Israeli settler home in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, following the eviction of a number of Palestinian families. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank , Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

A deliberate Israeli policy to Judaise East Jerusalem has forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and created a chronic housing shortage in the occupied part of the city.

Simultaneously, Israeli settlers have been encouraged by the Jerusalem Municipality to settle in the growing number of settlements mushrooming in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, all illegal under international law.

The municipality has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has pursued a declared policy of maintaining a 72 percent majority of Jews over Palestinians in the city,” according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).The municipality [of Jerusalem] has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state

“Towards that end it has not allowed Palestinians to build new homes, creating an artificial shortage of some 25,000 housing units in the Palestinian sector, while Palestinians are not able to access most of the Jewish neighbourhoods.

“This induced shortage raises the price of renting or buying, and since 70 percent of Palestinians live under the poverty line, they are forced to move outside the Jerusalem borders to acquire affordable housing where they can be stripped legally of their Jerusalem residency,” explains Halper.

“Such are the political machinations behind the seemingly justified policy of demolishing ‘illegal’ homes, a key element of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing,” he adds.

The International Peace and Cooperation Centre (IPCC) – a Palestinian non-governmental organisation specialised in urban planning and community development – issued an East Jerusalem Housing Review 2013 report describing some of the obstacles Palestinians face in trying to build new homes or extend current homes.

“House construction is severely stifled by deficiencies in the planning and, to a lesser extent, delivery systems, both of which have been derailed by Israeli policy makers,” stated the report.

“Building legally, by obtaining a permit through the planning system, is impossible within the majority of land in East Jerusalem. The permit system rigidly maintains requirements that cannot be met as a result of the planning and infrastructural deficiencies.”

According to IPCC, these include “insufficient outline and detailed master plans, inappropriate zoning of urban areas as low density or ‘green’ land, insufficient physical infrastructure, including road, sewage and water networks and the near total absence of registered land.”

Most of the land in East Jerusalem (92 percent) is unregistered, making it impossible to obtain building permits.

The IPCC report said that “development is further stifled by institutional shortcomings such as the unavailability of suitable housing loans, insufficient capacity or willingness of the private sector to plan and deliver large housing projects, the limited amount of suitable development land for sale and its extraordinary cost.”

As a result, Palestinians have been forced to build without the requisite permits. Over 70 percent of new construction from 2001 to 2010 was undertaken without building permits, with informal dwellings comprising between 42 and 54 percent of all housing.

Average room density is 1.9 people per room, making it 90 percent higher than in Jewish West Jerusalem.

While the Israeli authorities have set strategies concerning the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers have been using other methods to slowly take over.

Muhammad Sabbagh is a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem who, together with other Palestinian activists, is involved in a long, ongoing battle with Israeli settlers over home ownership and possible eviction.

His extended family is part of a group of 28 Palestinian refugee families who live right next to several Israeli settlement homes.

These Palestinian families were allocated land by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956 when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. The Jordanian government had said that after three years the Palestinians would be given the homes.

However, following Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967 Israeli settlers tried to evict the Palestinians claiming they had documents proving ownership of the homes from the late 1800s during the Ottoman Empire.

The case went back and forth to the Israeli courts until an agreement was reached that the Palestinians could stay for the next 90 years if they agreed to pay rent.

When some of the families refused to pay the rent on the basis that the homes belonged to neither the Israeli government nor the settlers, they were evicted in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers and police.

Subsequent court action and original Turkish documentation proved that the settlers’ documents were forged and that the homes had never belonged to the Jewish community several hundred years ago as the settlers had claimed.

Further evictions have currently been frozen by the Israeli courts on the basis of the documents being forgeries but Sabbagh says that is insufficient.

“We are now fighting to have the homes returned to us as their legal owners and so that the families who were evicted can return home.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, with Peru’s agriculture minister, Milton von Hesse, to his right, meeting with local campesinas in the highlands town of Quequeña. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
QUEQUEÑA, Peru , Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

Some 40 multicoloured tents were set up to showcase the fruits of community-based rural development projects in the main square of this village in southern Peru during a visit by IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze.

The event organised in this highlands community in the southern Peruvian department of Arequipa showed the fruits of 20 years of collaboration between the specialised United Nations agency and this South American country.

Dishes made with the protein-rich quinoa; mushrooms that grow 4,000 metres above sea level; chubby guinea pigs; brightly coloured garments; homegrown honey; different kinds of cheese; and scale models of towns, rivers and valleys were presented while a popular local band played.

On his first trip to Peru, the Nigerian expert who heads IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) visited Quequeña on Aug. 3, where products made by community projects in Arequipa and the neighbouring southern departments of Moquegua, Cuzco and Puno were displayed.

“It’s not strange that Peru has been the laboratory where we decided to launch these initiatives,” Josefina Stubbs, director of IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, told IPS.

Stubbs, who accompanied Nwanze, said the Local Resource Allocation Committees (LRACs) developed in southern Peru have drawn attention from other countries, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Peruvian technical experts involved in the project will soon travel to China to share their experiences, which are focused on meeting needs in communities based on the transparent community management of resources, said Stubbs.

The funds IFAD provides the Peruvian government are transferred to the communities’ own bank accounts, explained the expert from the Dominican Republic.

The project in southern Peru is the oldest of the three that the government is carrying out in rural areas with loans and technical advice from IFAD.

Here in Arequipa, the communities design and implement their own productive initiatives, which help generate income to cover their basic needs. Crop improvement, guinea pig and livestock raising, weaving and gastronomic undertakings using local products are some of the projects.

“IFAD supports the government’s efforts to enable people to produce enough to have access to buy something to feed themselves,” Nwanze told IPS.

On Sunday, the head of IFAD visited the highland villages of Sibayo and Callalli, which are also in Arequipa, before returning to Lima on Monday and flying from there to Colombia, where similar projects are being carried out.

Every three years, IFAD distributes some 300 to 400 million dollars in loans for agricultural and rural development in Latin America, where it supports a range of projects in nearly every country in the region.

Nwanze added that the next step for Peru would be to strengthen the decentralisation of the management of the projects so the “regional authorities take responsibility for the programme and the financing.” He mentioned the progress IFAD has made along those lines in Argentina and Brazil.

Stubbs said the idea was for more villages and towns to adopt this kind of initiative. With that aim, IFAD authorities met Saturday morning with the governor of Arequipa, Juan Manuel Guillén. A working group will now be created to launch this new stage, she said.

For his part, Peru’s minister of agriculture, Milton von Hesse, praised IFAD for seeing campesinos as “the most qualified to decide what kind of technical assistance they need” and for fomenting connections between markets.

The important thing is that the products made by local campesinos make it outside their communities, and even outside the country, he said.

“It has been 20 years of continuous learning; we have also made mistakes,” he told IPS. “But what is important is that successful experiences have been incorporated in our public policies, and we will continue doing that with all of the lessons that are learned.”

In middle-income countries like Peru, IFAD continues to grant loans, but it especially provides technical assistance because, as Stubbs said, “macroeconomic stability will not by itself bring development.

“For the first time, I have the privilege to see that all of the governments, of whatever political stripe, have really understood that closing the inequality gap is in everyone’s interest,” she said.

Juan Moreno, programme manager for IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, informed IPS that the agency only has an allotment of 25 million dollars for working with Peru through 2015.

“We don’t have one billion dollars, like the World Bank,” Stubbs said. “Latin America doesn’t need IFAD’s money – it needs IFAD’s knowledge.”

To illustrate, she mentioned the case of Argentina, which two years ago launched a 150 million dollar project, of which IFAD only supplied seven million dollars. Most of the funds came from the government itself.

In the midst of regional economic growth based in large part on the extractive industries, Stubbs said governments and civil society should exercise more oversight of the activities of mining and other industries, to preserve water sources and land, which poor rural populations depend on for subsistence.

She said every country should undertake its own kind of development, depending on its ecosystem.

Nwanze, meanwhile, said governments should invest in infrastructure like roads to generate new opportunities for local development. He added that in rural areas, “when particularly women have access to economic empowerment, the community starts to change.”

He said it is difficult to say, in a few words, how to fight poverty. But he added that access to basic services is key to working with the most disadvantaged communities from a human rights perspective.

“For me, human rights are basically in everything, it is not only a question of people having freedom of speech,” the Nigerian expert said before heading to his next destination.