JAFFA. ISRAEL// The ground floor of Zaki
Khimayl’s home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they
smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa’s beach, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv,
the business should be thriving.
Mr Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab
neighbourhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya, is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a
world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind:
his eviction from Jaffa.
Sitting on the cafe’s balcony, Mr Khimayl, 59, said he feels
besieged. Bulldozers are tearing up the land by the beach for redevelopment and
luxury apartments are springing up all around his dilapidated two-storey home.
He opened a briefcase, one of five he has stuffed with demands
and fines from official bodies, as well as bills from four lawyers dealing with
the flood of paperwork.
“I owe 1.8 million shekels [Dh1.8m] in water and business rates
alone,” he said in exasperation. “The crazy thing is the municipality recently
valued the property and told me it’s worth much less than the sum I owe.”
Jaffa is one of half a dozen “mixed cities”
in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens supposedly live together. The
rest of Israel’s Palestinian minority, relatives of the Palestinians in the
occupied territories, live in their own separate and deprived communities.
Despite the image of coexistence cultivated by the Israeli
authorities, Jaffa is far from offering a shared space for Jews and
Palestinians, according to Sami Shehadeh of the Popular Committee for the
Defence of Jaffa’s Homes. Instead, Palestinian residents live in their own
largely segregated neighbourhoods, especially Ajami, the city’s poorest
district.
Only last month, Mr Shehadeh said, the Jewish residents’
committees proposed creating days when the municipal pool could be used only by
Jews.
Although Jaffa’s 18,000 Palestinian residents constitute
one-third of the city’s population, they have been left powerless politically
since a municipal fusion with Jaffa’s much larger neighbour, Tel Aviv, in 1950.
Of the cities’ joint population, Palestinians are just three per cent.
After years of neglect, Mr Shehadeh said, the residents are
finally attracting attention from the authorities – but the interest is far from
benign. A “renewal plan” for Jaffa, ostensibly designed to improve the
inhabitants’ quality of life, is in fact seeking the Palestinian residents’
removal on the harshest terms possible, he said.
“The municipality talks a lot about ‘developing’ and
‘rehabilitating’ the area, but what it means by development is attracting
wealthy Jews looking to live close by Tel Aviv but within view of the sea,” he
said.
“The Palestinian residents here are simply seen as an obstacle to
the plan, so they are being evicted from their homes under any pretext that can
be devised.
“Some of the families have lived in these homes since well before
the state of Israel was established, and yet they are being left with nothing.”
The current pressure on the residents to leave Ajami has painful
echoes of the 1948 war that followed Israel’s declaration of its existence.
Once, Jaffa was the most powerful city in Palestine, its wealth derived from the
area’s huge orange exports.
As Israeli historians have noted, however, one of the Jewish
leadership’s main aims in the 1948 war was the expulsion of the Palestinian
population from Jaffa, especially given its proximity to Tel Aviv, the new
Jewish state’s largest city.
Ilan Pappe, an historian, writes that the people of Jaffa were
“literally pushed into the sea” to board fishing boats destined for Gaza as
“Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion”.
By the end of the war, no more than 4,000 of Jaffa’s 70,000
Palestinians remained. The Israeli government nationalised all their property
and corralled the residents into the Ajami neighbourhood, south of Jaffa port.
For two years they were sealed off from the rest of Jaffa behind barbed wire.
In the meantime, Jaffa’s properties were either demolished or
redistributed to new Jewish immigrants. The heart of old Jaffa, next to the
port, was developed as a touristic playground, with palatial Palestinian homes
turned into exclusive restaurants and art galleries run by Jewish entrepreneurs.
The Ajami district, on the other hand, was quickly transformed
from a distinguished neighbourhood of Jaffa into its most deprived area, which
became a magnet for crime and drugs. “The municipality showed its disdain for us
by dumping all the city’s waste, even dangerous chemicals, on our beach,” Mr
Shehadeh said.
The residents – even those who continued to live in their
families’ original homes – lost their status as owners and overnight became
tenants in confiscated property, forced to pay rent to a state-controlled
company, Amidar.
Today, Amidar wants the families out to make way for wealthy
Jewish investors and real estate developers.
Over the past 18 months, it has issued 497 eviction orders
against Ajami families, threatening to make 3,000 people homeless.
“The problem for the families is that for six decades they have
been ignored,” said Mr Shehadeh, who is standing in the local elections to the
council next month.
“Four-fifths of Ajami’s population is Palestinian and no
investments were made by the municipality. Amidar refused to renovate the homes,
and the planning authorities refused to issue permits to the families to build
new properties or alter existing ones.”
Faced with crumbling old homes and growing families, the
residents had little choice but to fix and extend their properties themselves.
Now years, sometimes decades, later Amidar is using these alterations as grounds
for eviction, arguing that the residents have broken the terms of their rental
agreements.
Mental Lahavi, vice-chairman of the local building and planning
committee, recently admitted to the local media: “The municipality froze all
[building] permits in the area for a long period and would not even let people
replace an asbestos roof. They turned all the residents of the neighbourhood
into offenders.”
Mr Khimayl has amassed large debts because he used parts of his
home that, according to Amidar, were not covered by his contract – even though
the house has been owned by his family since 1902.
Amidar has also been waging a legal battle
over a minor alteration he made to the property.
Many years ago, Mr Khimayl rebuilt the dangerous external stone
steps that provided the only access to the house’s second floor. In 2005, Amidar
inspectors told him he had broken the terms of his contract and should remove
the new steps.
Unable to reach his home in any other way, he replaced the stone
steps with a metal staircase. Another inspector declared the staircase a
violation of the agreement, too.
Mr Khimayl is currently using a metal staircase on wheels,
arguing that the moveable steps are not a permanent alteration. Nonetheless,
Amidar is pursuing him through the courts. Other families face similar problems.
A recent report by the Human Rights Association in Nazareth
concluded the government was seeking to use a “quiet” form of ethnic cleansing,
using administrative and legal pressure, to make Jaffa entirely Jewish.
Amidar has said it is simply upholding the
law. “In cases in which the law has been broken, the company acts to protect the
state’s rights, regardless of the value of the property or the religion or
nationality of the tenants.”
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