Lifta: My land or your land?

The 12 families of Lifta will have to go, sooner or later. Where to? No one knows.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Lifta: Two plans, but neither provides alternatives for the 12 families still residing there (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Lifta: Two plans, but neither provides alternatives for the 12 families still residing there
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Jerusalem. Being the poorest city in the country is more than enough, a few high-ranking officials at Safra Square explained off the record.
Now it seems that the fate of Lifta’s last few residents is going in the same direction.
Though the site is one of the city’s most beautiful and the view is breathtaking, with life going on amid nature only a few meters from the city center, its current residents are not rich or affluent. While the municipality’s plans for Lifta are much more acceptable and honest than those promoted by the ILA – to preserve the nature and transform the whole site into a sort of nature reserve, with a few educational and leisure spots – the residents are absolutely not a part of either vision.
To implement the plans for Lifta, the residents must leave. They feel totally abandoned, forgotten and on their own in this struggle. The eviction orders come on the basis of a Jerusalem District Court ruling – stating that they are not the owners of these lands and properties – but no one has offered them an alternative.
The municipality is not involved in the eviction orders and procedures – and this is certainly for the better, thereby preventing a situation in which a municipality representing its residents would have had to harm some of these residents. What is hurting these residents, beyond the logistical dangers, is the fact that while all these years they have considered themselves residents of Jerusalem, now they have been told the city cannot do anything for them.
“Even if the court rules that we are not owners, isn’t there any other way to treat us, after so many years here – other than as intruders?” one of the residents lamented at a meeting they held a few months earlier.
The court has indeed ruled out any right they claim to have on the village’s remains.
But the bottom line is still a very tough one: The 12 families of Lifta will have to go, sooner or later.
Where to? No one knows.