Angela Godfrey-Goldstein co-directs the Palestinian anti-occupation non-profit, Jahalin Solidarity, which advocates against forcible displacement. She was an Israeli peace and environmental activist in the Sinai from 1998 to 2002.
"There is no future. They destroyed the future and everything else," said Fayez Awad, 58, sitting on what remained of his floor at property in al-Bustan, part of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem. "We spent our whole lives building this house. This is all we managed to achieve in life. They brought us back to zero again, me and my children." These words, expressed to a BBC correspondent I escorted throughout the historically Palestinian neighborhood in June, define the Palestinian experience amid Israel's campaign to ethnically cleanse them from their land.
Amid a regional war and Israeli violence against Palestinians that long-ago became normalized in the West, the worst forcible displacement since 1967 in East Jerusalem is moving forward. The Israeli state is working overtime to ensure the city will never be the capital of any future, viable Palestinian state.
Over the last decade living here, I have watched as increasingly right-wing authorities transformed the city into one exclusively for Jewish Israelis. In local parlance, this constitutes "Judaization:" a strategy to displace Palestinian East Jerusalemites through demolitions, evictions and deliberately inadequate and unaffordable housing. These efforts include the authorization of huge new settlements surrounding East Jerusalem that block West Bank Palestinians' access to the city.
Amid a regional war and Israeli violence against Palestinians that long-ago became normalized in the West, the worst forcible displacement since 1967 in East Jerusalem is moving forward.
- Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Al-Bustan, a small village located south of Al-Aqsa Mosque, is currently the focus of this campaign. The Jerusalem municipality plans to replace 1,550 Palestinian homes with settler parking lots and a park. Displaced landowners will not receive compensation, left with nowhere to go because of a rigged system dating back to 1968, when no open land was zoned for Palestinian residents. So-called "illegal" building has been the only option for Palestinian development.
Haaretz recently reported that only 7% of building permits were awarded to Palestinians this year, despite representing 40% of the city's population. Over one-third of East Jerusalem Palestinians are already forced to live in the slums of Kufr Aqeb or Shu'afat Refugee Camp. These areas legally fall within Jerusalem's city limits but beyond the Apartheid Wall separating the city and much of the occupied West Bank, with checkpoints preventing easy access.
My friend Fakhri abu Diab was born in al-Bustan 64 years ago in his grandparents' home. It was demolished twice in 2024 as punishment for his advocacy on behalf of his community. Today, he lives in a trailer on his land. One evening while asleep, he suddenly heard voices, crashing doors and babbling geese honking warnings of intruders. Groggily wondering if he was in a nightmare, he awoke, startled in bed with his wife. What he saw horrified him: rifles pointed at him by masked men. They took him away for questioning in retaliation for his advocacy.
Over the last decade living here, I have watched as increasingly right-wing authorities transformed the city into one exclusively for Jewish Israelis.
- Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
Many rely on those advocacy efforts. Yusra Qwaider, a 97-year-old Palestinian bed-ridden in al-Bustan, recently told The Guardian that she had been served a notice of her home's imminent demolition. Her doctor warns that removal will kill her, a brutal end to a life spent searching for safety. Born in Jaffa, Israeli militias forcibly displaced her family during the 1947-49 Nakba that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon the creation of Israel. Her family was again violently and forcibly displaced from Yalo, near Amwas, during the 1967 Six-Day War that established today's illegal occupation and apartheid system, to Jerusalem's Old City and, finally, Silwan. Where will she go now?
Al-Bustan's community is tightly knit by extended families. Twenty years of negotiations through lawyers and in direct meetings with the municipality were recently called off by the authorities, who now deny residents any alternative accommodation or compensation as they face the loss of their homes. Years of meetings with town planners, costing the community tens of thousands of dollars, promises by successive mayors not to demolish and false pledges that the government would respect their land rights are over.
Officials have stepped up demolition orders, giving residents two options: government demolition or self-demolition. The latter option saves Palestinian residents the substantial expense of bulldozers, plus police overtime and their lunches, which are charged to homeowners. Yet certain costs cannot be avoided. Fines are levied for "illegal building," averaging $35,000. Expenses to build and furnish a new home are substantial.
Imagine the feeling of taking a sledgehammer to your home's kitchen, bathroom or child's playroom. Each demolition generates a legacy of understandable hatred on which terror thrives. That may explain why the Border Police, a semi-military force policing East Jerusalem, including demolitions, operates within the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Their surveillance cameras' gaze is so invasive that it feels like you are being watched while sleeping.
Many visitors understand the plight of the residents of al-Bustan. There is a warm solidarity from Global South diplomats, who perhaps sense an affinity with their communities. Yet they also experience the loud music and aggressive behavior of Jewish settlers increasingly taking up residence here, a reminder that they refuse to join the community as good neighbors. Asked why they have taken over the homes of long-standing residents, they respond: "But they built illegally!" Of course, the overused line ignores that 13% of East Jerusalem zoned in 1968 for Palestinian residence was almost fully built upon already.
The settlers, coordinating closely with the Israeli state, work overtime to ensure that Jerusalem is a city where coexistence is denied. They hope to establish Greater Jerusalem, a Jewish-only entity defined by apartheid policies that extend to planning, demolitions, services, road systems, affordable housing, evictions, legal systems and policing. In this reality, Palestinians are told that they are unwelcome in their homes, communities and land, across all aspects of society.
As an Israeli witnessing these developments firsthand, I sense that today's Israel bears only a dim relationship to Judaism's core values.
Israel has repeatedly proven its rejectionist foundation. It has rejected the internationally recognized two-state solution, just as it rejects sharing Jerusalem with Palestinians, let alone any genuine effort to create a viable Palestinian state. In doing so, it signs its own death warrant as a sustainable society integrated within the international community, hailed as a liberal democracy with citizens welcomed throughout the world.
Rahm Emanuel, an American politician and long-standing supporter of Israel, last month warned Israelis that their country has become a territorial pariah. His speech echoed an earlier warning by Vice President JD Vance to Israel: "You cannot just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem." It should speak volumes that two prominent U.S. politicians, traditionally very pro-Israel in rhetoric and action, now criticize the Israeli state.
It does not. Rhetoric alone has long failed to end the nightmare that Palestinians have faced for decades. The international community's statements of concern, or outright complicity in Israel's genocide of Gaza, after 77 years of Israeli impunity, stain our collective conscience. Until the world commits to action, leveraging accountability and justice mechanisms for Palestine, Israel will continue its downward spiral toward global isolation as Palestinian suffering worsens.
Today's Israel is often cited as the Third Temple, yearned for by Jews worldwide for generations. Yet many Jewish readers may now hear the tragic echoes of 70 CE, when decades of Jewish messianic hubris led the Roman Empire to destroy the Second Temple and, 65 years later, enforce Jewish exile from Jerusalem. What irony, then, that in forcing Palestinians to take a sledgehammer to their homes today, Jewish messianics — including Kahanists Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir and Arieh King — are slowly but surely destroying the foundations of the third temple they hoped to rebuild.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
