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Sitting beneath a tree beside the rubble of his demolished home, Fakhri Abu Diab stared out over what remained of the neighborhood where he has spent his whole life.
The 62-year-old Palestinian resident of al-Bustan, a densely packed warren of homes and small shops in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood, now lives with his wife in a temporary metal structure erected beside the ruins of his family home, which was demolished by Israeli authorities in 2024. Several months ago, he received a demolition order for that structure, too.
“My family has been here for generations,” Abu Diab said quietly, gesturing toward the broken concrete and twisted metal scattered around him. “I stayed here next to my land, next to my ruins, next to my history. And now they want to destroy this, too.”
Abu Diab has become one of the neighborhood’s best-known voices, fielding calls from media outlets around the world as international attention has focused on reports — not all accurate — about Israel’s plans to clear out al-Bustan.
Sitting directly below the Temple Mount and adjacent to the City of David archaeological park, al-Bustan occupies some of the most politically sensitive land in Jerusalem.
In recent months, media outlets have reported that homeowners are being forced to dismantle their homes to make room for a biblical-themed tourist park intended to strengthen Israeli historical claims while undermining Palestinian ones. It’s a story that, for some, sounds like a poignant symbol of what critics view as efforts to displace Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
For Israel’s courts, Jerusalem municipal officials and several right-wing activists who spoke to The Times of Israel on background, however, the main story is something else: a long-overdue decision to remove unauthorized construction on land designated for public use.
“The zoning of the area where structures were built without permits and unlawfully in the Al-Bustan neighborhood is designated for a public park for the benefit of all city residents,” the Jerusalem municipality explained in a statement to The Times of Israel.
“This area was never zoned for residential use, and the Jerusalem Municipality is currently working to establish a park and public parking lots in an area suffering from a severe shortage of open public spaces and parking.”
The city has yet to publish plans for the area since 2010, when then-mayor Nir Barkat proposed redeveloping the area into a park that would restore it “to its historic state as a major world and tourism site,” alongside the preservation of some neighborhood homes.
Nonetheless, a source inside the municipality said reports in the international press describing plans for the area as a biblical theme park were “a complete lie.”
Evictions of Palestinian residents from Sheikh Jarrah, other parts of Silwan and elsewhere have drawn intense international criticism. In a charged dispute over competing historical narratives, it can seem at times that the only thing all parties can agree on is that the situation has been sorely mismanaged.
Now, with Israel ramping up evictions and demolitions in the 70-dunam (17-acre) tract at the foot of the Kidron Valley, tiny al-Bustan has become the latest flashpoint in a long-running fight over what parts of Jerusalem’s history will play a role in determining its future.
Green space to urban enclave
Al-Bustan — Arabic for “the garden” — sits in a narrow valley directly below hillsides that rise toward the Old City and the Temple Mount, one of the most politically sensitive areas in Israel. Adjacent to the neighborhood is the City of David archaeological site, home to ruins dating back to the city’s Iron Age origins.
Sloping down the hill toward the biblical Pool of Siloam, where ancient Jerusalem drew its water, some archaeologists believe the lush sliver of land that al-Bustan sits on was once the royal garden of Israel’s earliest kings. Its location at the basin of several surrounding mountain ridges makes it one of the most fertile spaces in the city, irrigated by water runoff from multiple directions.
Today, the neighborhood is packed with ramshackle buildings, narrow roads and piles of rubble from homes that have already been demolished. But before Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, the valley looked very different, preserved as a green space and used for farming vegetables, dates and pomegranates. Save for three or four permanent structures, the land was dedicated solely to agriculture, records show.
But Silwan and other areas in East Jerusalem saw their populations grow rapidly in the years after the war, and municipal planners failed to approve new housing projects to keep up with demand. Housing became increasingly scarce within the city, and local families began building homes on the land without permits.
Aerial photos seen by The Times of Israel illustrate how, over the years, construction during the 1970s and 1980s began to transform the area from an open space packed with greenery into a dense residential enclave.
At its peak, roughly 1,500 residents lived in some 115 illegal homes, many built with substandard foundations or lacking proper electricity, water, or sewage infrastructure.
Activists on both sides of the conflict disagree about how many of the residents have historical ownership claims to the land on which they live.
Some residents, like Abu Diab, say they grew up in al-Bustan, and that their families own plots of land there, although they lack proper documentation and the state’s courts have rejected their claims of ownership. Others are squatters who arrived later and have no such claims. Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly upheld demolition orders for structures built there without permits.
According to Laura Wharton, a longtime Jerusalem city council member from the left-leaning Meretz party, who has been involved with the issue for years, there are “definitely” people who can trace their property ownership back before 1967, but there are fewer now than there were several decades ago.
Activists and locals blame restrictive planning policies for leaving East Jerusalem residents with little choice but to build without permits as families grew and the population expanded. The municipality, meanwhile, turned a blind eye to the unauthorized construction, neither regulating it to meet the population’s needs nor providing any services.
Now it is seeking to simply sweep the neighborhood away with similar disregard, opponents charge.
“The municipality and the government have been really derelict,” said Wharton. “They took no responsibility for providing for the needs of the growing Palestinian population. Instead, they regard virtually any Palestinian building as illegal because they didn’t have a permit, even though there were no plans otherwise.”
Parks or wreck
Authorities first mounted a campaign to clear out al-Bustan in 2005, but residents managed to tie up cases in court and win political support to stave off evictions. Over the last two decades, though, Israeli authorities issued several eviction and demolition orders while also conducting on-and-off negotiations with residents for a solution.
A plan introduced in 2010 would have razed around half of the neighborhood’s homes and replaced them with a large green space and a community center. The rest of the neighborhood would have been authorized and redeveloped, the plan indicated.
However, the idea was met with stiff opposition from residents and civil society groups, who objected to the demolition of dozens of homes and the nature of the green space, which would be focused on tourism and link similar parks in the Kidron and Ben Hinnom valleys and the City of David archaeological site, all of which are operated by the right-wing Elad settler group.
Residents proposed an alternate scheme that would have also created green spaces, for the benefit of the community rather than for tourists, while preserving more of the neighborhood.
The sides remained at an impasse until 2018, when newly elected Mayor Moshe Lion began pushing ahead with a plan to move al-Bustan residents to a nearby location and demolish the structures, Wharton said.
But the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and subsequent war derailed the process.
According to Wharton, when residents approached the municipality earlier this year about restarting talks, they found themselves locked out of the process.
“The city announced that it wasn’t interested anymore in any discussions with the residents of Silwan,” she said. “There was a decision that they’d lost their chance, and that it was going to unilaterally begin demolishing the homes.”
A statement from the municipality deflected blame for the breakdown. According to its telling, al-Bustan residents “did not demonstrate serious intentions to reach agreements” after years of work by the municipality to find a solution, including offers of alternative housing options within the area.
Demolition activities have meanwhile accelerated. More than 20 homes have been razed this year alone, and more than half of the roughly 115 homes that were standing in 2005 have now been destroyed, according to Ir Amim, an organization that advocates for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Demolition proceedings are underway for many of the remaining structures.
In May, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, three bulldozers came into the neighborhood under police protection and demolished several homes, witnesses said. The incident “took the heart out of Bustan,” according to Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, co-director of pro-Palestinian nonprofit Jahalin Solidarity, who joined the meeting at Abu Diab’s home.
In some cases, al-Bustan residents have dismantled their homes instead of waiting for municipal demolition teams to arrive, seeking to avoid the heavy fees levied by the city for razing homes. Al-Bustan residents have been charged hundreds of thousands of shekels in fines and costs for the removal of their homes under a 2017 law that increased penalties for unauthorized construction, Abu Diab said.
Abu Diab is still paying off debts from the demolition of his home in 2024, he said.
“If they don’t demolish the home themselves, the municipality comes and then charges them,” explained Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher with Ir Amim. “Families are not only losing their homes, but they’re left with huge debts.”
According to the city, the razed homes are making way for a public park and infrastructure for parking that is badly needed in the crowded neighborhood.
“The municipality is criticized for demolishing houses, but we are also criticized for not building enough parks in East Jerusalem, and because the roads and parking are not suitable for the size of the population there,” the municipal source insisted. “This plan is designed to provide these for residents of the area.”
However, no such plans for green spaces, parking lots, road infrastructure, or environmental rehabilitation have been submitted by the city, which appears to be focused on enforcing demolition orders.
According to Tatarsky’s organization, even if a green space were created, it would be used to strengthen Jewish Israeli claims to East Jerusalem while marginalizing Palestinian communities, as has been done with other historical preservation projects in the area.
Tatarsky has made similar claims about a new visitors’ center being built at the Mount of Olives, though that project’s organizers say its purpose is to promote Jewish education, not to displace residents.
“This whole thing is actually a settlement project, a clever means to expel a Palestinian neighborhood and replace it,” Tatarsky said. “The park will completely redesign the map so that isolated Jewish settlements here will suddenly be connected, pushing the Palestinians out.”
Land-use discrimination
To critics, the razing of the neighborhood is redolent of wider nationwide dynamics in which land-use policies have been used to hamstring growing Arab communities, with officials refusing to issue residential construction permits and then demolishing homes for being built without authorization.
Among those championing such policies are members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who founded the Regavim movement to lobby for the demolition of Arab and Palestinian homes in Israel and the West Bank, it claims encroach on Israel’s open space.
A report by the group published in November claimed that some 3,500 dunams (865 acres) of open land in Jerusalem had been lost to illegal construction since 1999, praising Lion and Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for stepping up demolition orders but calling for more to be done.
In Jerusalem, Tatarsky and others allege Israel restricts Arab building as a way of entrenching Jewish control of the city.
“Israeli governments always wanted Jerusalem to remain a Jewish city with Jewish dominance,” Tatarsky said. “Planning and building policies have become some of the main tools for controlling demography.”
The Palestinian population of East Jerusalem has grown by more than 300% since 1967, and now totals around 400,000, about 40% of the 1 million people living in the capital. However, only 7% of housing units approved for construction in 2025 were intended for Palestinian residents, and 15% in 2024, according to a recent report in Haaretz.
Some 20,000 homes in East Jerusalem now exist without building permits, according to Bimkom, an organization that monitors planning and building in Jerusalem. Residents say thousands more homes are needed.
Critics like Tatarsky also say that the state’s complicated laws about Palestinian property rights, in which outdated Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli systems interact in confusing and sometimes contradictory ways, are often used by the state to deny Palestinian claims to the land.
Large portions of East Jerusalem lack complete land registration records, known in Hebrew as Tabu, since Jordan failed to document ownership claims during its custodianship of the city from 1949 to 1967. As a result, land claims for many Palestinian families appear only in the form of dusty old tax receipts or inheritance papers, documentation that is not recognized by Israeli courts.
Discriminatory policies go beyond just land use decisions, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem claim, saying they receive far fewer municipal services than Jewish neighborhoods, despite paying local taxes at the same rate. Today, much of East Jerusalem is devoid not only of legal homes but also of other infrastructure that makes cities livable.
“The Palestinian population grew very quickly, but there was almost no planning for schools, roads, parks, or housing,” Wharton said. “People built because they had children and grandchildren and nowhere else to go.”
The Jerusalem municipality rejected many of these allegations, saying it has many residential projects underway in East Jerusalem, and that master plans for the neighborhoods include large urban renewal projects.
“The purpose of these plans is to regulate the field of construction alongside clearing areas for public needs that will serve the residents of the neighborhoods,” the municipality said.
The municipality rejected claims of discrimination made by activists and residents, arguing that they obscure a more complicated reality. Successive city administrations, including that of the current mayor, have worked to develop housing, infrastructure and employment opportunities in East Jerusalem, despite interactions with local representatives that are often hostile.
“The Jerusalem Municipality will continue to act to develop the public space and invest in all population sectors in the city, in accordance with the implementation of court orders, while providing public spaces for the benefit of all residents in the area and in alignment with the site’s land zoning,” it said in a statement.
The arguments over al-Bustan reflect much larger disagreements about history, law and sovereignty that are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. But for some, they also underscore the reality that Jews and Palestinians will continue sharing Jerusalem long after the latest demolition orders and court rulings have faded, making civility and coexistence as essential as ever.
“I want Jerusalem to be a great city that works for everyone,” Wharton said. “But that does not justify seizing land or demolishing the homes of residents.”
The post As Jerusalem razes enclave to restore open space, Palestinians see city shutting them out appeared first on The Times of Israel.
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