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Sarah Kaminker and Daoud Kuttab set up a nongovernmental organization called the Jerusalem Information Center; it would make information available about the situation in East Jerusalem. My role in this center was primarily to help organize and guide, together with a Palestinian guide, trips through East and West Jerusalem to show groups of journalists, consular workers, and others the comparative conditions in the Jewish and Arab parts of the city. I remembered from one of our dialogues in Jabel Mukabber that Jamil had said there were people in the village living in caves. I asked him if this was really true, and he said he would take us to see them. We drove down to the Kidron Valley to the subneighborhood of Sall’a, which, like the rest of Jabel Mukabber, is part of the Sawahre al-Gharbiyye village. There, we met Samih, who spoke perfect Hebrew, owned a garage, and taught automotive mechanics in a vocational school. He showed us the beautiful stone house that his family had built before 1967. Sawahre, like many Arab villages in East Jerusalem, had no sewage system. Each house had its own cesspool. The bordering Jewish neighborhoods did have sewage systems, and in order to expand their systems a pipelinewaslaidthroughSawahretotaketheJewishsewagetotheKidron Valley, where it was dumped untreated between the last Arab houses of the village and into the valley. The pipeline ran beside the foundations of Samih’shouse,whichhadbeguntosag.Samih’sengineersaidthecitywas responsible,buttheauthoritiesdeniedit.Helackedthefundstoenterinto a long lawsuit with the city. The city engineers condemned the house as unsafe, so Samih’s family had to find a new place to live. Fortunately, they owned some private land close by. Unfortunately, the city had never given out a single building permit for residents of Sawahre. So Samih began to build without a permit on his own land, resulting in the city inspectors Jerusalem Information Center 205 206 A zionist among palestinians issuing a stop-work injunction. He showed us the single wall he had put up before he was forced to stop. Next to the sagging house were two large caves, which Samih’s elderly parents had converted into their home, with doors affixed and a kitchen and furniture. It was startling to see that in this modern, “united” city, people were literally living in caves, even though they owned land in a sparsely populated valley. We asked Samih if we could bring the press to see this. He said that he knew that he would get into trouble for it, but he agreed. On our next tour we brought a busload of journalists to see the caves. They were shocked to hear the story. Israeli television was doing a special show on Jerusalem and included the caves in its story. Cave dwelling is not common in Jerusalem, but this was certainly not the only case, and it illustrated, by being so extreme, what was happening to Arab housing needs throughout their neighborhoods and villages in “united” Jerusalem. After several tours had visited the caves, Samih’s parents decided that they were being treated like monkeys in a zoo. This was their home, and they wouldn’t have any more people coming around to stare at them. But before that happened, the municipality decided that this publicity was undesirable. They warned Samih. They sent him a bill for municipal property tax to be paid for residing in the caves. One morning, Samih called me to say that his garage had been broken into and all the tools had been stolen from it. Ordinarily, thieves would sell the tools far away, but Samih was told that the thieves were selling them right in his own village. The significance was clear. They were collaborators who had been sent by the authorities to force Samih to stop working with our center. The Sall’a neighborhood concentrated many problems into one small area. Since no one could ever get a building license, many people built illegally on their privately owned land, so there were lots of destroyed houses and lots of homes threatened with demolition. We located several families with large numbers of children (birth control seemed to be unused, especially in the poorer and Muslim families) who were forbidden to expand their tiny homes, and who were willing to be visited by our groups. In poor Arab homes, there is always a niche piled high with mattresses that are spread out at night, completely filling the floor space. [3.21.231.245] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 02:45...

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