In the heart of Jerusalem, a squalid Palestinian ‘refugee camp’ festers

Many Jerusalemites drive past the massive building just outside the American Colony Hotel, near the seam between the east and west of the city, with its three narrow, multi-story glass windows cracked and broken as if a bomb exploded inside years ago but no one ever cleaned up the mess. Few would guess what lies within.

There are signs of life: clothing hanging from the windows and small shanty structures made of cinder block and metal sheets, like those of Indian slums, jutting into the parking lot.

This hulking and dilapidated structure is referred to by locals and in the Arabic press as the “Samoud camp,” or camp of the steadfast. The term samoud has Islamic overtones of staying steadfast in faith, but in this case, for the residents of the nightmarish camp, it also means holding out for a better life.

It is home to around 42 Arab families, an estimated 300 individuals. Over the past few years, it has made intermittent appearances in the Arabic news as the site of police raids, but its story of suffering and betrayal has largely fallen by the wayside.

M., a source very familiar with the story of the building who spoke with The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity, described horrific conditions in which darkness, dampness, overcrowding and a total lack of privacy have led to hellish social consequences — drug and alcohol abuse, violence, rape, child marriages — as young as 14 years old — and “a whole psychological hospital of cases to work with.”

M. also said the building has incurred so much structural damage — as more and more families literally carve out living spaces through the foundations — that it is at risk of partial or even total collapse.

A recent visit to the building, which was only possible because one of the residents ensured this reporter’s safety, found it in a state of utter disrepair and neglect.

How did this grand building, the size of a small fortress, built in a central tourist area — where East Jerusalem’s finest hotels are located, including the famous American Colony and Olive Tree hotels — become a squalid “refugee camp” in the heart of Jerusalem? And how is it possible that both the Jordanian owners of the building and city hall cannot evict the illegal residents, despite both sides knowing the building is dangerous and the residents’ lives are at risk?

The story highlights the surreal, chaotic and even grotesque political vortex that exists in Jerusalem, where perceived enemies are neighbors and wherein about a third of the population — the mainly Arab East Jerusalemites — are residents but not citizens.

The building belongs to the Jerusalem Waqf, the Muslim trust that controls important property like mosques and schools in East Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Waqf is actually a body of the Jordanian government that continued to operate in the capital after the Hashemite Kingdom lost Jerusalem to Israel in the 1967 War.

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M. said he believes the Waqf will not forcefully remove the families, because it would be a public relations disaster for it to be seen working with the Israeli authorities to expel Palestinian families from their homes. In an interview with the Times of Israel, a Waqf official argued its hands were tied because it cannot turn to the Israeli police without the express permission of Amman, and because it “doesn’t have any coordination with the [Israeli] authorities.”

The building itself, which is located at the entrance to the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, was meant to be an Islamic community center, and also included a theater.

According to M., the building was never finished because of a lack of funding. And so it remained barren through much of the 1990s — that is, until the first 10 families arrived.

A member of the city council told The Times of Israel he would like to explore using the centrally located site of the Samoud camp for public use — for both the Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem.

But neither the municipality nor the Waqf was working on a solution for where to relocate the Samoud families — until The Times of Israel began researching the story.

Genesis of the ‘steadfast’ refugees

In the spring of 1997, Mohammad Abdul-Aziz Mohammed al-Husseini began a tent protest with 10 families over Israeli authorities’ intention to strip their status as residents of Jerusalem, which would mean the loss of their freedom of travel through Israel and the loss of civil services like healthcare and social security.

Husseini and his family are from the town of Eizariya, located on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives, less than two miles from Jerusalem. At the time, Israel’s Interior Ministry had just embarked upon a sudden crackdown, retracting the blue ID cards that denoted Jerusalem residency from people whose “center of life” couldn’t be proven to be within Jerusalem’s municipal borders. This policy remains in force today. In 2002, the West Bank security barrier would physically separate Eizariya from Jerusalem.

Husseini said they took their case to the Israeli courts and won the ability to keep their blue IDs, but still lost their ability to get civil benefits as residents of Eizariya.

The protest, which used tents provided by the UN, according to M., stretched from the spring of 1997 until the next winter, when Husseini led the families out of the frigid Jerusalem weather and into what he said was the abandoned building of the unfinished Islamic center. The move was meant to be temporary.

“They entered illegally, but for humanitarian reasons. We [the Waqf] remained quiet and looked the other way,” Ghaleb Nasri a-Din, the manager of the properties department for the Waqf, told The Times of Israel.

Twenty years later, the original 10 families have multiplied through marriages, births and relatives moving in to take advantage of both free rent and a Jerusalem address to keep their blue ID cards.

‘Better to live with the Jews than PA’

A non-resident cannot enter the Samoud camp alone. The residents are suspicious of outsiders. “If you go in alone, you’ll leave shirtless,” M. said, only half-joking.

The now 62-year-old Husseini, the unofficial leader and spokesperson of the camp, invited The Times of Israel to visit his home and sent down one of his grandchildren, perhaps 10, to escort this journalist up to his apartment. Without that escort, this reporter would not have been allowed onto the premises.

Before the escort arrived, another child interrogated this reporter — why are you here? why are you taking pictures? — acting both afraid and on guard.

The inner hallways of the building, if they can be called hallways, are bare, jagged cement, decorated only with spray-painted religious and political slogans and images. Electrical wires hang from the walls and ceiling like vines in a jungle.

Inside Husseini’s home, protected by a heavy metal door, the white paint on the living room walls is moldy and peeling off. Some of the other rooms in the apartment are bare cinder block walls.

Two of his grandchildren were sitting on a couch in the living room, watching the 2009 American movie “Avatar” on a big flat-screen TV with the sound turned all the way up. Another little girl wandered in and out. The clothes the children wore were frayed and gray.

Husseini, speaking mainly in Hebrew and sometimes in Arabic, said he was content with his current place of living.

He cannot afford to rent an apartment, as his only income is the NIS 3,700 (about $1,000) from Israeli social security he said he receives monthly.

“You see, it’s fine here. Do you know how people are living in the Old City of Jerusalem? In closets. I know some people are living in wells there,” said Husseini.

While it may have been Israeli policy that led him to leave what he said was a beautiful home in Eizariya for fear of losing his blue ID, his anger is focused at the PA, which he calls “the trashiest people in the world,” and especially the Waqf, which he calls a “criminal gang.” Throughout the interview, he continued to hurl curses at the PA and the Waqf.

He said that the late Jerusalem Palestinian leader Faisal al-Husseini, who once ran the Orient House, the PLO’s headquarters in Jerusalem, promised to purchase a building for the Samoud residents in Abu Tor, a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood south of the Old City. He said some $2 million was donated from various Gulf countries to buy the building. But Faisal died in May 2001 while visiting Kuwait, and his relative Adnan Ghaleb al-Husayni took over as the Palestinian governor of Jerusalem.

Husseini claims that when Adnan al-Husayni took over, the plan to buy the building in Abu Tor was suddenly scrapped.

According to Husseini, when he asked the new Jerusalem governor what the status of the Abu Tor plan was, al-Husayni, using a popular Arabic phrase, replied, “Illi fat, mat” (What’s past is dead). Husseini has no doubt about where the donated money disappeared to.

“Now many people say al-Yahud, Ahsan min a-Sulta, the Jews are better than the PA. The Jews are better to live with. Why? The government of Israel cares for people and the PA doesn’t.”

An expensive solution utterly fails

The Waqf hoped for years that Israel would forcibly remove the families from the Samoud camp, according to M. But, he added, Israel didn’t want to act without an official request from the Waqf, as its property is diplomatically sensitive.

“The Waqf played a poker game and lost,” said M.

Eventually the Waqf got a large grant from Saudi Arabia to build the families new apartments in Sur Baher, an Arab neighborhood on the southeastern outskirts of Jerusalem.

In 2005, some of the Samoud families began moving into the new apartments in Sur Baher. Others, however, did not want to go to such an outlying village, far away from the center of the city, and refused to leave.

Additionally, however, some of the Samoud families that did move to Sur Baher were ousted by residents of the village.

Some residents of Sur Baher, a village composed of a few big clans, did not like the outsiders moving in. Especially, according to M., as some of the new families from the Samoud camp were considered disreputable, with criminal pasts that included abuse of drugs and alcohol. A handful of the Samoud families did manage to hold onto their Sur Baher apartments and continue to live there today. According to Husseini, these are people who have familial ties to Sur Baher.

Thus, the Waqf’s expensive solution failed, and many of the families returned to the Samoud camp, rejoining others who had never left. And even those families who continue to live in Sur Baher to this day keep homes in the Samoud camp, giving them to children they’ve married off, or allowing some of their wives — polygamy is permitted in Islam — to keep homes there. One resident of the Samoud camp, according to M., has five wives and 20 children.

The result of this has been an unchecked rise in the population in the building, with each new nuclear family carving its own home into the limited space of the structure. This is why the shanty shacks have been added to the exterior of the building: to accommodate more and more families.

For Samoud camp residents, bills are a blessing

Husseini points out his home has water, electricity and cable. “Life is fine here,” he said again, though he is willing to acknowledge that some of the building’s occupants have smaller homes. In 2007, one resident told the Arab-Israeli news site Panet that she and her six children live underground, with no air or sunshine, and complained of “terrible living conditions” that led to the spread of disease.

Running water and electricity in the Samoud camp are not only necessary for daily life, but paying the bills for these utilities is the whole reason many families continue to hold their places in the building.

When Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, the Arab residents were granted residency status but not citizenship. This residency status entitled them to government services like healthcare and social security in return for paying taxes.

While the issue of residency status was problematic from the start, with East Jerusalemites unable to vote in national elections, the issue became a nightmare for them in the mid-1990s.

In 1995, without any public statement, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the Interior Ministry began demanding East Jerusalemites prove the capital was their “center of life.” Since then, more than 11,000 East Jerusalemites have lost their Jerusalem residency status, making some of them stateless.

In 2002, the security barrier would physically separate many outlying towns of Jerusalem from the capital. But before the barrier was built, and before Israel began demanding the “center of life” requirement in 1995, East Jerusalemites who wanted to build homes could do so in nearby Palestinian towns such as Eizariya and a-Ram, and they did so unaware that Israel would later move to strip the Jerusalem residency statuses of some.

“The municipal line was arbitrarily drawn between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Because there was no wall, the fiction worked and it didn’t matter where you lived,” said Daniel Seidemann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an NGO that specializes in Jerusalem issues.

Since 1995, to protect their coveted blue ID cards, East Jerusalemites with homes in the West Bank have eschewed their nicer abodes in the West Bank for whatever residences they could get inside Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.

Husseini confirmed that many of the Samoud families, like himself, have West Bank homes close to Jerusalem. But in order to retain their status as residents of Jerusalem, they keep their addresses in the Samoud camp.

By paying the monthly bills, the families in the Samoud camp can prove Jerusalem is their “center of life,” and continue getting access to healthcare and social security.

Since 1967, East Jerusalemites have had the legal ability to apply for Israeli citizenship, but a recent Times of Israel investigation showed that option has been nearly totally frozen.

Samoud families now responsible for their own lives, Waqf says

The Times of Israel visited the offices of the Waqf, located in Jerusalem’s Old City, on December 14, and spoke with Ghaleb Nasri a-Din, the manager of the Waqf’s properties department.

A-Din explained that the Waqf had done all it could for the Samoud families, who had taken advantage of the Waqf’s kind gesture to allow them to temporarily stay in the building.

“We built other homes for them in Sur Baher. Now they are living there (in the Samoud camp) under their own responsibility,” he said, acknowledging the building is dangerous.

At one point during the interview, he took out a massive binder, full of loose documents. This was the Samoud camp file. None of it had been computerized.

He showed The Times of Israel photographs Waqf employees have taken of the building, which showed the internal and external structural damage the residents had caused, including the adding of windows and balconies.

A-Din also laid blame on the Jerusalem municipality, which he said “screwed us” after it provided the building with electricity and water infrastructure, thereby encouraging the residents to stay put. This, he said, occurred in 2011.

“The municipality knows the building is dangerous and yet it continues to give them water and electricity without our permission, as if they want them to stay there,” he said.

Before the city added the water and electricity infrastructure, the Samoud residents were stealing the resources from the mosque adjacent to it. This mosque is owned by the Waqf. But a-Din doesn’t think the municipality has done the Waqf any favors.

“If someone steals, they should be brought to jail,” he said.

While he said the Waqf cannot request that the Israeli police evict families from the Samoud camp, he argued that if the municipality knows it is dangerous to live there, it should act according to the law and remove them.

Hatem Rajoubi, a lawyer with the Waqf who sat in on the meeting, said he had a solution.

“The moment the municipality gives us the permission to build on lands we own, the Waqf has no problem to take responsibility to build homes for people who live in dangerous buildings, like those who live in the Samoud camp.”

Rajoubi said the Waqf owns lands in East Jerusalem where city hall won’t allow it to build.

Reaction from Jerusalem municipality

Jerusalem city council member Yoav Yeivin (of the Hitorerut/Awakening Jerusalem movement), said he would consider Rajoubi’s suggestion, but added he also wanted to explore using the centrally located land of the Samoud camp for public use.

“On one hand, out of a civil, humanitarian and public duty, I intend to try to give a permit to the Waqf to build on its lands a residence worthy of the Samoud camp families,” he said.

He continued: “On the other hand, I will look at how to allocate this land for a building worthy of public service in Jerusalem.”

Yeivin, who has visited the building himself, said “the population density is growing, the health and sanitary conditions in the structure are bad, and the Jerusalem municipality is struggling to provide proper education services to the children there through an at-risk youth program.”

Indeed, the municipality does provide social workers to help the children of the building.

However, added, Yeivin, “Since the building belongs to the Waqf, the municipality has almost no possibility to provide more extensive services than it provides today.”

Yeivin concluded: “We will not allow such a massive building in the heart of a major tourist area to be used as a refugee camp, instead of hosting a public service institution for the residents of Jerusalem, both its Arab and Jewish residents.”

The Waqf told the Times of Israel it has no intention whatsoever of selling the land to the municipality. It wants to build an Islamic community center — the use for which the building was originally intended.