Anger soars with demolition of popular East Jerusalem eatery

This article originally appeared at The Media Line.

Last Friday evening, those Jerusalem families looking for a tasty, low-key night out found, instead of the homey and simply named Seafood Restaurant of Beit Safafa, a south Jerusalem neighborhood straddling the Green Line [the demarcation line between pre- and post-1967 war], found, instead of the eatery, a pile of rubble.

Word quickly spread. “There’s been another demolition,” announced numerous media WhatsApp groups. Only this time, it was different.

To begin with, it is rare that a business would be demolished. Based on its own monitoring and information collected from the Israeli Ministry of Interior, the Jerusalem Municipality, the Civil Administration, UN bodies and agencies and Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) estimates that about “48,038 Palestinian structures have been demolished…since 1967.”

The vast majority are illegally built private homes.

Arab residents of Jerusalem argue that it is almost impossible for them to receive building permits.

Data that Jerusalem City Councilor Laura Wharton provided to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz shows that in the year 2014, 188 of the 3,238 building permits issued in Jerusalem were granted to Arab neighborhoods.

Over the past five years, only 878 permits out of 11,603 building permits issued in Jerusalem were for construction in Palestinian Arab neighborhoods.

Under the administration of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, who came into office seven years ago promising to regularize the state of building in east Jerusalem, the situation has, in fact, only worsened. Until 2010, an average of 400 housing units were approved annually for eastern Jerusalem. In the past five years, that figure has gone down to an average of 200 permits, according to Wharton’s data, which was provided to her by the NGO Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights based on municipal information.

But it is even worse: of the 158 permits issued to Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem during 2015, more than two-thirds went to Beit Hanina, a leafy, affluent neighborhood in the north of the city whereas only 51 permits were issued for the rest of Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods.

But Beit Safafa is no less prosperous or bourgeois.  On Sunday morning, residents milling about the wreck of the Seafood Restaurant, a well-appointed establishment popular among Arabs and Jews, among them the Mayor’s mother, Shula Barkat, could not recall the last time a building had been demolished in their neighborhood of about 8,000 people. Was it four years ago? No one could remember.

The Seafood Restaurant employs about 25 people, who have now been home, not working, for four days. Muhammad Khattab, 23, the owner of the land the restaurant is on, described how on Friday at 6 AM, “with no warning, no permit” men driving municipal bulldozers turned up at his house, knocked and informed him they were about to tear part of the restaurant down.

Showing The Media Line around the dusty wreckage, Khattab described demanding repeatedly to see a warrant and then asking for permission to demolish himself what he referred to as “the pergola.”

Jerusalem restaurants, like most structures in town, are built for the summer months, with breezy poorly fitted windows and thin walls, and, very often, large outdoor areas where patrons can smoke and enjoy warm breezes while dining. The problem posed by the cold, briskly windy, sometimes freezing, few months of winter is often resolved by the construction of temporary structures that serve as patio enclosures before being put away with a sigh of relief in early March. Downtown Jerusalem is dotted with such temporary structures, everything from elaborate tents to flimsily walled-in terraces. One new and popular restaurant, the Hungarian Igen-Migen, is in its entirety one such fragilely constructed patio.

Imad Bourkan, who was busy clearing up the rubble, his hands caked with white dust, and who identified himself to The Media Line as a manager of the restaurant, said that his material losses stood at about 300,000 shekels, or about $76, 420. He referred to the part of the restaurant that had been torn down as the “winter enclosure” but showed extensive damage also in the patio itself and in the structure of the restaurant’s building, that has stood for 18 years and been serving food for about five. The enclosure had been up for two months or so, since temperatures started dipping in the evenings.

Ruth Edmonds, ICAHD’s Acting Director, asked, “Do you know how many examples we have of this — when they say the third floor is illegal but they demolish the whole thing?” Speaking to The Media Line, she said “I’m sorry to say there are so many examples of this. Sometimes the building next door is demolished.”

A few hours after the visit to Beit Safafa, a man named Fadi Sublaban got in touch. He too, identified himself as a manager of the Seafood Restaurant. “Of course it was illegal!” he said, explaining to The Media Line that no, he had no interest in sharing his lawyer’s telephone number. “But they still had to give us a warning before tearing it down. You can’t do it like this!”

His plan, he explained, had been to build the enclosure more or less according to code and then, once caught, retroactively negotiate a permit and “legalize the thing.”

“Brigands,” muttered a middle-aged man from Beit Safafa, who declined to identify himself, commenting on the change of tone.

“These guys from east Jerusalem are just awful. They don’t respect the law.”

Aren’t these people your neighbors? The Media Line asked.

“No. They just have the restaurant here. These guys are from Silwan,” he said, to general agreement from the small gathering crowd of men. He word ‘Silwan’ was uttered with marked disapproval.

Silwan is not establishment Beit Safafa. Adjacent to the Old City, sunk into a poorly drained valley, Silwan is a poor, gritty neighborhood beset by poverty and commonly the site of violent outbursts between Palestinian and Israeli residents. It is, to the denizens of Beit Safafa, far from who they are.

City Hall finally weighed in. In an email to The Media Line, the Jerusalem’s municipal spokesperson said, “This lightweight construction, occupying an area of approximately 110 square meters, built without a permit, without the supervision of an engineer and without regard for safety, was built on land intended for housing in the first place.”

“The offense was detected before the completion of construction and the demolition was carried out last week. Jerusalem’s Municipality will continue to ensure uncompromising compliance with the law and the safety of residents and visitors,” the statement concluded, bringing to an end the story of a non-demolition demolition in a city in which both unjust demolitions and brigands attempting to take advantage of the chaos created by that reality exist more or less peaceably side-by-side.