18 February 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Over the past few days
graffiti scrawled on walls around the mixed Jewish and
Arab town of Jaffa in central Israel exclaims:
“Settlers, keep out” and “Jaffa is not
Hebron”.
Although Jaffa is only a
stone’s throw from the bustling coastal metropolis of
Tel Aviv,
Arab residents say their neighbourhood has become the
unlikely battleground for an attempted takeover by
extremist Jews more familiar from
West Bank settlements.
Small numbers of
nationalist religious Jews, distinctive for wearing
knitted skullcaps, have begun moving into Jaffa’s
deprived main Arab district, Ajami, over recent
months.
Tensions have been
simmering since a special seminary was established
last year in the heart of Ajami for young Jewish men
who combine study of the Bible with serving in the
Israeli army. Many such seminaries, known as “hesder
yeshivas”, are located in the
occupied territories
and have earnt a reputation for turning out
extremists.
Last week Ajami’s residents
were dealt a further blow when an Israeli court
approved the sale of one of the district’s few
remaining building plots to B’Emuna (Hebrew for “with
faith”), a construction company that specialises in
building subsidised homes for religious families, many
of them in West Bank settlements.
The Association of
Civil Rights
in
Israel,
the country’s largest human rights law centre, which
petitioned the courts on the Arab residents’ behalf,
called the company’s policy “racist”.
B’Emuna, which is expected
to complete 20 apartments in the next few months, is
applying for approval for a further 180, as well as a
second seminary and a synagogue.
“We have no problem living
peacefully with Jewish neighbours,” said Omar Siksik,
an Arab councillor representing Jaffa in Tel Aviv’s
municipality. “But these Jews are coming here as
settlers.
“Like in Hebron, their
policy is to weaken us as a population and eventually
push us out of our homes,” he said, referring to a
West Bank city
where an enclave of a few dozen settlers has severely
disrupted life for tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Jaffa’s fortunes have
changed dramatically since early last century when it
was the commercial hub of Palestine, famously
exporting its orange crop around the world. During
Israel’s founding in 1948, most of the town’s
Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee, with the
few remaining inhabitants confined to Ajami.
Today, Jaffa’s 18,000 Arab
inhabitants are outnumbered two to one by Jews, after
waves of immigrants were settled in empty homes during
the 1950s.
Arab residents have long
complained of being neglected by a municipality
controlled from Tel Aviv. Ajami’s crumbling homes,
ramshackle infrastructure and crime-ridden streets
were on show in this year’s much-feted eponymous
movie, nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language
film.
But the latest arrivals in
Ajami are causing considerable anxiety, even from
officials in Tel Aviv. Gilad Peleg, head of the Jaffa
Development Authority, said he was “deeply concerned”
at the trend of extremist organisations arriving “to
shake up the local community”.
Nasmi Jabali, 56, lives in
a modest single-storey home close to the olive grove
where the new apartments will be built. “We’ve seen on
TV how these settlers behave in the occupied
territories, and don’t want them living next to us,”
she said. “They’ll come here with the same
attitudes.”
But despite widespread
opposition, the
Tel Aviv District Court
last week rejected a petition from 27 residents who
argued that the Israel Lands Authority had
discriminated against them by awarding the land to
B’Emuna, even though its policy is to build apartments
only for Jews.
Yehuda Zefet, the judge,
accused the residents of “bad faith” in arguing for
equality when they wanted the interests of the local
Arab community to take precedence over the interests
of Jews.
Mr Siksik said the judge
had failed to take into account the historical
injustice perpetrated on Ajami’s population. “For six
decades the authorities have not built one new house
for the Arab population, and in fact they have
demolished many Arab homes, while building social
housing for Jews.”
Fadi Shabita, a member of
the local Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa’s
Lands, said the plots in Ajami being sold by the
government originally belonged to Palestinian
families, some of whom were still in the district but
had been forced to rent their properties from the
state.
“The land was forcibly
nationalised many years ago and the local owners were
dispossessed,” he said. “Now the same land is being
privatised, but Ajami’s residents are being ignored in
the development plans.
“For the settlers, the
lesson of the disengagement [from Gaza in 2005] was
that they need to begin a dialogue with Jews inside
Israel to persuade them that a settlement in the
West Bank
is no less legitimate than one in Jaffa.”
B’Emuna told Israel
National News, a settler website, that it was
developing Jewish-only homes in several of the half
dozen “mixed cities” in Israel to stem the flow of
Jewish residents leaving because of poverty and
falling property values caused by the presence of an
Arab population.
B’Emuna has said it is
looking to buy more land in Jaffa.
A short distance from the
olive grove that is about to be developed is the
Jewish seminary established last year. An Israeli flag
is draped from the front of the building and stars of
David adorn the gate at its entrance.
The manager, Ariel
Elimelech, who was overseeing two dozen young men on
Sunday as they pored over the
Torah, said
he commuted daily to Ajami from his home in Eli, an
illegal settlement deep in the West Bank south of the
Palestinian city of Nablus.
Mr Elimelech said he
favoured coexistence in Jaffa but added that the
seminary’s goal was to strengthen Jewish identity in
the area. “We don’t call this place Ajami; it’s known
as Givat Aliyah,” he said, using a
Hebrew name
that refers to the immigration of Jews to Israel.
He said the students
performed a vital service by visiting schools to help
in the education of Jewish children before performing
18 months of military service.
Kemal Agbaria, who chairs
the Ajami neighbourhood council, said residents would
launch an appeal to the
Supreme Court
and were planning large-scale demonstrations to draw
attention to their plight.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the
Plan to Remake the
Middle East”
(Pluto
Press) and
“Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair” (Zed Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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