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A divided house, and divided lives, in Jerusalem http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=inDepthNews&storyID=2006-10-30T133154Z_01_L18230280_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST-HOUSE.xml&WTmodLoc=InDepthNewsHome_C1_%5bFeed%5d-2
Mon Oct 30, 2006
By Luke Baker
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - If they look out of their windows, Fawzia al-Kurd and Bryna Segal share the same view from the same house across the rooftops of East Jerusalem.
But that's where their shared vision ends.
Kurd, a 54-year-old Palestinian, raised her five children in the house, which sits half-way up a hill in Sheikh Jarrah, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Arab East Jerusalem.
Segal, a 25-year-old Jewish settler born in Israel to parents from New York, moved in nearly four months ago.
The large home, built of cream-colored Jerusalem stone, has been in Kurd's family since 1952, when she says her father-in-law was granted permission by the Jordanian authorities, which then controlled East Jerusalem, to build it.
For decades, including the years that followed the 1967 Middle East war, when Israeli forces defeated the Jordanian army and captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Kurd and her family lived in the house without particular problems.
Then in 1998, hoping to move her eldest son in with her, she renovated half the house to create a separate unit -- a two-bedroom home for her son and his family.
Because the work was a renovation rather than an extension, she says the Jerusalem municipality told her she did not need a building permit, and so the changes went ahead unchecked.
Then the problems began.
Eight years on, the person living next door to Kurd and her husband is Segal, with her husband and two young children. A third is on the way. "It's hard, every day it's so hard," says Kurd, a mild-mannered, religious woman who keeps her hair covered with a traditional hijab headdress. "I cannot bear it."
For Segal, a simply dressed woman who also keeps her hair covered for religious reasons, it's equally odd.
"We don't talk to one another," she says, playing with one of her sons at a playground near the house. "We don't bother them and they don't bother us."
RISKY RENOVATION
Property disputes are not uncommon in Jerusalem, a city that both Palestinians and Israelis want as their capital. But the one between Kurd and Segal is notably quirky.
Since 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, the Jewish population in the traditionally Arab area has grown rapidly, with wealthy Jewish organizations buying up properties and moving settlers in.
There are now estimated to be about 200,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, alongside about 250,000 Palestinians.
As the population balance grows ever closer to even, property disputes become more heated.
A few months after Kurd's '998 renovation, it came to the attention of the Knesset Yisrael Committee, a Jewish property rights group, that potentially illegal work had been carried out on the house and that ownership of the land was disputed.
A court case was filed and it was ultimately determined that settlers should be allowed to live in half of the house, which is built on land that Knesset Yisrael says belonged to Jews before 1948, when the state of Israel was founded and Jordan took over the West Bank in the ensuing war.
Lawyers challenged the ruling, but the settlers moved in, with the first group taking up residence in 2000. Since then other families have come and gone. Segal moved in June, after transferring from a settlement in the West Bank.
"We like living in places that are important," she said when asked why she wanted to live in this shared house. "We wanted to be in Jerusalem." There are now seven Jewish families living cheek-by-jowl with Palestinians in the small neighborhood. They are protected 24 hours a day by two armed Israeli guards.
Segal and her husband, who is looking for work, pay $300 a month rent for their house, which she says is the largest and nicest among the small settler bloc in the district. The rent doesn't go to Kurd, but she didn't say who it does go to.
$10 MILLION? NO THANKS
While the guards say they have to deal with very few problems, tensions are constantly present between the Jewish and Arab families in the area and between Kurd and the Segals.
The Jewish community has installed a small playground for their children, which Arab children are not allowed to use, says Segal. The armed guards stop them. The Arab children play on grass nearby or in the street. "I don't want my kids playing with Arab kids, and they don't want to play with each other," says Segal.
Kurd, who speaks Hebrew, says she refuses to speak to the Segals. Segal says she has tried to talk but has been rebuffed. "They took my house, why would I speak to them?" says Kurd.
She used to have a doorbell that played a prayer from the Koran, but she accuses the Segals of cutting the electricity. Their front doors open just inches apart.
An Israeli flag flies above the Segal's side of the house, as they do from all the other Jewish houses in the neighborhood. Inside Kurd's home, there is a tapestry map of the region showing Palestine before Israel's founding. Kurd holds out hope that lawyers will get the settlers evicted. But it's also unclear if she does have ownership of the land the house is built on since another Arab family can show ownership back to at least 1933. More court cases are pending.
Kurd says a settler group offered her $10 million to give up her side of the house. She refused.
"What would God think of me if I did such a thing?" she says, sitting on the green sofa in her front room, looking out the window over East Jerusalem, the same view the Segals have.
(Additional reporting by Roleen Tafakji)
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