Zuhair Rajabi is not packing.

Late last month, Rajabi, who describes himself as “the spokesperson” of the Batn al-Hawa section of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, received an eviction notice ordering him to vacate his home. Several neighbors were also told they would need to leave.

His home, where he has lived all his life, was built by his father in the early 1960s, when the area was still part of Jordan. Eventually, he and his six brothers inherited the property.

“The whole family is 52 people,” he told The Times of Israel, sitting in his living room, which showed no sign of the pending eviction order. “Some of my brothers have found apartments — three or four — I still haven’t.”

Rajabi said he has no intention of leaving the home voluntarily. In response, authorities told him that they would arrive sometime after Passover to remove him by force.

Despite the attempt to project a sense of normalcy, the pending action casts a heavy shadow over Rajabi and the three children who live with him.

“They asked me, what will we do,” he related. “I told them, ‘What will we do? We’ll do what everyone in the neighborhood does — in the end they will evict us against our will.'”

For a decade, Rajabi has helped serve as the public face for the neighborhood as his family and dozens of others have fought legal battle after legal battle against claims by a far-right Israeli group that the land on which their homes sit was owned by Jews forced out a century ago.

In recent weeks, a series of rulings by the High Court of Justice in favor of the Jewish claimants have triggered one of the largest evictions of families from East Jerusalem ever. At the end of March, 15 families were evicted — 11 by force — from their homes, and seven more, including Rajabi’s, are expected to be evicted in the coming weeks.

Cases against dozens of additional families are still making their way through various levels of the courts, but are expected to mirror previous rulings forcing the Palestinians to leave.

“Today they evict your neighbor, tomorrow they evict you,” Rajabi said. “Today they remove your cousins, tomorrow they remove you. There’s nothing you can do.”

History of dispossession

The eviction proceedings were initiated by the right-wing Ateret Cohanim organization, which filed a petition in 2010 seeking ownership of the land on which the families reside. In total, according to Peace Now, a left-wing organization, 37 families, amounting to hundreds of people, have been displaced from the neighborhood since the first eviction was ordered in 2015.

Ateret Cohanim did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Times of Israel.

The organization, established in 1981, works “to restore Jewish life in the heart of ancient Jerusalem,” according to its website. Much of its activities involve purchasing homes in Arab-majority parts of Jerusalem, where it then houses Jewish families, often under armed guard.

In the early 2000s, Ateret Cohanim quietly petitioned the state registrar to be named as trustee over lands in Silwan that had once belonged to a public endowment known as the Benvenisti Trust.

The Benvenisti Trust was established in the late 19th century to house poor Jews of Yemeni origin who had arrived in the country but were unable to find housing within the walls of the Old City. Instead, the trust purchased land for them in Silwan, a neighborhood just south of the Old City that slopes down toward the meeting point of the Kidron and Ben Hinnom valleys.

Even then, Silwan was an Arab neighborhood, and Jews were a minority there. Jewish and Arab residents lived in relative quiet until the 1921 riots, which saw violence........

© The Times of Israel