At the bottom of a steep and densely populated valley just below Jerusalem’s old city walls, the earth has been shaken in recent weeks by jackhammers and bulldozers.
These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades as the Israeli state has relentlessly sought to stamp a uniformly Jewish identity on to the occupied east of the city, while erasing its Palestinian character.
Typically it is workers for the state and municipality at the wheel of the bulldozers, but in the al-Bustan neighbourhood, in the shadow of the 11th-century al-Aqsa mosque, the clamour is from a more recent development.
It is the sound of Palestinians demolishing their own family homes.
“This is something really hard. This is something bitter,” Jalal al-Tawil said as he watched a tractor he had hired, with a front loader at the front and jackhammer at the back, rip apart the last remnants of the house his father had built, which in turn had been on the site of his grandparents’ home.
By Wednesday morning, most of the walls had been brought down to their foundations and the rubble pushed into a single pile. Al-Tawil left the thick knotty root of a 35-year-old grapevine until last.
“It used to provide grapes for all of al-Bustan,” he said. The spring vine leaves had already sprouted along the trellis above him, but he was resigned to the fact they would never again bear fruit.
The experience of demolishing his own family’s home and history had drained al-Tawil, but it came down to brutal economics. The Jerusalem municipality had told him it would cost him 280,000 shekels (£72,000) if its workers demolished the house. Hiring his own equipment and labour would cost al-Tawil less than a tenth of that.
“Also, if they do it, they will uproot the land and make a complete mess,” he said. For him it was like being given the choice between suicide or being murdered, he said.
More than 57 homes in al-Bustan, part of the larger Silwan district of East Jerusalem, have been demolished in the past two years with at least eight designated for demolition in the next few weeks. On the site a biblical theme park called the Kings Garden is to be built, supposedly where King Solomon took his leisure three millennia ago.
The park is designed to be part of a spreading, largely settler-driven, archaeological project focusing exclusively on Jerusalem’s Jewish past and centred on what has been called the City of David – despite the view of many Israeli archaeologists that the visible remains date to other eras, before and after King David’s iron-age reign.
Aviv Tatarsky, a senior researcher at Ir Amim, a group advocating for an equitably shared Jerusalem, says al-Bustan encapsulates the erasure of Palestinians from both geography and history.
“Israel is not willing to recognise the bi-national, multi-ethnic, multicultural reality of Jerusalem and it is wiping out first and foremost Palestinians – but really anything that is not Jewish, and then glossing it over with this Disneyfied nonsense,” he said. “If this happens to the end, Israelis will go there and they will see the story of the park and they will be completely ignorant of the fact that lives were destroyed, a whole community was destroyed to make space for it.”
The shadow of the Kings Garden theme park has hung over al-Bustan for nearly two decades, but the bulldozers have been held back until now by Palestinian resistance, combined with international opposition and some ambivalence within Israeli politics.
All three barriers have fallen since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, the ensuing Gaza war and the restoration of Donald Trump as US president. Ambassadors from other countries still visit and pledge support, but with Washington’s support, their combined intervention has proved ineffectual.
“There are stray dogs who go around the neighbourhood at night who feel more safe and secure than we do,” said Mohammad Qwaider, 60, a father of six. He recently demolished the part of the house which has been a family home for more than half a century, in the hope of appeasing the planners. This week, however, a man from the municipality came to warn him that the bulldozers would be back to level the rest of it.
Qwaider has chronic back problems, a son with special needs, and an infirm elderly mother who is unable to move, and he argues they have no other options.
“If they demolish our house, we will put up a tent. We will not leave,” he said. “Maybe they misunderstand our mentality as Palestinians. We are not an easy target. You cannot take our land.”
His mother, Yusra, is confined to a bed in a small ground-floor room. Her life story embodies modern Palestinian history. She was born 97 years ago in Jaffa but her family was forced to flee in 1948 in what Palestinians call the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the mass displacement which is the other side of the historical coin of Israel’s independence in that year.
Nakba commemoration day fell on Friday, the day after Israeli Jews asserted their control with a nationalist march through the old city to mark Jerusalem Day, chanting “death to Arabs”.
From Jaffa, Yusra Qwaider’s family sought shelter in a village called Yalo in Jordanian-controlled territory west of Jerusalem. In 1967 they were driven out again in the six-day Arab-Israeli war, and Israeli forces demolished their house and the rest of the village. From there they went to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s old city in 1970, but were only able to stay three years before large parts of the district were demolished by the city’s new masters.
“After the Jewish quarter, we came here to Silwan. From here, we are not leaving. Not me, and not my children,” she said.
Two doors down, Fakhri Abu Diab, the al-Bustan community leader, took the same decision when his family house was demolished in 2024. Now he and his wife, Amina, live in a portable cabin amid the rubble of what was once their family home of four generations. Only part of the kitchen of the old house has been left standing among the ruins.
“This is where we used to eat with my children, my grandchildren,” Abu Diab said. “They demolished our past. They demolished our memories. They demolished our dreams. They demolished my childhood, our childhood, and they demolished our future.”
He compared the torture of living in the wreckage of his family’s history to a physiological illness. “My heart is burning,” he said. “Maybe you see me sitting with you, talking to you, but from inside, I am burning.”
Abu Diab is still paying off the 43,000 shekel (£11,000) fine the municipality imposed to cover the cost of demolishing his home, at the rate of 4,000 shekels (£1,020) a month. He said he also had to pay 9,000 shekels (£2,300) for the sandwiches the police ate while enforcing the days-long operation.
The Jerusalem municipality did not respond to a request for comment on its actions in al-Bustan, but told the +972 news site that the planned theme park was “being constructed for the benefit of all city residents” and al-Bustan’s houses were built illegally.
“This area was never zoned for residential use, and the Jerusalem municipality is now working to build a park in an area that suffers from a severe shortage of open public spaces,” it said.
The municipality also said it had tried “for years to find a solution for the residents that would also include a residential alternative, but they did not express any serious interest in reaching a resolution”.
To that, Abu Diab pointed out that the community had long ago presented a master plan for the district with plenty of green space, which he said had been overruled at the political level. On the issue of permits, he said, some homes like his dated back to long before the Israeli occupation.
The municipality has routinely denied building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem while routinely approving them for Israeli Jews. Furthermore, Abu Diab argued, the same rules were never applied to unauthorised settler outposts which constantly spring up in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Amina Abu Diab, a schoolteacher and social worker, said her main concern now was for the children she cares for, who were facing a future of homelessness and uncertainty.
“A house is a child’s dream of the future, and if somebody comes to demolish them, they destroy the dreams and a child’s sense of security,” she said. “And then what do the children think of us? That we cannot protect ourselves and we cannot protect our children.”
