Last update - 14:42 03/11/2005
Twilight Zone / The forbidden staircase
Residents of Anata are faced with a real conundrum: Part of their home lies in Jerusalem, while the remainder is in the territories. What to do?
By Gideon Levy
Sometimes the occupation can also be funny. But then it's the kind of laughter that brings tears to the eyes. For example, one could pay a visit to the neighborhood of Dahiyat as-Salam in East Jerusalem, literally "the neighborhood of peace," the new Anata, and laugh. Laugh the whole way. Laugh from the access road that leads to the home of Ayoub Elian, which is included within the boundaries of Jerusalem, although the house itself is considered a residence in the territories; laugh at the authorities' claim that Elian cannot live in his house because he is prohibited from driving on the very short road that leads to it; laugh at the staircase and half a porch that lie under Israeli sovereignty while the living room and bedroom are in the occupied territories; laugh at the residents who are arrested for being present illegally on the way to their local grocery store; laugh at the search and detention orders, signed by a judge in Israel, that were brandished by police officers who came in the middle of the night to people's homes and arrested about 100 men in their bedrooms - on the charge of being illegal residents; laugh at Israel's intention to very quietly evict hundreds of Palestinians from their homes - in a little mini-transfer - to satisfy some ridiculous bureaucratic whims that are somehow always directed solely at the Palestinians; laugh at the arnona (municipal tax) that residents have been paying the Jerusalem municipality for years for an abysmal return in services, at the same time that they are being expelled from the city on the pretext that they are not legal residents; laugh at the resident who wants to get to the municipal offices to take care of his payments and is prevented from getting there; laugh at the claims of the municipal spokesman that "illegal residents in the city who maintain the legality of their presence here can avail themselves of all avenues to prove their claim."
Ibrahim Elian, the head of the Anata council, sits in his office wearing a keffiyeh and necktie. He belongs to the disappearing generation of old-time Palestinian communal leaders whose place will soon be taken by retired young fighters. Residents come in and out. Anata, somewhere between a suburb and a bedroom community next to the capital, has a population of 17,000, and all the residents are considered residents of the territories. They carry green identity cards and have unrestricted mobility from their homes to their cars and back.
Next to the town, with clear, secure borders like those between Ramat Gan and Givatayim, where a street begins in one city and continues in another, lies Dahiyat as-Salam, "The Neighborhood of Peace," which was built in honor of the peace with Egypt. Built on the land of Anata, it is considered a Jerusalem neighborhood. So what's the problem? Well, if old Anata is the territories and "New Anata" is, according to the Israelis, Jerusalem, whoever doesn't have a blue Israeli identity card - which is most of the people in the new area - is legally prohibited from living there, regardless of who owns the homes. Let them take their inferior green identity cards and go find themselves a house in the territories. That's the story in a nutshell.
About 300 families from New Anata are paying arnona to the Jerusalem municipality. Most have at one time or another requested an Israeli identity card because of the location of their residence, and their requests were denied. Having no choice, they went on with their daily lives with the green identity card, either making their way around the checkpoints or just staying home. Until that horrific late summer night, the second to last night in August. The Border Policemen showed up at 2 A.M. Resident Ali Siha, 43, woke in a fright. They ordered him to get everyone out of the house. Then these upholders of the law handcuffed and blindfolded him. They shattered the windshields of his car. They also arrested his two sons. Siha was born in Anata and in 1970 moved to a house that he built on his own private land and has lived in this house ever since. Dahiyat as-Salam hadn't been built yet, but some residents were already building homes on their lands outside of Anata, completely legal houses with building permits from the Civil Administration.
They gathered all the men at the gas station at the edge of the neighborhood. There were about 100 men there in the middle of the night, all of them handcuffed and blindfolded. What was their crime? Why in the middle of the night? Why blindfold them? Why put painful plastic handcuffs on their wrists? No one asked - either in Israel or among the assembled crowd. Nor did anyone bother at first to explain to the stunned residents why they were being arrested.
They waited until the morning at the gas station, sitting handcuffed on the ground. What was the rush? The trucks arrived at six in the morning. About 30 "criminals" were loaded onto each one. One truck to the Neve Yaakov police station, one to the Russian Compound and one to the new Border Police base not far from the neighborhood. The interrogation began. What are you doing here if you have an identity card from the territories? "I don't know if it's my mistake or yours," replied a confused Siha. And tiler Sami Elian, a 51-year-old father of seven, said something similar: "I don't know if it's my problem or yours. You're the ones who came in 1967 and gave us Bethlehem identity cards. Then 10 years later, you came and changed them for Ramallah identity cards. Anata is two kilometers from Jerusalem. So whose mistake is it?"
"Be quiet, be quiet," the police officer replied, and just wanted the tiler to sign a statement in Hebrew, in which he was not fluent. Elian refused to sign. Others signed. "They told me that the state says that I'm in this place illegally. My house was actually built in 1974 and I showed the policemen the building permits I'd received for it from the Civil Administration." The interrogator: "That's not my business." The tiler: "Imagine someone telling you to move your house." At 1:30 in the afternoon, nearly 12 hours after they were rounded up, the tiler and his friends were transferred from the police station to the detention facility in the Russian Compound, where they were fingerprinted. At 4 in the afternoon, they were put back onto the trucks and returned to the checkpoint before Anata, where they were unloaded like a flock of sheep.
The search order is properly signed, of course, by a judge. The search is to be carried out in front of two witnesses who are not police officers, the order stipulates. The request was submitted by Commander Rami Saif. There are no names on the order, only addresses: Houses number 6472 and 6476. Where the report on the search is meant to list the "exhibits seized," there is only a blank line.
A neighborhood without a school or a clinic, caught between Pisgat Ze'ev and Anata. In the autumn sun, the houses of the Shuafat refugee camp are gray and the houses of Pisgat Ze'ev are white and the contrast couldn't be starker. The fence will pass through here soon, too. The spectacular valley that separates Jerusalem from Anata will be torn in half when the separation fence is built upon it. The lands of Anata once comprised about 36,000 dunams; after Pisgat Ze'ev was built, only 800 dunams were left. Now more will be eaten up, for the fence. "Give us a settlement so we can live there," mutters an old man passing by on the street.
The houses of Dahiyat as-Salam are nice-looking, well-tended stone houses of two or three stories, with olive trees in the yard. This is not where the most impoverished live. The midday quiet masks the tempest that has pummeled the people here. What will they do? About two weeks ago, a spokesperson for the Jerusalem municipality told Haaretz reporter Akiva Eldar, who had also written about the neighborhood's plight: "It's known that many residents of the territories seek to attain the personal status of being a resident of Jerusalem and of Israel. In recent years, we have seen many of them paying arnona taxes to the municipality out of a desire to attain Israeli residence. Illegal residents in the city, who maintain that their residence is actually legal, can use all avenues, including the legal one, to prove their claim and eligibility - certainly if they have been residing in the city for generations."
You go up the road that leads to Ayoub Elian's house - a few dozen paved meters in all. This is Jerusalem. The yard is a combination: "In the sun - Jerusalem; in the shade - the territories," the owner jokes. But the status of the steps is much clearer. A dozen innocent-looking stone steps with a dizzyingly grotesque reality behind them. Ayoub brings out the official sketch which shows very clearly: The border passes right by the edge of the steps. The steps are an inseparable part of Jerusalem, but the house to which they lead is an inseparable part of the occupied territories. When Ayoub goes up the steps to his house, he's going from Jerusalem to the territories.
But even if the problem of the steps is solved, the problem of the road will remain. (Ali Siha's house, across the way, is also divided: The porch is in the territories.) Ayoub was arrested even though his house is in the territories and is supposedly permissible for him to live in. He was arrested because the police reached the logical conclusion that one cannot go in or out of the house without going up the steps to get in, and so Ayoub was therefore trespassing on Israeli territory. That's how it is when you've reached the lowest of the low. "How do you get in the house, by plane?" the officer joked.
From the house across the way, the Border Police took the father and the sons, and from this house they took only the son. Mohammed Hamdan, 72, has a son with a blue identity card. The son was arrested. Why? Because he had an illegal resident - his elderly father - in his house. Why are you keeping illegals in your house, the police asked him. "But I'm staying with him, not the other way around," the son tried to argue, failing to appreciate the humanitarian gesture on the police's part in not .arresting his father.
Sami Elian's wife has a permit that allows her to enter Jerusalem from 7 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. In other words, she is permitted to stay in her home from 7 A.M. until 5 P.M. Law-abiding by day, criminal by night. Funny stuff. Sami's house is tiled with the finest Anata tiles in a polished, beautiful turquoise color, as befitting a man of his trade. But Sami is legally not allowed to step on this floor.
On the day he was arrested, Ali Siha had a one-time entry permit so his wife could receive medical treatment at Al-Muqassed hospital in East Jerusalem. One day only. As it turned out, Ali was in Jerusalem that day - but as a detainee, and by the time he got home, the permit had expired. He still carries permit number 7700655197 in his pocket, signed by Sergeant Meli Cohen of the permit department, just in case it might do him any good one day. He brought in a medical certificate a week before the scheduled tests. He made two trips to the offices of the Civil Administration in Beit El and waited there a whole day each time to try to be able to take his wife to the hospital - which is just 10 minutes from his house. That's how it is. Maybe he'll try again. They'll ask him to bring some other document and then he'll have to wait another week.
A neighbor, Yusuf Hamdan, received a bill from the Jerusalem municipality for arnona and water. He went to the checkpoint and showed the Border Police officers the bill, but it didn't interest them. No entry permit, no arnona payment. The accrued late fees are already adding up. His brother, Ahmed Hamdan, would also like to get some clarification of his bill. To do so, Ahmed must go to Beit El with the bill, come back to Beit El a week later and hope to be issued a one-time entry permit for Jerusalem, then go there to the municipality offices - assuming there is no closure that day. There is no Israeli post office branch in Anata at which the arnona could be paid. "It costs a lot of money to build a clinic, but what about a post office branch so we could pay the arnona? Or the phone bill? All you need is a desk and a chair."
Meanwhile, they either sneak into town, or don't pay. "Paying them money is hard, too." Ahmed Hamdan's water bill has already reached NIS 20,484. "If you do not abide by my request, I shall be authorized to seize and sell your property," wrote Yoav Golan, the collection official. Reception hours are every day from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.