Ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem
Annika Hampson talks to Abu Mayaleh, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem who refuses to be ethnically cleansed
Naif Abu Mayaleh owns two little shops in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, right on the border of the Jewish Quarter close to the entrance to the Al-Buraq Ash-Sharif, or Wailing Wall. Last month an Israeli settler organisation offered him a blank cheque, plane tickets and US visas in exchange for his properties.
Abu Mayaleh snubbed the offer, "my people have paid for this city with their blood. I cannot, I will not, sell to these people." Having refused to sell his properties, Abu Mayaleh has become a victim of a campaign of terror waged by a group of extremist settlers.
A frail man of 51 years who looks many years older, Abu Mayaleh spoke of how the settlers physically abused him and have vandalised his shops on countless occasions throughout the past 26 years, since the Yeshiva was established in the late 1970s.
"I'm old enough to be their father and they treat me worse than a dog," he stated. He said they know his name, and hurl insults at him when he prays. He claimed they beat him and broke his front teeth. His leg has a large scar around his ankle where they kicked him. "I am desperate," he beseeched, "I have nobody to turn to. They come and do what they want and I am utterly helpless."
Abu Mayaleh's shops sell tourist souvenirs: postcards, hand-painted pottery from the West Bank, boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, carved wooden nativity figures, and glass cabinets lined with Bedouin jewellery. But nearly 40 per cent of Abu Mayaleh's merchandise -- estimated at thousands of dollars -- now has been destroyed. Piles of smashed pottery and broken glass are collected in cardboard boxes at the entrance to his shop, and a heap of damaged rosewood crosses are piled on the table, dirty with mud from the settlers' boots.
The settlers are from the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva, located in an Arab property across the road from Abu Mayaleh's shops. Ateret Cohanim is a Jewish group dedicated to establishing and consolidating a Jewish presence in the Old City -- a political aim spearheaded by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and dating back to 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the Old City, along with the rest of East Jerusalem.
Although relatively small and populated only by a handful of extremist messianic Jewish settler groups, the settlements in and around the Muslim Quarter of the Old City play a significant role in perpetuating and exacerbating the tensions in Arab East Jerusalem, and their presence are seen by the Palestinians as a major provocation.
The settlers are determined to expand their grip on the Old City and have governmental support, both in terms of legal "creativity" and financial backing, to help achieve this aim. They adopt a variety of tactics in order to take possession of the properties. They harass Palestinian owners and use more fraudulent, underhanded methods such as contracts signed illegally by secondary leaseholders.
The Israeli stranglehold on Palestinian residential expansion by severely limiting building and renovation licenses has further played into the hands of the settlers. Today, settlers have seized and occupied at least 78 Palestinian properties in the Old City, most of which are located adjacent to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Dome of the Rock). Ateret Cohanim, just one of the settler organisations, alone has over 30 properties in the Muslim Quarter.
In comparison to the settlers, who are backed politically by the prime minister of Israel and secure financial support from across the world, Abu Mayaleh believes he is simply a pawn in the ongoing political game, which has cast a crippling blight over the non-Jewish areas of the Old City, and is aimed at creating new de facto realities which will affect the outcome of the peace negotiations on the final status of Jerusalem to favour Israel.
With little other choice, Abu Mayaleh opens his shop each morning, waits for the increasingly elusive tourists. He laughs at the roadmap and Sharon's commitment to evacuate some "illegal" outposts.
"What kind of 'painful concession' is that?" he asked. "He is offering to dismantle a few caravans in the desert while the Jews are swallowing Jerusalem." He sipped his tea, picked up his prayer rug and concluded, "I pray to God to help me out of this situation. He alone can help me now."
