In Lod, destruction of homes may be harbinger of more woes for Israel's Arabs

LOD // Where six modest homes of the Abu Eid family once stood rest piles of rubble, refrigerators and personal belongings.

Demolitions that target Arab homes are certainly not a new issue inside Israel: as many as 800 were destroyed last year, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). Because many lack the difficult-to-obtain housing permits, tens of thousands more are at risk for demolition.

But the Abu Eid family compound was flattened last December by way of an especially tenuous legal justification and unusually brutal force, according to Israeli and international rights groups.

Itay Epshtain, co-director of ICAHD, said: "I've been to countless home demolitions, but few as violent as that one. A police officer cocked his M-16 rifle at me and said, 'If you don't stand back, I'm going to shoot you'."

Six months later, 67 members of the impoverished Abu Eid family have been forced to move in with friends and neighbours in Lod, a crime-ridden city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The demolition has exacerbated already tense relations between Lod's 50,000 Jews and 20,000 Arabs, where there are weekly demonstrations to protest about the incident.

Arab residents decry neglect by the mainly Jewish municipal officials, calling the old town, where drug abuse and petty crime have thrived, the "Lod ghetto".

"There's no more Lod, it was demolished," Mohammed Salim Meme, 61, an Arab who lives in the old city, said of the steady elimination of Arab structures.

While the ministry of defence resettled the Abu Eid family in Lod during the late 1950s, they leased from the Israel Land Administration (ILA). It is the ILA, a semi-governmental body that controls roughly 93 per cent of all the country's land, not the Abu Eids, that technically owns the land.

The family was denied a request in 2001 to have the area on which its homes were built rezoned from agricultural to residential land, their lawyer, Adi Ben Yaacov, said. This would have given legal status to their houses, which Israeli authorities said lacked permits.

Neighbouring land, on the other hand, has received such rezonings recently to allow for expanding Jewish communities and building a seven-hectare Jewish religious school, whose road is expected to run through what was the Abu Eid compound.

Mr Yaacov said the ILA waged a legal campaign against the family, which culminated in obtaining an eviction notice. But he said the organisation has yet to demonstrate proof of obtaining a demolition permit for their homes.

"They just came, tossed the kids and people out and demolished them," he said. "They broke just about every law on the book."

None of the family members has been offered compensation, but instead they are expected to reimburse the authorities for the demolition fees, Those usually run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Nor have the Abu Eids received an explanation for the estimated 500 police officers who, according to Human Rights Watch, arrested four family members on the day of the demolition and pointed weapons at children.

"They used the army, attacked women, broke arms," said Wasfieh Abu Eid, the 73-year-old family matriarch, as she waded through the detritus of her home of nearly five decades.

She said she spent four days in hospital after "the police threw me to the ground" during that rainy winter day.

For Mrs Abu Eid, whose family was uprooted from what is now northern Israel in the fighting of 1948, the incident may be a harbinger of further hardship for her and the rest of Israel's roughly 1.2 million Arab citizens.

"Big problems are awaiting us," she said. Behind her growing concerns are rising calls that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state. Spearheading this is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, who has declared that recognition of Israel's Jewish character is a necessary element for peace with the Palestinians.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation, which conducts peace talks with Israel, already recognised it as an independent country when the Oslo peace process started in 1993. But the group's leaders have refused to extend a Jewish recognition, and not only because they see it as a ploy to avoid negotiating the key issue of a right of return for Palestinian refugees.

It also smacks of further pretext to codify discrimination against Israel's Arabs, such as the Abu Eids, said Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator in talks with Israel.

"They are already discriminated against as second-class citizens. They are already hounded everywhere they go," he said. "Why is that we have marginalise them even further with this Jewish-state recognition?"

That marginalisation was on full display in the case of the Abu Eids, according to Mr Yaacov, and rights organsations.

"They simply demolished their homes without any legality, as far as I'm concerned," Mr Yaacov said.

Back in what remained of her family compound, Mrs Abu Eid wonders what will become of the 27 children, some of whom had stopped attending school. Several have forgone education for work to help sustain the family.

"What about the kids? What will they do?" said Mrs Abu Eid.

"It feels like I've lived a life of fire and it's starting to burn my whole family."

Officials from the ILA could not be reached for comment.

hnaylor@thenational.ae