Palestine Monitor , December 1, 2010

Ajami is a predominantly Arab district of Jaffa, housing around 8,000 Palestinian Israelis. In May 2009, a plot of land on Etrog Street, hosting the local farmers’ market, was sold by the Israel Land Authority to B’emunah, a housing company that deals mainly in developing housing estates for Zionist communities in Israel.

Written by Sophie Crowe.

The land, originally Palestinian, was deemed "absentee property" by the state after most Arabs fled the city in 1948, and eventually became public land.

Tensions have been raised further by the plans of a Zionist learning centre (Yeshiva) in Ajami, combining military service with Torah study. Its students are mostly West Bank settlers, who stay for a two month stretch. Its Rabbi is accused of racism by Arab residents.

B’emunah and the yeshiva are now believed to be seeking to buy several hundred apartments together in the area. The purchase of the Etrog plot is understood to be a continuation of the Yeshiva and is funded by American donors.

28 residents initiated a petition to protest the sale of this land to B’emunah, challenging the legitimacy of selling state land to an organisation intending to only provide housing for members of a nationalist religious community. The petition was supported by Darna, the committee for housing rights in Jaffa, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). The group brought a case to the Tel Aviv court.

The court rejected the case, and the group took it to the Supreme Court, which declared it would not invalidate the sale as B’emunah had already paid the ILA in full. However, the court forbade the ILA to sell to a company such as B’emunah again, a decision which has courted controversy for its mixed moral message.

B’emunah’s plans are emblematic of a wider problem; the marginalisation and expulsion of Arabs from the mixed cities of Israel, mirroring the settler movement in the West Bank. "B’emunah’s business is ideologically motivated", says Sami Shehada, head of Darna. "They focus on the mixed cities, for which they believe separation is the solution. B’emunah’s activities are merely representative of the branches of the Zionist movement, in their racist and exclusivist principles."

The Ajami community fears that Zionist Jews are not interested in co-existence with Arabs, and that they want to establish Jewish dominance in these areas at their expense.

City council member, Omar Siksik, represents the Arab list of Jaffa and has spoken out against the B’emunah development. "We in Jaffa are living in a sea of problems," he says, "of which B’emunah is just one…Since the advent of the state of Israel, Jaffa residents have dealt with an influx of Jews. The difference now is that we are dealing with extremists whose coming here is a provocation. Their objectives are clear; they are hostile to Arabs, which throws suspicion onto their arrival here."

"There is an element of public policy that wants to create a situation in which Arabs will move out. The extremists know they have the support of the government. There has been no objection to B’emunah in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city council, where the attitude is that it’s a free country and the transaction was carried out lawfully."

The fear is that Jaffa will become the new Hebron, should the encroachment of Ajami by religious ideologues spell the start of fresh tensions between both communities. "The atmosphere in the country is changing all the time, becoming more extreme," Omar says. "Arabs, as a small minority in Israel, have less power to resist this trend."

Learn more from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) http://www.acri.org.il/eng/