiers in black ski masks and riot helmets jump out into the street, shouting to each other and pointing their M-16s as if in combat.
“You see this situation?” Abu Diab asks rhetorically, “This is our life. This is the problem. It’s like this everyday here now.” His eyes move from the soldiers to the three young boys waiting for the bus a few feet away. “And you see those children? They are not afraid, they are not moving, they’re staying…they do not want to give the soldiers the chance to shoot at them….you see? We teach them that. Now the jeeps are going.”
Abu Diab, chairman of the Popular Committee for the Al Bustan area of Silwan, and member of Silwan’s General Popular Committee (which unites all 12 areas of Silwan), turns and heads back into the tent. Raised in February 2009 by local residents, the tent is the meeting center for the Al Bustan area’s collective struggle to protect its 88 buildings, home to more than 1,500 people. All 88 buildings have been served with multiple demolition orders to make way for the expansion of Israel’s “City of David” archeological site, an exclusively Jewish heritage project involving the expulsion of the East Jerusalem Palestinians whose families have inhabited this neighborhood for centuries.
Some of the Al Bustan homes to be demolished predate the 1948 creation of the State of Israel (at times by more than a century), while most predate the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. All pay the Arnona, the Israeli Municipal property tax, and have done so since the 1980 Israeli “annexation” of this portion of the city. Though declared “null and void” by UN Resolution 478 as a breach of international law, the annexation continues to be a de facto reality, which brings highly concrete consequences to Palestinian Jerusalemites.
As one of the nine elected volunteers making up the Al Bustan Popular Committee, Abu Diab spends most of his free time acting as liaison for the lawyers who have taken up the 88 legal battles in progress in Israeli courts. He represents Al Bustan in front of the Municipality and keeps the media, his neighbors, and Israeli activist groups updated on predicted military actions and home demolitions through the committee’s website and direct contact.
The Al Bustan center also hosts the collective Friday afternoon prayer, a weekly spiritual protest; along with summer camps and courses in first aid, fear management, child trauma, and English and Hebrew. But notwithstanding this endless effort, ten of Al Bustan’s 88 buildings have already come down. What is more, all Al Bustan residents are currently paying off heavy squatter fines, generally amounting to around 65,000 NIS (approximately 17,000 USD), because they refuse to leave. “We have no power, and Israel is above international law, so what can we do?” states Abu Diab. “We can help people go to lawyers, hold demonstrations…but when I see my children or my wife, they are not happy…When I go home, I see the kitchen, the bedrooms, the salon, and I say ‘maybe this is the last dinner, the last coffee, the last time I’ll sit with my children in my home’…Many families are suffering from psychological issues, and for this, we, the community, can’t help them. ”
Abu Diab gives the example of one high-achieving seven-year-old boy from Al Bustan whose teacher became concerned when he stopped performing well in school. One day the teacher took the boy aside and asked him if he needed any help with his assignments. He told the boy to open his backpack, and when the boy did, the teacher discovered that it was full of toys in place of his textbooks. The teacher went to the boy’s home to discuss this with his parents, and when the boy’s mother asked him why his schoolbag was full of toys and not books, the boy replied that he had heard them say their house would be destroyed, but no one knew exactly when. So, he explained, he had been taking his favorite toys to school with him each day to protect them from the bulldozers.
But the grave situation of Silwan is not limited to Al Bustan.
On the adjacent hillside in the neighborhood’s Baten el-Hawa area, the Abu Nab building, home to seven Palestinian families, is under constant threat of “evacuation” on the part of the Israeli settler families occupying the Beit Yonatan building next door. Abu Nab was built on the site of a nineteenth century Yemenite synagogue—in Israel more than reason enough to challenge any Palestinian’s ownership rights.
Just down the street from Abu Nab, Palestinian resident and father of four small children Zuhair Rajabi spends a good part of his time systematically documenting the violence around his house through the six video cameras he has set up at all angles of his residence. He lives next to yet another occupied house in Silwan, the Beit Al-’Asl (known as Beit Haduash to its occupiers). Though Zuhair holds the documents attesting to his uncle’s purchase of the Beit Al ‘Asl from another Palestinian family before it, too, was declared the home of Israeli settlers, this has not helped him.
“So we are fighting [the settlers] in the Israeli court. What else can we do? Israel is strong, and we are weak. Every week two to three hundred people come to the Popular Committee meetings because we are asking ourselves what we can do, how we can resist this. The irony is that we are in Jerusalem, so I pay my water bills, my electricity bills, my taxes to the Israeli State. And with this money the Israeli State funds its army and pays its security forces to oppress us.”
Zuhair is in constant contact with Israeli activist groups such as Tayoush, ICAHD, and Breaking the Silence, and up to 20 Israeli activists at a time spend the night in the Abu Nab building in an effort to protect its Palestinian inhabitants from their violent ideological neighbors. Along with his video documentation, Zuhair has saved all empty M-16 shells which hit his house and car, and the tear-gas canister shot into his living room on the night of June 26—the last time settlers decided to stage a vigilante eviction attempt of Abu Nab —just in case he will ever be able to use this evidence for legal purposes.
In the Wadi Hilwe valley area at the entrance to Silwan, a small Israeli settler girl, about eight years old, walks up the street. She is followed by an armed private escort, which in turn is followed by an Israeli military jeep. Occupied houses are scattered down the street, easily identifiable by the large Israeli flags on the balconies signaling where Palestinian families have been ousted to make way for Israelis.
The child and all her escorts parade past Silwan’s Wadi Hilwe Information Center, another makeshift tent structure erected as a Palestinian answer to the Israeli City of David Tourist Information Point located just down the street and surrounded by soldiers. “We have a right to tell our own story here, and not just to have to listen to others telling the history of this neighborhood as if we never existed in it,” explains Nihad Siyam, one of the center’s founding members, “We have been here for thousands of years, though this is something they would like to erase.”
The center functions as home base for alternative archeological tours of Silwan, carried out in collaboration with the Israeli archaeologists of Emek Shaveh, who highlight the political role played by archeology in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promote a vision of collective ownership of the area’s archeological past, rather than its ownership by one ethno-religious group.
David has thus become Goliath: A champion of international impunity, at least in the exclusively Jewish historical legacy Israel has forced on him. And the Palestinian residents of Silwan continue in their seemingly hopeless legal battles, where justice is defined by the oppressor. They continue in their creative array of grassroots initiatives, resistance techniques, and activities aimed at positive community reinforcement. But for just how long can Silwan continue to resist in the face of massive Israeli aggression before exploding into a desperate use of much more than just the sling and stones?
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