Israel expels Palestinians based on archaeology claims, building rules : NPR

EAST JERUSALEM — Fakhri Abu Diab, 62, has lived on the same property in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan all his life. But he doesn’t know how much longer he will be able to stay.

In the courtyard, there are geese in a pen — and a massive mound of rubble. Two years ago, Israeli authorities demolished the house, saying it lacked proper building permits.

It was his mother’s house, the home where Abu Diab was born and grew up. While its original structure predated Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem on land captured from Jordan in 1967, Abu Diab later added rooms to accommodate his growing family. Those additions were considered illegal by the Jerusalem municipality. Residents and human rights groups say it is difficult or impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits in the area, leading them to build without permits.

Abu Diab is an activist in Silwan fighting to preserve the neighborhood against the demolitions that have been going on for nearly two decades. When NPR interviewed him in 2021, he was still living in his family’s home. Now that it’s demolished, he and his wife are living in a small trailer he set up in a corner of the courtyard. He says he has received a new eviction notice from the Jerusalem municipality.

“I want to be close to my memories, to my home, and they said it’s not allowed,” he says. “Why? Because they want to take our land and make cars parking and gardens for the settlers. You know they have a political agenda and they [do] not want us here.”

Hundreds of Palestinians like Abu Diab are being pushed out of Silwan by Israeli authorities to make way for Israeli settlers, as well as Jewish religious and archaeological sites, on this prized land just south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, according to residents and human rights advocates. Amid the piles of demolition rubble, new settler homes have sprouted.

This is a flashpoint in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United Nations’ International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion that Israel unlawfully occupies East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel denies this — it considers East Jerusalem part of the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. Palestinians want part of the city for their hoped-for independent state.

A cause of pain

Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, an Israeli peace activist, points out settler houses along the way down a hill in Silwan. Homes and gardens sit behind protective walls and gates with barbed wire. Israeli flags fly above.

“You see the surveillance cameras? Look, they live the fine life. Everything is very well tended. There is lots of water used, lots of gardening,” says Godfrey-Goldstein, who co-runs Jahalin Solidarity, a nonprofit group trying to prevent forcible demolitions in the Palestinian territories.

She says what’s going on here is a “horrible, sinister cause of pain” for many people driven out of their homes.

The process of transforming this area where many Palestinian families have lived for generations into a Jewish neighborhood has accelerated under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which includes two cabinet ministers who are settlers themselves.

Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem et U.N. human rights experts say Israeli actions to force increasing numbers of Palestinian families out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank amount to ethnic cleansing. Human rights advocates say this has expanded since Israel’s wars in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon have drawn away much of the world’s attention.

Arieh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem who is also a leader in the Israeli settler movement, rejects the accusation.

“The antisemitic organizations in Israel and abroad would not raise claims of ethnic cleansing if a Christian family in the Netherlands were evicting, through a Dutch court order, a family of Syrian migrants who had occupied their property in Amsterdam. It is time for this antisemitic hypocrisy to disappear from public discourse,” he told NPR.

He alleges that Palestinians, whom he calls “Arab squatters,” were living in homes purchased by Jews during the British Mandate of Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem when it conquered territory from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. In 1980, the Israeli parliament passed a law declaring a unified Jerusalem as the nation’s capital. The annexation is not recognized by most countries.

Israel is accused of expelling the neighborhood

B’Tselem says home demolitions are ramping up especially in Silwan, home to 20,000 Palestinians, where the group accuses Israel of trying to expel “an entire neighborhood.”

Just in the al-Bustan area of Silwan, where Abu Diab lives, 48 homes have been demolished since 2023, according to B’Tselem. It says 1,450 people there now face expulsion.

Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem’s international outreach director, says the “Judaization” of Silwan is being done with a “very dubious, discriminatory and rigged legal system.”

“This is what enables settlers to remove a huge number of Palestinian families,” she says. “They say the Palestinians built their homes illegally.”

Michaeli says the settler associations are fully supported by the Israeli government. They use various administrative tools to oust Palestinians — drawn-out court proceedings, zoning regulations and restrictions on building anything so much as even a chicken coop.

Archaeology digs in

Another tool advocates point to is archaeology.

Yonatan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist who monitors the settlements with the advocacy group Peace Now, says Israel uses evidence of a historical Jewish presence in East Jerusalem to justify settlers moving in today.

“It’s a way for settlers to claim the land where our so-called ancestors lived, and to say God actually promised it to us,” he says. “A kind of making the biblical stories true, through physical evidence.”

There’s an excavation site in what’s known as the City of David National Park, named for the biblical king who ruled some 3,000 years ago. Mizrachi says archaeologists have been digging there since the 1800s.

“There are multiple layers of civilization here that help explain the history of Jerusalem, but there is also manipulation going on as the settlers who manage the site push a specific Jewish narrative,” he says.

Mizrachi sees a multicultural, pluralistic history of Jerusalem.

“This is Jerusalem, where Canaanites established. Jerusalem where different peoples and nations lived. There are archaeological finds from different periods, from different cultures,” he says. “This is the story of Israel-Palestine, people came and went. So you have everything everywhere.”

Jewish school children swarm in and out of the entrance to the City of David. The visit offers a tour of the excavation site and other biblically themed exhibits like the Pool of Siloam and Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Across from the ticket booth, tea tables are set up under the shade of olive trees in what is known as The King’s Garden.

A plaque on the wall of the tea area dated October 2020 and signed by then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, during President Trump’s first administration.

The plaque states the City of David site brings to life biblical Jerusalem at “the very place where the kings and the prophets of the bible walked” and proclaims that “the spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem.” It concludes, “The City of David serves as a proud reminder of the glorious heritage of the United States of America.”

Sarah Kaplan, an Orthodox Jewish woman walking by the entrance to the biblical park and archaeological dig with her husband and seven children, says the sites are very important.

“Today there are all kinds of voices that undermine the connection, the belonging of the Jewish people to the land of Israel in general, and to Jerusalem in particular,” she says. “But these artifacts found here prove the children of Israel entered the land of Israel and conquered it thousands of years ago. You can’t argue with science.”

“I can do nothing. We have complained to the whole world” 

Not 100 yards from The King’s Garden, 60-year-old Omar Abu Rajab closes up his sheep pen. He walks up to the second floor of his small home, which is now lopped off and open to the sky.

He has been given two months to leave his home before it must be entirely demolished. Like many here, Abu Rajab can’t afford to pay the bulldozer fee, so he’s tearing it down with his own hands.

He left part of the upstairs wall standing for now, so children won’t fall off the second floor, he says. And he covered its jagged edge in carpets.

“My heart is broken. It is extremely hard,” he says. “But I can do nothing. We have complained to the whole world. To everybody it’s like a film. It’s we who suffer.”

Suddenly, the Muslim call to prayer rings out over Silwan, led by Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. It’s in a compound in Jerusalem that’s one of the holiest sites for both Muslims and Jews.

Abu Rajab says he has nowhere else to go. And if he has to he will live with his sheep in the pen.

“Silwan is heaven on Earth,” he says, “I will never leave it.”

New eviction orders have been issued targeting seven apartments where more than 50 people from one extended family live, including many children. They have until the end of the month to evacuate, before their homes will also be demolished.

Itay Stern contributed reporting for this story.