Among Palestinians, Fear Spreads That Israel Will Raze More Homes

Since the day the bulldozers came, ripping apart the houses of Talal and Ayda Arrar and four other families, a new, cold fear has gripped their neighbors on the edge of the Shuafat refugee camp: Will they be the next to lose their homes?

But Talal Arrar, whose family managed to stay in their small, six-room dwelling only five days, is no longer afraid. “They have taken my home and my hope,” Arrar, 46, said of the Israeli police and building officials who left his family to live in a donated tent. “What else can they do to me?”

In the last six weeks, Israel has destroyed about 50 Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the traditionally Arab side of the city. Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups say the stepped-up campaign against illegal Palestinian construction stems from Israeli anger and frustration in the aftermath of twin suicide bombings July 30 in Jerusalem.

Now, as Israel reels from a second deadly attack in the heart of Jerusalem, human rights activists say it is unclear whether the Israeli government will continue the demolitions. But some observers fear that after the Sept. 4 bombings--which killed eight people, including the three assailants, and wounded 192 others--Israel’s actions against illegal Palestinian building will only intensify.

“Israel feels it has a free hand after every terrorist attack,” Harriet Lewis, a leader of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said recently. “We’re very worried about what may happen as a result.”

The demolitions are part of a long-standing policy by Israel to limit Arab building in areas under its control. The practice had slowed in recent months, however, with the peace process near collapse and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing international criticism for its policy of expanding Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land.

Last spring, senior Israeli security officials warned the government that razing Palestinian homes at a time of heightened tensions could provoke a violent response. But the recent attacks, which killed 20 people in addition to the five suicide bombers, have allowed Israel to resume the home demolitions, said Daniel Seidemann, an attorney with the group Ir Shalem, affiliated with Peace Now.

“With the sympathy generated by the bombing, the government is of the opinion that it can do with impunity today what it hasn’t been able to do in the past,” Seidemann said. “Much of the Israeli public is behind it too.”

Impetus of Attack

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli civil administration in the Palestinian territories, acknowledges that the home demolitions did slow in the first half of the year but picked up again after the July bombings.

“We had delayed [demolitions] to try to give some chance to the negotiations between us and the Palestinians and to try to stop tensions between us,” Dror said. But after the July attack, “everything changed,” he added. “All the reasons we had before did not exist anymore.”

The demolitions are part of the wider struggle over land, particularly in Jerusalem, that is at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian Authority of President Yasser Arafat encourages Palestinians to build, legally or otherwise, in the battle to raise Arab population figures before negotiators from both sides consider the fate of Jerusalem. Israel is fighting just as hard to encourage Jewish construction and to restrict building by Arabs.

But the victims of both sets of policies and, often, of their own desperate naivete are usually people like Talal Arrar, his wife and seven children. The Palestinian laborer, who has worked construction in Israel for 30 years, scrimped and saved until, on May 10, he could buy a small piece of land on the camp’s eastern edge. Arrar knew that the site, on a trash-strewn slope above a valley, was not zoned for building. But the seller assuaged his fears, pointing to other houses going up nearby. The Israelis could never knock them all down, he said.

The family sold Ayda’s few pieces of gold jewelry, borrowed $10,000 and began construction almost immediately, eager to move as soon as possible from the single room they had rented for the previous year. Ayda complained that with so many people, the small space was impossible to keep clean. And at night, “we were on top of each other like sardines,” Talal said.

On Aug. 9, they moved in. They reveled--briefly--in their new home with its washing machine, tables and a white-painted cabinet they had splurged on. And they tried to ignore the garbage and the fetid odor that cloaked their hillside from an open sewage pipe 20 yards away.

Then, on Aug. 12, workers from the Jerusalem municipality posted a notice in Hebrew on the Arrars’ building and those of several others on the far side of the camp. Fearing the worst, the couple took the order to a Palestinian office in East Jerusalem, where an official told them they had 72 hours to appeal before their house would be demolished.

But a convoy of jeeps, trucks and bulldozers arrived at 9 the next morning and quickly reduced the Arrars’ house and four others to piles of broken concrete and twisted steel. Ayda Arrar said the workers let the family and several neighbors inside his house to grab bedding and a few clothes; inexplicably, they would not let them retrieve the children’s birth certificates or school documents.

Finally, to make room for the bulldozer, the workers smashed the window of the Arrars’ car and damaged its hand brake as they pushed it out of the way. The car is now illegal to drive.

City Points to Risk

A city spokeswoman said she could not comment on specifics of the Arrar case but noted that the deadline on their order was 24 hours after notification, not 72. “Perhaps they didn’t understand the Hebrew,” said the spokeswoman, Johanne Malka. “But if they take it upon themselves to build illegally, then they know they are risking demolition.”

Still, if the family had managed to live in the house for 30 days instead of five, she said, the city could not have destroyed it.

Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert has described illegal Arab building as a “cancer” that threatens Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War. Olmert, a right-wing politician often considered a potential rival to Netanyahu, says he favors intense enforcement of laws prohibiting unauthorized construction in the city, on either its traditionally Arab east side or its mainly Jewish west side.

But in reality, Israel has long sought to consolidate its hold on East Jerusalem by expropriating mostly Arab-owned land, confiscating identification documents, demolishing structures whose owners did not have building permits and restricting the ability of many Palestinians to obtain such permits.

The actions are closely linked, Palestinian rights groups say. Illegal construction is booming, for instance, throughout the Shuafat camp as the result of a flood of newcomers--West Bank residents worried that they will lose their Jerusalem ID cards if they do not live in the city. The refugee camp lies within the city limits.

The Arrars, along with many others, admit that they did not even try to make their construction legal. They knew the quest would be impossible; anything east of a dirt road that runs along the top of their hill is outside the camp’s designated housing area. They also felt an odd, now clearly misguided, sense of security, they say, stemming from the knowledge that most people, Arab or Israeli, would not want to live where they did, amid garbage and sewage. The only ones who made homes there were those who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere.

But that unpleasantness, in the end, did not protect them or their house, Talal Arrar said. “The Israelis won’t even let us live beside the sewage,” he said bitterly, his face a mask of fatigue and worry.

Shelter, but No Food

Now, the family members, with children ranging from 6 months to 13 years, sleep in a sweltering tent donated by an aid agency. They have a few foam pads and other belongings from their house. Neighbors, fearful that they may soon face the same fate, have provided cots and blankets.

But the Arrars have little food and nowhere to cook or bathe. Neighbors such as Majida Natsche, 32, say they would like to help but cannot afford to feed nine extra people for long. And they have their own worries. “We are living images of the dead,” said Majida’s husband, Muhsen. “When I hear the sound of bulldozers, I wake up scared that they will destroy my house while we are sleeping.”

Another neighbor, fearful and angry, said Israel’s actions will backfire, providing it with less, not more, security--provoking other Palestinians to launch suicide attacks. “They wonder why Palestinians blow themselves up,” said the father of six. “If they knock down my house, and I look in the eyes of my children, I would feel like throwing myself on tons of explosives. If they take your house, what do they leave you?”

Some, with almost as much anger as they have against Israel, blame Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for the plight of the Arrars and others. The Palestinian government “told us it was OK to build here,” said Raya Amleh, 37. “We have our president. Why doesn’t he protect us?”

But Talal Arrar dismissed such talk. Leaning against a broken slab that once formed a wall of his living room, he said: “We built because we didn’t have enough room. We have kids. We didn’t think of the political situation. We just want to live. We have seven kids; we wanted a roof for them.”

Miriam Ash and Saida Hamad of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.