Nazati and Taghrite are one family of thirty-eight that have been battling plans to destroytheir homes in the al Ram area, between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The residential area in which they live lies just outside of the al Ram municipal borders, andonly 300 meters from the nearest illegal Jewish settlement Adam.
More than five hundred people live in this older residential area, but every family who built ahome after the Oslo Accord was signed in 1993 has received demolition orders.
Every family now awaits the destruction of their homes with increasing dread as furtherIsraeli redeployment seems a distant possibility.
The best any of them can hope for is to be included in the next phase of redeployment, which maymean the salvation of their homes.
Their story:
Nazati and Taghrite lived in Jerusalem’s Old City with their five children in a tiny one-roomapartment until 1993. They decided to buy land in al Ram, where the prices were good (Israelilaw prohibits non-Jews from buying land in Jerusalem and inside Israel).
They built a four-room home, about 130 meters square, and put 45,000 Jordanian dinars($58,500 US) of their savings into its construction.
They completed the required engineer’s survey and provided land ownership documents toapply for a building permit from the Israeli military authorities for the West Bank.
Because they moved into an older residential area where many people already live, they feltconfident that they would receive the required permit to build. In 1994 they received anegative response to their request from the Israeli military authorities.
The response stated that their home lay in an “agricultural area” according to the archaic andnever-updated planning regulations called RJ-5, instituted by the British some 55 yearsago.
On this basis theirs, and 38 other homes built after the Oslo Accord, were given housedemolition orders on or after June 1994. The political basis of these orders is clear: thisarea lies just outside the al Ram municipal limits (according to RJ-5) but in what is clearly aresidential area.
The nearby illegal settlement of Adam ALSO lies in an agricultural area (according to RJ-5)but this settlement was not only established on the agricultural lands of al Ram, but alsocontinues to expand. Adam, incidentally, was established on the most fertile lands of thisarea.
In March of 1995, this family appealed to the Israeli High Court against the demolition, andpetitioned the Court to include their area in the municipality of al Ram.
The court decided to delay the demolition until it heard the case on the town plan. They have notyet heard the case, but since the original petition in March 1995 the Interim Agreement (orOslo II) was signed in September, and this area fell into the still fully-occupied 70% of theWest Bank called Area C.
This sealed the fate of these 38 homes. The policy of house demolitions since the signing of theInterim Agreement has taken on overtly political overtones. House demolitions are nowfocused in areas near Jewish settlements, settler by-pass roads, military installationsand the Green Line – all areas over which the Israeli government seeks to maintain permanentcontrol even after the final status negotiations.
These families now live in fear. Thirteen homes of the 38 have been destroyed since September1995, six in 1998 alone.
Now settler by-pass road number 45 will run close to this neighborhood, putting more homes atrisk. While the High Court has not yet heard the Zarrou case for expanding al Ram’s town limits,it appears that the court’s decision will depend on the political outcome of the scope of theredeployment from the West Bank.
The best that this neighborhood can hope for is to be included in the next redeployment, a slimhope indeed given their proximity to the settlement and the construction of the bypass road.