The tall, slim, gray-haired retired shoemaker has lived his whole life in the same city, but under two different governments, first Jordan, then Israel.
For most of that time, since 1972, the 71-year-old father of six has been fighting to keep his home.
“From 1972 to 2021 we have been pursued,” Iskafi said.
A sign on the steel gate of his east Jerusalem house states: “We will never leave our land.” The stone structure is tucked in on the back of a number of small alleyways and off a small, paved road, just below Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
Iskafi’s parents were never able to return to their home and he never learned the building’s exact location prior to their death. He himself was born in east Jerusalem, when that part of the city was under Jordanian rule.
After ’48, “people went to Lebanon or to Gaza and we came here, because we had relatives here,” he told The Jerusalem Post, as he sat on a plastic chair set up on the sidewalk on the nearby Othman Ben Afan Street.
He is one of four families facing an imminent threat of eviction, as a result of a property dispute, with the Nahalat Shimon company, which wants to develop the area for Jewish housing. His three-generation family and the three other homeowners are part of a larger group of 28 families, all of whom could be disposed.
Prior to the outbreak of Jewish-Arab violence this week and the renewed Hamas-IDF hostilities, which has seen barrages of rockets as far as Petah Tikva and Tel Aviv, their story was seen as a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as such it captured international attention.
The street itself has become a known protest site, with police barricades at both ends and almost nightly clashes with police and at times between them and their Jewish neighbors. Television cameras can often be found on the street, and residents gather on the sidewalk in plastic chairs and old sofas.
Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel Smotrich visited this week to call for the Palestinian ouster from the neighborhood and to pay a solidarity visit to a Jewish family that lives on the street. Joint List MKs visited to show support for the Palestinians families, as did the European Union representative in Jerusalem, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff. He assured the Sheikh Jarrah families that EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell had taken up their cause this week at a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Prior to the 1948 war for Israel’s independence, the land was owned by Jews, and the particular plots on which the four houses sit belonged to two Jewish organizations and those rights have since been transferred to the Nahalat Shimon company.
Iskafi said his parents were part of 28 families in the neighborhood who took part in a model international project sponsored by Jordan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency by which they gave up their refugee status in exchange for ownership of small stone homes in the neighborhood. UNRWA took their refugee card and “we didn’t receive food, health or education” benefits, Iskafi said, adding that it was a choice fraught with difficulties. “But we did it.”
Unbeknownst to the families, however, the Jordanians never registered the property.
“I don’t know why,” Iskafi said.
Five years after Israel captured the eastern part of the city in the 1967 war, unified it and applied sovereignty to it, the two Jewish organizations that owned the land sought to reclaim it. Israeli law does not allow the Palestinians to reclaim their initial pre-1948 property, and so the battle for a home has centered here on these structures.
ISKAFI SAT in front of the small home of Sami Jaouni, 68, whose family fled the western Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiyeh for east Jerusalem and also relinquished refugee status. He showed the Post a document from UNRWA, which confirmed that assertion.
The retired restaurant owner said of the land battle he inherited from his parents: “I have been worried about losing my home since 1972.”
“We have always struggled about this land,” the father of two stated.
It’s a fear that has grown more acute now, that in the aftermath of decades of legal twists and turns, two lower court rulings have upheld Jewish property ownership claims. Jaouni and Iskafi, along with the two other families, have appealed the matter to the High Court of Justice, which this week delayed by a month any ruling on the matter.
“I am still worried, I don’t know if it’s good or bad,” Jaouni said, adding that it’s still possible he could be forced out.
Or perhaps, he said, “they will leave us [alone] so we can live here quietly and peacefully.”
As he sat in his small modern kitchen, he recalled how his father had taken him to the family’s Talbiyeh residence when he was 12 or 13.
“It was colored with blue, and [he] told me this is our house,” said Jaouni. He has never gone back to visit the house, but has noticed as he passes by that it unceasingly looks different.
The home that he has known since he was one is the one he lives in now in Sheikh Jarrah and it is here that he wants to stay and it is this home that he wants to pass on to his children.
“That is all,” he said.
Iskafi said he hoped that international pressure on Israel would prevail and that the initial court delay would be followed by a decision to allow them to remain in their homes.
He was more political than Jaouni in his words and clarified that he believed that east Jerusalem should be part of a future Palestinian state and that Israel currently “occupies” it.
He looks at the Sheikh Jarrah land conflict as a symbol of that “occupation.” His family and the others who made the UNRWA deal have paid doubly, he said, first by losing their first homes and then giving up their UNRWA refugee status, noting that 70 years of benefits was already a hefty sum.
Iskafi said he would never recognize Jewish ownership of his Sheikh Jarrah home. “It’s not right and it’s not just. We are the owners, we left our homes and our gardens and our trees in 1948, and now they are pursuing us here,” he said.
Iskafi said he was left with the feeling that the Israeli Right didn’t want Arabs in this neighborhood or anyplace under Israeli rule. He has been an active part of the civic battle to keep the homes, including meeting with Burgsdorff, but was careful to decry violence. When Joint List MK Ofer Cassif visited, the two men hugged, then they clasped hands, held them up and said, “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.”
Back in 1948, “our families left without even their shoes,” Iskafi said. Now, “our children are living in a difficult emotional situation,” he added. His younger grandchildren, he explained, “don’t want to go to school, they are afraid that if they leave for school they will have no home to return to.”
“They cry, that is the hardest,” he said. “And I don’t have answers for them,” he added. •