by Mark Thomas
‘No, it belongs to the Palestinians. It belongs to us,’ shouts an old woman in Hebrew, interrupting the deputy mayor in mid-flow.
Her name is Rifka al-Kurd. She is eighty-eight, and was born in Haifa; her family lost their home there in 1948. For a split second, David Hadari looks affronted at the rudeness of being interrupted by this woman, but it is her garden that we are all standing in. The deputy mayor ignores her. He doesn’t respond to her or address her in anyway; he seems to look right through her to the canvas shelter the family erected next to the rooms the settler has taken over.
‘Look!’ he appeals to the reporter. ‘Look how liberal the settlers are! They allow them to put a tent up in the garden. I have never seen settlers like that!’ He gestures at the canvas shelter as if giving a character reference. Can we not see the human kindness the settler is displaying in allowing Rifka al-Kurd a tent in her own garden, next to her house that he has squatted?
David Hadari leaves this fracas of his own making and steps onto the road to talk to the settlers outside the occupied home belonging to the Ghawi family, the family under the fig tree. The hunched figure of Rifka al-Kurd pursues him from the garden to the road, standing in the middle of the street screaming and raising her hand with each outburst. The settlers, surrounded by security and police, ignore her. Still, Rifka steps forward, screaming at them. Her daughter, Maysa, runs to her side and takes her arm, leading her to a taxi. Maysa shuts the door on her mother then her own anger spills over and she too screams in fury. She smacks her outstretched arm at the elbow, a universal ‘Fuck you!’, takes a step forward, catches herself and spins away to the taxi, only to find that her elderly aunt who was in the car with her mother has now got out. As her aunt shrieks at the settlers, Maysa shepherds her back to the car that, once full, speeds away down the street. Deputy Mayor David Hadari simply walks through the iron gates of the occupied home to greet the settlers. He can be heard saluting them: ‘With your life and your actions you strengthen us! Well done! Well done!’
Back in the al-Kurd family garden, one of the neighbours stands by the canvas shelter watching over the property for them. He is an older gentleman and lives across the road.
‘Whenever a big US official visits, they start coming into the area and pressuring us,’ he says. ‘It is not a coincidence that the deputy mayor comes today.’
‘During the US vice-president’s visit?’
‘Yes. The settlers want to show everyone that they are the power.’
In the garden by the small beds and borders next to the rose bush, we chat for a while of other homes targeted by the settlers, of the campaign to evict them that has gone on for over thirty years, and the weekly demonstrations in support of the Palestinian residents.
Then, through the entrance, Phil spots the deputy mayor again. Emerging into a street quieter than when he left it, Deputy Mayor David Hadari starts to the main road.
I hurry after him, in time for us to hear him say in Hebrew to the settler leaders: ‘I don’t think he is a proper journalist.’ I doubt he realises he has made his one accurate comment of the day.
‘Deputy Mayor, can you just answer one quick question? If it is OK for Israelis to claim homes in East Jerusalem but not OK for Palestinians to claim homes in West Jerusalem, does that mean there is one law for one and one law for another?’
‘No, no, no, there is only one law in Israel, but this is the Jewish country.’ Then he shrugs and says something remarkable considering he is an elected law-maker and a powerful man. He says, ‘What can I do?’
What can he do? It is tempting to start on a long list but then he adds, ‘This is our country.’ He says it without a quiver of doubt, as if it were an immutable law of physics.
‘But if one group can claim homes and another can’t because of race, you are creating law based on race, aren’t you?
‘This city belongs to us, OK?’
‘But you’re not actually answering the question.’
‘So I don’t answer it. I don’t answer it.’
‘But you can’t create a law that only applies to one race of people and doesn’t apply to another.’
‘I spoke with you a lot,’ he says, turning away. ‘Thank you, bye bye.’ With that Deputy Mayor David Hadari turns his back to me to finish his trip and bid farewell to his guides. Shaking hands with the settler leaders and the police, he says to them in Hebrew, ‘You are doing God’s work.’
God. Of course. That’s why this is an immutable law: God. When someone is behaving this badly, mention of him is bound to make an appearance sooner or later.
chapter 19
GOD’S ESTATE AGENT
Arieh King is a thirty-six-year-old estate agent and religious ideologue; a combination that makes him one of the more pushy zealots, the type the more moderate zealots shy away from, as he does bang on a bit.
There aren’t many things worse than being an estate agent, but one of them is being a religious estate agent. Picture a Foxton’s branded Mini Cooper. Now imagine it with a fish logo on the boot.
Admittedly, this is a crude stereotype and, in real life, Arieh King isn’t remotely like this cartoon portrait. He’s much worse, really much, much worse. He’s powerful, dangerous, deluded, bigoted and a peddler of self-justifying showmanship. In many ways a fully rounded human being. Arieh King founded the Israel Land Fund (ILF) in 2007, after ‘realising a need to disrupt the purchase of Jewish-owned land in Israel by hostile, non-Jewish and enemy sources’. Quite a task as, according to Arieh King, these hostile enemy sources are ‘Arabs and non-Jews’. Which narrows down the suspect list to mere billions. ‘Arabs and non-Jews are living and owning land all over Israel,’ King fearlessly announces. That is how big this is. You read it right: non-Jews are living in Israel! The fact that his vision of Israel includes the West Bank, Gaza and bits of Jordan and Syria only goes to prove how many non-Jews are involved. However, King offers folk a chance to join his endeavours: ‘House by house, lot by lot, the Israel Land Fund is ensuring the land of Israel stays in the hands of the Jewish people for ever.’ Naturally the offer is only open to Jews.
With pronouncements like these, it’s not surprising that King is involved with evictions at Sheikh Jarrah. What is surprising is his willingness to meet me, and the manner of his arrival. When we get to the settler apartment block in East Jerusalem the afternoon sun is out and so is he. An armed settler stands guard by the off-road garage parking entrance. As I approach he confuses himself with a customs official and orders, ‘Passport.’
I confuse myself with a smart Alec and reply, ‘The Israeli visa should be good for your building.’
‘Wait outside,’ he says.
The Palestinian taxi driver, Phil and I do just that, parking on the side of the driveway, leaning on the bonnet and collecting stares from Arieh’s neighbours.
Phil has taken to wearing a straw cowboy hat. ‘It keeps the sun off and confuses the hell out of the soldiers,’ he had said and he was right: it is hard to label someone in a straw hat as threatening. It doesn’t, however, do anything for the settlers, whose stares are mainly a mixture of suspicion and hostility, no doubt having us down as either internationals or media, or worse, house-hunters.
After forty minutes I ask out loud, ‘Do you think we should have a time limit on this? Another twenty minutes, and then home?’
Suddenly, a scooter brakes with a jolt next to us. It revs at a noisy teenage whine and a man in a T-shirt and sandals shouts over the putt-putting of the bike, ‘Sorry, I am late; I will show you why. Come, come, come. Get in the car, follow me! Follow me! Don’t wait! Come!’ He twists and shoves on the scooter, looks over his shoulder and shouts again, ‘Follow me!’ then, hunching and leaning over the handles as if willing it faster, hares off into the traffic.
‘That,’ I laugh, jumping back into our taxi, ‘is an entrance! He’s definitely not what we expected.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ groans Phil from the back seat, shaking his head.
‘W
hat?’
‘We’ve got an eccentric. That’s what.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Eccentrics are always so fucking dull.’
*
Minutes later, we stand with King opposite the hillside cemetery of the Mount of Olives, where hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jews are attending a funeral.
‘Look. Look at all these Jews!’ says Arieh proudly.
‘I don’t mean to be rude, but are these special Jews? Because we are in Jerusalem, and there are a lot of them about.’
‘Nooo,’ says Arieh, and the words chewed on his lisp but none the worse for wear, start to gush out of him. ‘Look, look, look how many Jews are here. This is really incredible. They have walked from the centre of Jerusalem for the burial of a rabbi and not even one who is very high up …’
‘You’ve bought us to a funeral?’
‘… Thousands will come. You will see. Look, look at them. You must get the camera on them. You will see; this whole hill will be black with Jews. Wait and you will see. This is why I was late; I got caught in the traffic as they walk through Jerusalem …’
Fifteen minutes later, his enthusiasm suddenly vanishes and he snaps, ‘Come, I will show you where to go for the interview. Follow me. In the car. Come. I will take you.’
He starts the putt-putting engine of his scooter again, points the front wheel into the traffic and whizzes off. Seeing him do this for the second time is not as impressive.
Our destination is a crop of hillside apartments forming a new and virtually deserted estate. Arieh parks, removes his helmet, slips on a jungle-green, floppy hat and bounds up the steps from the pavement to an empty children’s playground. Mobile clutched to his ear, he natters away in his green hat and pale blue T-shirt in front of an orange slide, like a kids’ TV presenter on a fag break.*
Phone conversation over, he begins with boyish enthusiasm. ‘We are here in the heart of a battle between fundamentalism and the Western world. We have had Nazism and Communism and now we face fundamentalism. And at the heart of this battle is Jerusalem, the frontline is Jerusalem … So, if Jerusalem is divided, it is a threat to the whole state of Israel and is a threat on the future of every Jew in the world.’
‘So it is your struggle to make Jerusalem a Jewish city?’
‘Yes,’ he says determinedly, ‘I am going to do everything to protect this holy place, and to bring in more Jews.’
His mobile buzzes, in a snap he answers it, holding his finger up to indicate that I should wait. He converses in Hebrew for two minutes, then hangs up.
‘That was the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, David Hadari.’
‘The guy who was down in Sheikh Jarrah the other day?’
‘Yes … right … Where were we?’ Without need of a prompt, he finds his place in his spiel again, and explains his main reason for setting up the Israel Land Fund: ‘I got a database that shows funds, Arab funds, coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Arab banks. To buy land in Israel, for the Arab nation in Israel; what they call Palestine.’ With his voice rising in intensity he goes on, ‘I gave this information to the police, the government and Knesset members and they did nothing! Nobody cares. And they [the Arabs] are continuing! They are buying today wherever they want! It is a democratic state, so the Arabs can do what they want,’ he says, sounding cheated. ‘They are buying in the centre of town,’ he rails. ‘In King David Street, these buildings belong to Arabs! Why can Arabs buy anything they want in Israel? Including Jerusalem, central and west? Whatever they want! And I cannot buy in Jerusalem!’
His phone buzzes and he checks it, but this time ignores it.
‘You can’t buy land in Jerusalem?’ I ask incredulously.
‘I can,’ he concedes, shrugging. ‘Legally, I can, yes … But why do I have to confront demonstrations like these anarchists in Sheikh Jarrah?’ And he is off again.
For two hours, Arieh performs a series of rants where the best chance of my interjecting to ask a question would be for me to phone him. He also has a habit of speaking in headlines, only to row back on them. An example would be his explanation of the Israel Land Fund: ‘People are buying land. And this is what we want. We [the ILF] don’t want to become landowners. We want Jews from all over the world to come and be owners.’
‘Do the buyers live in Israel?’
‘Unfortunately, most of them prefer to buy and stay overseas.’
‘But you get commission?’
‘No,’ he says quickly.
‘Really? I read that you took commission.’
Then he rows back again and admits, yes. ‘When we are dealing with Galilee, where we know the land going to be economical, then we take a commission. Not in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is ideological, one hundred per cent. We don’t take any commission.’
‘And then there are the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.’
‘No. I am not doing evictions. I am paying the people. I prefer them to take the money, go quiet. Check me. You can ask every Arab about that. This is not my way, to kick people out in the middle of the night.’
‘But you do deliver eviction notices.’
‘Of course.’
‘In the middle of the night … with the army. There is footage of you doing that on the BBC.’
‘It is not my decision; it is the army’s decision, unfortunately,’ he says, rowing again.
He interrupts the interview continually to answer the phone to the deputy mayor and others. All this time he must be aware that he is being recorded and it can’t have passed his notice that conversations in Hebrew can be translated, conversations that run: ‘This morning I was there with the mayor … Now I want the mayor to issue a demolition order … If the mayor is issuing a municipal demolition order, the police have to escort the building inspectors …’
It is difficult to know if Arieh King’s relationship to these politicians is that of lobbyist, ally or leader, but it clearly helps to have some political connections in this game. Especially as King’s plan is to build 200,000 new homes; all in Palestinian areas. King seems to suffer from a syndrome that I had thought a particularly British strain of idiocy: the ‘uberdog’ syndrome, where the well off bemoan their lot, whinging on about how life is stacked against them. For example: ‘These days, you can only get into Oxford or Cambridge if you went to a state school,’ they will bray. ‘If your children are privately educated, they just don’t stand a chance. It is totally biased.’ Arieh is a classic ‘uberdog’, and he fires off tirades and salvos of imagined injustices. He laments the fact the Israelis cannot enter certain Palestinian cities on the West Bank, which, while true, pales in comparison with the restrictions on Palestinian movement, not only into Israel but crucially within the West Bank itself.
‘It is apartheid against Jews,’ declares the man whose property transactions are based entirely on race.
‘What is your objection to not being able to get in to these places?’
‘I have properties …’ he begins. ‘And it has bad effect on the Arab living behind the Wall’ – for a moment he appears to be on the verge of empathy, about to show some emotional depth and see something from someone else’s view point – ‘and the result of this is the Arabs are moving from their neighbourhoods into the Jewish neighbourhoods,’ says the man who has just complained about apartheid.
The Arieh King Show is a well-honed portrait of a put-upon settler, where everything is everyone else’s fault: the media, the anarchists, the leftists, the soldiers, the government and the big bad Arabs, performed by an obsessive who can’t quite make up his mind if he wants to be seen as powerful or humble. The finale is his boastful offer to take us to Sheikh Jarrah where settlers are occupying Palestinian homes, and he himself has appeared at night with the army and court papers. If we go with him, we will see, apparently, that he is actually well regarded.
‘People will come up and say, “Look, it is him!” No one will shout at me. I tell you, you will see.’
‘OK, brilliant. Let’s go to Sh
eikh Jarrah then.’
Arieh gets on his scooter and drives off into the evening light, leading the way. Except we never get there. Instead, he leads us to a friendlier part of town, nearer his home, having phoned ahead to warn them of our arrival. His offer is a bluff.
The ambient harp music is still playing at the hotel when we get back.
‘Did you have a good day?’ asks the owner.
‘Great,’ I say.
‘Tiring,’ says Phil.
‘I’ll bring some tea,’ the owner says, tiptoeing into the kitchen.
It is late and the small lobby is quiet, so we sink into the old easy chairs with a hushed ‘hff’.
‘It’s New Age water torture,’ I whisper.
‘I don’t mind, as long as I’m not near that odious man.’
‘He is a piece of work,’ I admit, ‘but a character …’
‘He’s a twat …’
‘Well, yes …’
‘… and you can’t change the facts. He might be a character but he’s a twat.’
‘I’m a performer and a person with no small ego myself, so I find him interesting. You have to admit it was quite a performance.’
‘He’s a bigot.’
‘Yes, he is but …’
‘He’s a complete bastard.’
‘Then this might not be the best time to tell you that I have arranged to meet up with him later in the week.’
Phil snorts with laughter and, forgetting where we are or the hour of the night, shouts in disbelief, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! You’re as fucking mad as him! I don’t want to ever see that fucking bastard … Oh, thank you for the tea … and sorry about the language.’
