‘Turning Israelis Into Settlers After Death’: Israel to Build Cemetery In Ecological ‘Hotspot’ in Palestine

African Stream did a round-up of news from Africa, starting with:

• the Pope’s visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC);
• a new anti-terror axis in West Africa between Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali after booting France out of Burkina Faso and Mali;
• a security summit in Burundi on the war in the DRC;
• Botswana threatened to cut ties with diamond mining and sales company De Beers without a better deal;
• Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, announced a shortened term after a failed coup;
• more than 400 people went on trial in connection with the assassination of Chad’s president, Idriss Déby;
• Tanzania banned “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series of books, as well as sex-education books that mentioned transgender and gay rights;
• Tunisia told the United States it should not meddle in the arrest of journalists, political figures and business leaders;
• Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali were also denied AU membership for their policy of “zero tolerance for undemocratic change;”
• the African Union removed a reportedly uninvited Israeli delegation at the union’s summit;
• Christian Atsu, a Ghanaian football player known for his charity work, was killed in Turkey during the earthquake that impacted Turkey and Syria; and
• counting is still underway after Nigeria’s presidential election, held on February 25.
  

Correction: The majority of homes to be razed were built after 1967. A previous version of this article stated otherwise.

EAST JERUSALEM—For the fifth week in a row, residents of Jabal al-Mukaber, a Palestinian neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem, demonstrated outside city hall against a municipal plan to demolish their homes.

Banging drums, blaring fog horns and blowing whistles, protesters demanded on March 20 that the municipality freeze 62 home demolition orders. Residents received these notices in January as part of a plan to expand the American Road, a highway cutting through Jabal al-Mukaber and largely viewed as a bypass serving illegal Israeli settlements throughout Jerusalem.

“This is a political target by the municipality to push the residents of Jabal al-Mukaber to take their stuff and live outside of Jerusalem,” said Mohamed Nas, who received a demolition order.

East Jerusalem’s ‘Urban Renewal’ Plan

The American Road was first proposed in 1996. It is named after a much narrower road U.S. contractors had abandoned midway through construction because the Six-Day War had begun in 1967. By the 2019, plans were underway to turn the rural road into an urban highway. The latest $250 million construction began in 2020.

The American Road recently was widened by 52 feet. But now plans are underway to expand the highway by another 105 feet, where the 62 houses slated for demolition are located.

An estimated 800 housing units also are being threatened with demolition to develop both sides of the highway, mostly for commercial and office use.

Sari Kronish, an architect with Israeli planning rights organization Bimkom, explained the municipality is hoping to turn the area around the American Road into an urban center. But without an adequate proportion reserved for residential use, the municipality’s urban renewal scheme fails in addressing the neighborhood’s main issue—a lack of housing.

“Equitable housing solutions are what drive the market,” Kronish said. “If we compare it to other places in the country, you have a minimum of 50 percent housing here.”

According to Kronish, residential building rights are included in this development plan, but do not allow for legalizing existing homes. Therefore, the houses in Jabal al-Mukaber will need to be razed and rebuilt into 8-floor units to meet the municipality’s new standards.

While only 62 homes in Jabal al-Mukaber have received official demolition orders, residents say municipal building plans suggest a total of 862 homes on about 94 acres are at risk of demolition because of the highway’s outlined development and proposed commercial center.

“Projects of urban renewal and evacuation and construction are being led, in cooperation and in dialogue with the residents,” said a municipality spokesperson, referencing reaching a joint compromise with the Bashir family in Jabal al-Mukaber.

However, the municipality did not respond when asked to elaborate on this agreement. Nas said any proposed settlements in Jabal al-Mukaber are false.

Denying the Right to Build

In a statement to Toward Freedom, the municipality said they will not permit illegal construction in the city. The majority of homes in Jabal al-Mukaber, and throughout East Jerusalem, lack building permits.

According to Jerusalem municipality data obtained by settlement watchdog group, Peace Now, only 16 percent of Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods received building permits from 1991 to 2018, compared to 38 percent of construction permits approved for Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. The extreme difficulty Palestinians experience in getting construction permits forces many to build without the necessary approvals or live in homes deemed illegal.

Not only do Palestinians face a labyrinth of bureaucratic procedures when building, but a lack of available land as well. Palestinians in East Jerusalem can only build on 17 percent of the land, while 35 percent is labeled as green spaces or conservation areas. In Jabal al-Mukaber, nearly 70 percent of the land is designated as “open space.”

Mohammad Mashal, 71, received his first demolition notice in 1994. He’s paid 200,000 shekels, or $62,000, in fines over nearly three decades. Mashal consistently applied for a permit, but was always rejected. Just last month, he received another demolition order as part of the 62 cases slated for demolition.

Ahmad Akmasri, 25, explained his father built their home before 1967 and decided to extend it in 2006. In 2010, the family started applying for a permit. But, until now, no building rights have been issued.

“We’re talking about 12 years in which we paid up to 100,000 shekels [$31,000] in fees, applications for the engineers, lawyers, all of what you can imagine, and it’s still not yet done,” Akmasri said.

Akmasri’s family is also embroiled in a separate building obstacle due to the Kaminitz Law. Passed by the Israeli parliament in 2017, it allows officials unlimited power in cracking down on unauthorized building, specifically in granting extensions on demolition orders. In addition to the 62 demolition cases in Jabal al-Mukaber, 70 other cases are related to the Kaminitz Law, including Akmasri’s family. With this new legislation, the family faces yet another fine after being unable to secure an extension in 2020 over administrative issues spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

Raed Bashir, the lawyer representing the neighborhood, submitted repeated objections to the municipal court against the demolition orders—all of which were rejected. But the movement remains steadfast as Bashir plans to submit next month an objection to Israel’s Supreme Court.

Mousa Jumah, 61, received a demolition notice about a decade ago.

“We have no rest in our life,” he said, describing a tense environment not unlike the atmosphere of the March 20 protest. “We are under pressure, and pressure leads to explosion.”

Amid the beating of drums and marching demonstrators inching closer and closer to barricaded city hall doors, Jumah captured the sentiment under the loud chanting: A sense of perpetual uncertainty.

“We have no future,” Jumah said. “We are wasted in this world.”

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.

Clara Ines Yalanda, 36, is a Misak Indigenous woman and a single mother. While she was still a girl, she migrated from an Indigenous reservation to Popayan, the capital of the Cauca region in southern Colombia. With few options available, Yalanda and her family settled in an informal neighborhood.

Twenty years later, Yalanda has been unable to break the cycle of poverty associated with informal neighborhoods. A housing deficit and migration to cities has led rural migrants like Yalanda to construct homes within cities using low-quality materials. These type of homes—which make up 65 percent of housing in Colombian cities—lack basic services, such as a connection to water or a sewage system, and they are constructed outside the bounds of local laws.

Yalanda’s house puts her family’s health and safety at risk because it is near a stream and a sewer drainage system. Currently, only one of Yalanda’s five children lives with her because of her strained finances as well as the poor state of the house.

Early this year, Yalanda’s home and five others’ flooded, with the water having risen more than 1 meter (3.28 feet) high. That forced her to temporarily abandon her home, losing her possessions in the process. Yalanda said the municipality has warned several times that her house is in a risk area—but she added it has not offered a solution.

“They have told me I have to leave,” Yalanda said. “But where can I go? I do not have anywhere else.”

Sunday’s second-round presidential election in Colombia could transform the lives of informal settlement residents like Yalanda. Former-militant-turned-politician Gustavo Petro and millionaire businessman Rodolfo Hernández approach the country’s urban housing crisis and environmental policy in different ways. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently reported governments must create housing programs that protect the most vulnerable from increasingly volatile weather events global climate change appears to be causing.

Landslides, Fires and Floods Intensify

Precarious conditions like Yalanda’s are not unusual. In Colombia, 65 percent of urban areas are informal, and 20 percent of the population lives in high-risk zones. This increases the exposure of residents to the impacts of climate change, as rainfall and wildfires intensify.

“Informal settlements have been a condition of urban development in Colombia for the last 50 years,” explained Gustavo Carrion, a consultant and on risk management, climate change and territorial planning. “Families migrate to the cities and settle in the most vulnerable areas and [are] the most exposed to landslides, fires and floods.”

According to Colombia’s National Risk Management Unit, La Niña—a weather phenomenon that causes higher-than-normal rainfall—affected between March and June 33,000 families, killed 78 people, injured 91 and caused eight people to remain missing. Although this phenomenon is not a direct consequence of climate change, scientists have warned that La Niña events are intensifying and becoming more frequent due to greenhouse gas emissions.

The Triple Cycle of Vulnerability

Most of the inhabitants of informal neighborhoods had migrated from rural areas that were hit by the decades-long armed conflict and poverty. Much of the conflict revolves around the production and flow of illicit drugs.

Yet, not only are the new homes of rural migrants informal, the way they make their living can be, too.

“I have worked my whole life selling vegetables and depend entirely on this,” Yalanda told Toward Freedom. “I do not have another source of income. The little I earn is for food and some necessities for the children. It is hard.”

Due to these conditions, residents of informal neighborhoods are caught in a triple cycle of vulnerability: First, they lack access to goods and services; second, they suffer material losses during climate-change disasters; and third, they are stigmatized by society and institutions, preventing adequate assistance.

According to Yalanda, the National Risk Management Unit offered a cooking pot and a torch, but denied further support due to their informal condition. A member of the unit reportedly suggested she should go back to her birthplace. Toward Freedom received no response after requesting an interview with the unit.

The IPCC has established “occupants of informal settlements are particularly exposed to climate events, given low-quality housing, limited capacity to adapt, and limited or no risk-reducing infrastructure.”

Early this year, a UN-convened working group of scientists presented the most recent IPCC report. At both the global and regional levels, it is the most comprehensive investigation of how climate change impacts ecosystems, biodiversity and human communities.

The report says “humanitarian responses and local emergency management are vital for disaster risk reduction, yet are compromised in urban contexts, where it is difficult to confirm property ownership.”

‘We Do Not Want Anything for Free’

Rene Delgado, president of the Local Community Action Council, explained residents of El Dorado—where Yalanda lives—have met with government officials many times since they settled in the area more than 20 years ago. A reallocation area was designated, but residents have been unable to participate because of the high loan-interest rates.

“We do not want anything for free,” Delgado said. “The only thing we are asking for is a payment option according to our economic capacities.”

The Cartagena-based Center for Regional Economics found around 70 percent of Colombian households that apply for low-income housing are headed by informal workers. The insecurity associated with this kind of work makes it difficult to apply for a bank loan, necessary for obtaining low-income housing.

“Colombian housing policy focuses on subsidizing loans that drown people financially,” Carrion explained. “Often low-income housing projects do not benefit the most vulnerable families. Instead, it results in a profitable business for a small sector that also participates in policymaking.”

Presidential Candidates on Housing

Previous local mandates set out by each presidential candidate provide a glimpse into what each may offer if elected president.

Petro, the left-wing Pacto Histórico coalition candidate, was mayor of Bogotá between 2012 and 2015. During his term in office, he oversaw the creation of more than 19,000 houses for victims of armed violence and residents of high-risk zones as part of a national housing program known as Vivienda de Interes Prioritario (VIP). Although Petro did not achieve his goal of 70,000 houses, VIPs in Bogota grew by 26 percent. Meanwhile, they shrunk by 27 percent nationwide.

Petro also has highlighted the importance of cities’ adaptability to climate change. Some of his proposals include restoring ecosystems and hydrological systems, reverting to deforestation based on communitarian and public governance of commonly used resources, as well as guaranteeing access to drinking water. The final policy was implemented in Bogotá during his term as mayor.

Hernández—also known as “the engineer”—is running on the League of Anti-Corruption Governors ticket. He became a millionaire by building low-income housing projects in the 1990s. But, by 2019, Hernández failed to deliver on constructing 20,000 low-income houses in Bucaramanga, a promise he made while running in 2015 for mayor of the city. Plus, Hernández’s construction company was involved in a scandal in 2001 for delivering poorly built homes that endangered lives. The company was later liquidated, but it did not compensate the affected residents.

Hernandez provides brief information on his website regarding how he would address climate change. During a presidential election debate on the environment, he expressed he lacks knowledge on the matter. Hernández also has suggested combining the Ministry of Environment with the Ministry of Culture. That has led some to speculate that, if Hernández is elected, the environment would be a minimal concern for his government.

“We are talking about the vulnerability of ecosystems and people,” Carrion said. “For that reason, housing policy has to be articulated environmentally and socially, while also taking into account poverty exacerbated by the pandemic.”