‘There is nothing the world can do about it’: Australian takes on controversial Middle Eastern role

East Jerusalem: She could hear it any day now. The sound Najah al-Rajabi has been dreading. The thud on the door telling her that time is up: she is being evicted from the home she has lived in for the past 55 years. The prospect of looming homelessness for the 18 family members in the home terrifies her. “I’ve cried so much I lost all my tears,” the widow, 69, says, her weary face framed by a purple hijab. “I’m dying inside. I’m an elderly woman and I have nowhere else to go.”

More than her own welfare, al-Rajabi fears for her grandson who lives downstairs. Awad, 31, has been in a coma since suffering a stroke six years ago, and relies on a ventilator to stay alive. His room resembles a hospital ward, not a bedroom. “What if we are evicted and he is thrown onto the street?” she says. “Even a few minutes without electricity could put his life at risk.” When eviction day comes her disabled 23-year-old granddaughter, who needs a wheelchair to get around, will also be homeless.

As she speaks, a litter of newborn kittens nuzzle their mother on the kitchen floor, blissfully unaware of the mounting anxiety of the humans in the house. Like many buildings in this part of East Jerusalem’s Silwan district, it is covered in brightly coloured murals of flowers and eyes painted by pro-Palestinian artists as part of a project called “I witness Silwan”.

Najah al-Rajabi and her grandson Awad Nasser al-Rajabi in the family home in the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood of Silwan, East Jerusalem.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Al-Rajabi’s narrow apartment may be modest but, for her, it is a sacred place. It is where she has spent almost all her life, where she raised her nine children and dozens of grandchildren. She cherishes her balcony’s spectacular view of Al-Aqsa Mosque, considered the third-holiest site in Islam.

Al-Rajabi’s late husband Awad bought the house from a Palestinian owner in 1975, and she has the documents to prove it. Yet in the eyes of the Israeli legal system, they count for nothing. On June 22, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected her family’s final appeal against an eviction process that began a decade ago. Within 30 days, a Jewish family is set to move into her home, taking advantage of a law that allows Jews who owned property in East Jerusalem before 1948 to reclaim it.

Israel seized East Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967 and considers it a part of its undivided capital city. By contrast, almost all the world’s countries, including the Australian government, regard East Jerusalem as occupied territory and the prospective capital of a future Palestinian state. Today it is home to about 362,000 Palestinians and 234,000 Israelis.

The al-Rajabi household is one of about 80 Palestinian families, consisting of more than 700 people, who face eviction in Batan al-Hawa, a densely populated neighbourhood in Silwan. Located just steps away from some of the most treasured sites for Judaism, Islam and Christianity, it has become one of the world’s most bitterly contested patches of land.

The battle being fought here – house by house, street by street, block by block – is not just about property but politics, power and identity. It can prove fatal. An imminent court decision on the possible eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem triggered a 2021 conflict between Hamas and Israel that led to an estimated 270 deaths.

In Silwan we meet another grandmother, Asmahan Shweiki, 79, who is preparing to be kicked out of the home her husband bought in 1988. On June 16, the Israeli Supreme Court told her family members they had a month to vacate the property before they would be removed. “We are living in a scary moment, I have no other place to go,” she says. “There are memories in every part of this home.”

Zuhair al-Rajabi, a relative of Najah and the head of the Batan al-Hawa neighbourhood association, says residents are facing a form of “psychological warfare”. “They are trying to demolish our strength, fighting us in every way they can: the army, police, settler organisations, the court.”

Zuhair al-Rajabi, head of the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood committee, says he and his neighbours are subjected to “psychological warfare”.Credit: Kate Geraghty

For the past 80 years, Silwan’s population has been almost entirely Palestinian, but energetic Jewish non-government organisations are working to change that. Playing a leading role is an Australian-Israeli whose love for the Collingwood Football Club is exceeded only by his passion for Israel, and his determination to expand a Jewish presence throughout Jerusalem.

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Daniel Luria, 65, grew up in Melbourne but believes life only began when he moved to Israel 30 years ago. “In Australia I was an alien in someone else’s beautiful country,” he says. “My home has always been here.” For the past 25 years, the passionate Zionist has worked as the executive director of Ateret Cohanim, a group that says it “stands at the forefront of Jewish land reclamation in Jerusalem”. Luria summarises the organisation’s mission as “ideological real estate with an enormous number of political ramifications”. Like the Palestinians fighting to remain in their homes, he frames the property battle in East Jerusalem in militaristic terms. “The war with Iran may be over, but the war for Jerusalem goes on,” he says.

Melbourne-born Daniel Luria, executive director of Ateret Cohanim, works to facilitate the transfer of homes from Palestinians to Israelis in East Jerusalem.Credit: Kate Geraghty

It’s a battle fought not only over bricks and mortar, but language. Luria calls Silwan by its biblical name of Shiloach, and flinches when the term Palestinian is mentioned. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times: there has never been a Palestinian people, nation, heritage, history. It doesn’t exist … Of course, there are Arabs who live in Israel today and inside Jerusalem. And if an Arab wants to live in a Jewish state for the Jewish people I will roll out the blue-and-white carpet for him and kiss his hand.” Palestinians say they have a proud national identity and an ancient connection to Jerusalem.

To limit the growth of the Jewish population in places like East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority has made it a crime, punishable by death, for Palestinians to sell property to Israeli Jews. The Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem has also issued a fatwa forbidding Palestinian Muslims “from giving up, or selling Jerusalem and the land of Palestine to the enemy”.

Luria says most of Ateret Cohanim’s work consists of facilitating voluntary property sales from Arab owners to Jewish buyers, a task made necessary by the strict Palestinian restrictions on property sales to Israelis.

The organisation’s critics view its work as far less benign. In 2009, Ateret Cohanim activists were accused of breaking into a Palestinian home in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter and changing the locks after trying to present a fake bill of sale for the property (the group denied the accusations). “Ateret Cohanim has been accused of using methods that include bribery, straw companies and the exploitation of legal technicalities to gain ownership of Palestinian homes,” Amnesty International wrote in a 2022 report. Recordings published in 2018 showed the organisation’s chairman and attorney offering Palestinian property owners prostitutes and Viagra, and threatening to destroy their reputations unless they agreed to sell their homes.

A voluble character, Luria is proud of his organisation’s work and happy to share his views, which he knows some will find provocative. But he declines a request to walk through Shiloach, insisting the story is better understood when viewed from a distance. From a lookout near the Mount of Olives, he points with pride to the Israeli flags now dotting the district and a synagogue that Ateret Cohanim reclaimed in 2015. “The Arab and the Muslim world basically understands one thing: strength and strength of conviction. This here is the story of strength of conviction.”

Shiloach was inhabited by Yemenite Jews from 1882 until 1938, when rioting forced them out, and they were resettled in other areas. From this time, Palestinians – many of whom were fleeing conflict elsewhere – moved into the area, which they call Silwan. The Israeli courts have found that much of the land in neighbourhoods like Batan-al-Hawa belongs to a charitable trust formed by Yemenite Jewish leaders in the 1800s. This makes the Palestinian families living there today “illegal squatters” in Luria’s words, a view affirmed by the highest levels of the Israeli judiciary. “There’s no question about ownership in relation to deed and title,” he says. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying through their teeth.”

Families facing eviction are commonly offered compensation, he says, though many decline to take it because of the Palestinian restrictions on land sales to Jewish Israelis.

An armed Israeli security guard escorts Israeli settler children past Palestinian homes that have been issued with demolition or eviction notices.Credit: Kate Geraghty

According to a February report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an investigation by the Israeli Justice Ministry found the charitable trust, which has filed dozens of eviction lawsuits against Palestinian families, is “nothing more than a fictitious entity managed entirely by the Ateret Cohanim Association, in violation of the endowment’s charter and contrary to the rules of proper administration”.

Luria insists the two organisations are separate entities, although he sees how they are confused. “We obviously have similar overall interests,” he says. “Anywhere in the world, if someone is illegally squatting on your property it makes perfectly good sense to get your property back from the courts.”

By contrast, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the Israeli non-profit B’Tselem say the mass eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem is so extensive it amounts to a form of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

In June, the Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights said evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem violate international law and “form part of a concerted campaign by the Israeli State and settler organisations, which target Palestinian neighbourhoods to seize Palestinian homes and expand Jewish settlements”.

Luria describes the 43 Jewish families his organisation has helped move into the area as modern pioneers, praising them for their willingness to live surrounded by Palestinians who don’t want them there. “This is the most hostile neighbourhood in the country,” he argues. Jewish residents, he says, have had washing machines dropped on them by their Palestinian neighbours and been attacked with Molotov cocktails. Unlike Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem, they are entitled to government-funded security protection and allowed to carry firearms.

The Jewish residents moving in today are not necessarily descendants of the Jews who fled the area in the 1930s and few have Yemenite heritage. “It’s not a relevant factor,” says Luria. “We are the indigenous people of this land: Jews have a right to come back to this land, live in this land, and especially to get back properties that the Jews were thrown out of. I can’t think of anything more obvious or straightforward than that.”

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Fakhri Abu Diab’s home looks like a bomb site. Indeed, it appears virtually identical to the Israeli homes destroyed in missile attacks during last month’s 12-day war between Israel and Iran. But it was bulldozers that turned his home into a pile of rubble on Valentine’s Day last year.

Fakhri Abu Diab among the ruins of his home in the Al-Bustan neighbourhood that was demolished by Israeli authorities in February last year.Credit: Kate Geraghty

“It was like they were bulldozing my heart,” he says, standing at what used to be the front door of his home. “I begged them to stop. I couldn’t fight or do anything. I lost my power.” Heirlooms, documents and family photos were destroyed, but he salvaged a rusty blue kerosene lamp used by his mother to illuminate the house at night.

The accountant, 63, is a prominent community leader in Al-Bustan, a neighbourhood in Silwan that many Israelis believe is the site of the biblical garden of King David. He has spent the past 20 years leading the opposition to a controversial municipality plan to raze all 100 homes in Al-Bustan and turn the area into an archaeological tourism park. The authorities told him they were demolishing his home because of unauthorised extensions he made to his property, which was built before the establishment of the state of Israel. He was charged $14,000 for the demolition of his home, including a bill for the drinks and snacks consumed by the workers while they bulldozed his property.

The Biden administration condemned the demolition of Abu Diab’s home, saying such acts “damage Israel’s standing in the world” and “obstruct efforts to advance a durable and lasting peace and security that would benefit not just Palestinians but Israelis”. Princeton University professor Richard Falk, a former United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian issues, has argued that such demolitions “violate international law, with certain actions potentially amounting to war crimes”.

Human rights groups say the demolition rate has surged under the cover of the war in Gaza, which has distracted international attention from the displacement of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Israeli authorities demolished a record 181 homes in East Jerusalem last year because of a lack of building permits, according Ir Amim, a left-wing non-profit focusing on Jerusalem’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This included a quarter of all the homes in Al-Bustan, which was designated as green space in the 1970s, prohibiting construction by residents.

Ir Amim researcher Aviv Tatarsky says that, unlike Israelis, it is virtually impossible for Palestinian families in East Jerusalem to receive permits to build new homes or renovate their ageing and often overcrowded properties. “Everyone knows how dangerous it is to build without a permit, but they don’t have a choice,” Tatarsky says. “There is a very direct political aim here: to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem.”

Amani Mousa Odeh points to what used to be the kitchen of her partially demolished home.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The front section of dentist Amani Odeh’s family home was razed last month, but she plans to move back in, defying a self-demolition order. As with Abu Diab, the authorities sent her a bill for demolishing her home. “They are trying to break people, they want us to be nothing,” she says. “But this is our land, our place.” She named her 11-year-old daughter Silwan, reflecting her love of the neighbourhood where she grew up.

Determined to remain on his property, Fakhri Abu Diab has erected a makeshift building made of lightweight steel for him and his wife to live in behind the wreckage of their former home. He says the authorities have taken control of his bank account and told him they will come back and demolish his temporary home unless he does so himself. Remarkably, he says the Jerusalem municipality is still charging him property tax on the home it knocked down.

He suffers high blood pressure his doctors say is caused by stress. But he stays put, growing zucchinis and capsicums in his garden and tending to chickens and geese just as his mother did on the same spot. Like grandmother Najah al-Rajabi, awaiting imminent eviction in her apartment nearby, he knows his home will be seized and that he could lose his Jerusalem residency permit if he leaves. “I want to stay with my history, stay where I belong,” he says.

Daniel Luria is equally resolute about his mission to spread a Jewish presence through as much of the Holy City as possible. Slowly but surely, he believes, he and his allies are winning the war for Jerusalem. “This land belongs to one people and one people only,” he says. “Jerusalem runs through our veins, as does Israel, and there is nothing the world can do about it.”

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