By JONATHAN COOK
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 [$500,000] 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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