Name: Settlers are taking over East Jerusalem one house at a time
Uploaded: 2024-06-12T16:32:50.000Z
Duration: 9 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This girl is telling me about a moment when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, which she's But the casual nature with which this little girl is telling me this story is a clue that this isn't your typical apartment complex.

I'm in East Jerusalem, in a Palestinian neighborhood, but I'm in a compound called Maale HaZeitim, where a number of Jewish families live surrounded by fortified walls and private security.

This girl's school bus has bulletproof glass.

I got into this compound to ask them why they're living here.

One component of this building, these buildings, these six buildings, is that they are a physical structure in Eastern Jerusalem with a flag on top that says the Jews are here, Israel is here.

She is one of about 2,600 hardline religious Jews who buy up homes from Palestinian families in Palestinian neighborhoods, often clandestinely and with huge sums of money from international donors.

I visited some of these families to better understand the motivations at play here, and to see what life is like at the ideological epicenter of this conflict.

In 1948, the newly declared state of Israel was fighting a war with its Arab neighbors.

That war ended with a ceasefire line called the Green Line.

If you zoom into the Green Line, you'll see that it goes right through Jerusalem, with Israel controlling the west and Jordan controlling the east.

And Jerusalem's old city, which is this tiny piece of land where Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have holy sites, was right on the Green Line, but it was on the east side, controlled by Jordan.

And during that time, Jews were not permitted to visit the Western Wall, which is the holiest site in Judaism.

Then in 1967, Israel seized control of the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Israel then pulled a highly controversial move.

They declared that the eastern part of Jerusalem, as well as 27 Palestinian villages surrounding it, were now a part of Israel.

They erased the Green Line that separated the city and drew a new municipal border, announcing that it was now Unified Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.

But in reality, the city remained completely divided.

The Palestinians in the east didn't want to be a part of this new country that they had just been annexed into.

So in order to cement their claim and establish a Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem, Israel built 12 huge neighborhood blocks adjacent to Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, while simultaneously creating policies that limited Palestinian urban development in the east.

The world saw this as illegal and refused to recognize Israel's new definition of Jerusalem.

But that didn't stop Israel from building these neighborhoods.

But there's a difference between the 200,000 Israelis that are living in these 12 big neighborhood blocks and the Israelis who buy up individual properties in Palestinian neighborhoods.

The big neighborhoods serve as a way to establish a large Jewish presence in East Jerusalem.

It's part of a political strategy to claim large sections of land, preventing any future division of the city.

But the Israelis that are buying individual Palestinian homes have a mission that is different.

Their objective is based more on the biblical significance of tiny pieces of land throughout the city.

The settlers of East Jerusalem have a thermal map.

Not everything glows with the same intensity.

They settle areas that resonate with biblical history and have a proximity to the Temple Mount or at the very least are within the visual basin of the Temple Mount.

There are two right-wing organizations that are dedicated to this aggressive settlement project.

They have targeted a handful of spots in the city that they want to occupy but that are in Palestinian neighborhoods.

These organizations raise large amounts of money from international donors and they use this money to buy properties from Palestinians for a price that is well above market value.

The settlers are perseverant and they will spend years chipping away to try and get one property.

Once they've secured a property, they will move a Jewish family in, sometimes under the cover of night and escorted by soldiers.

The families are then protected by 24-hour private security that is provided by the Israeli government, costing about $25 million per year to the Israeli taxpayers for these 2,600 Israelis living in Palestinian neighborhoods.

Needless to say, Palestinian neighbors are not thrilled about these secret, militarized move-ins into their neighborhoods.

I spent a Friday evening with several of these people to better understand their motives.

We walked up from one compound up the Mount of Olives to another compound for Sabbath prayers.

This one was purchased from a Palestinian man who was in debt from a gambling problem.

And they bought the house from him for a very good price.

I watched these settlers pray as they looked down over the city.

And as I talked to them, I began to realize that in order to understand why they do this, you have to understand the internal logic that they adhere to.

The whole project of the State of Israel is a Jewish project.

The State of Israel is the biggest Jewish organization.

If you want to vote in a Jewish country, there's an easy way.

And then you can have an effect on this country if you so wish.

But if you're another minority, then God bless you, you have a huge region, Allah loves you.

These hardliners believe that Israel exists primarily for Jews, and thus, they're entitled to rights and benefits that others are not.

If it needs to change, if it needs an update, if you need to download the latest version and it needs to change for your particular environment.

To them, going out and buying Palestinian homes isn't a politically dubious land grab.

In fact, it's a noble spiritual mission, one that has been prophesied about for thousands of years.

So when I'm living in this place, it gives me a purpose, it gives me a reason.

Even if I'm not doing something ideological, that moment that I'm living in a place that's ideological, it gives my life every second a meaning.

And thanks to effective lobbying by these groups, the messianic paradigm has seeped into government policy as well, aiding the settlers on their mission to sink roots into the eastern part of the city.

An example of this is a law that says only Jews can buy property in the Jewish quarter of the Old City, but that anyone can buy property in the other quarters.

The settler organizations have targeted the Muslim quarter for their purchases due to its proximity to the Temple Mount, and they now have dozens of holdings there.

The government has also granted these two organizations jurisdiction over many of the public spaces in the city that have been deemed archaeological sites or national parks.

Some of these sites are situated in Palestinian neighborhoods that are at the top of the list for the Jewish home purchases.

Places like Silwan and the City of David.

These right-wing organizations are using their jurisdiction to shape the public realm of Palestinian neighborhoods, to reflect their agenda of a Jewish Jerusalem.

The result is a government-supported, militarized, ideological gentrification of Jerusalem, one house at a time.

As we zoom out, you can see that between the national parks and the individual properties, these organizations have amassed a strong influence, both public and private, in and around the Old City, where their holiest religious sites are.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem are in this weird legal limbo where they live in the municipal borders of the annexed city of Jerusalem, but they don't have Israeli citizenship.

This leads to severe neglect from public investment.

The reason for that is politicians never allocate resources, funds, time, entitlements to people who don't vote or can't vote.

Almost 90% of the sewage pipes, roads, and sidewalks in Jerusalem are found in the West.

And you can see that the proportions of public resources are heavily skewed towards West Jerusalem, even though a third of the population lives in the East.

Last week the municipality said, we will renovate the schools in East Jerusalem that are in desperate need, they're dilapidated and overcrowded, but you have to adopt the Israeli curriculum, something that the Palestinians have refused to do since 1967.

So your kids can study in a decent physical environment, provided that you peddle your national identity in exchange for that.

That's the kind of Faustian deal that the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are not going to accept.

It's hard to imagine when or how this situation will ever be resolved.

Palestinians in East Jerusalem don't want Israeli citizenship.

They were annexed against their will into a country that doesn't recognize their full rights.

 And as Jewish neighborhoods grow in East Jerusalem, Israel's grasp over the city becomes tighter and tighter.