In the Village of Nowhere, a Fate Soon Sealed

A Narrowing Existence

The authorities came to Raed Shawarwa's house, a smooth concrete cube behind his father's, while he was on a job hours away. His wife received them nervously on a March day in 2004. The house, they said, would have to be torn down.

"The Jews told us we had no building permits," said Shawarwa, a cousin of Mahmoud and a distant cousin of the Darawis. "But no one here does."

For years, the village had been growing slowly, clandestinely, despite the 1993 Israeli orders to cease construction. Village sons like Yusef Darawi married and brought their brides from surrounding towns, some with Jerusalem residency. Families grew larger. Today, children's tiny purple pants and school smocks dry on lines strung beneath vine-laced trellises outside many of the homes in the warm evening.

The construction to enlarge homes and accommodate the population growth was done without permits, which Arab residents receive from the Jerusalem municipality only with great difficulty. City officials say the decisions are based on planning criteria. But human rights groups counter that denying permits is a way to limit Arab population growth and increase the proportion of the city's Jewish residents.

An Israeli organization that tracks home demolitions reports that the Jerusalem municipality has destroyed 467 homes that it says were built without permits since 2000 -- the year the second Palestinian uprising began.

As the intifada intensified around him, Shawarwa had more immediate concerns -- saving his house, which with his slight savings, he had built himself. He commuted several hours each day to Ramallah, where, as a heavy-machinery operator on a construction crew, he made far more than in Bethlehem. In a good month, he says, he brings home $225.

Shawarwa appeared in court in 2004 in a bid to make his house legal. He was fined the equivalent of $6,000, more than two years' salary, and the house was ordered sealed until permits could be arranged. Raed bricked up his own windows.

"I felt like I was killing myself," Shawarwa said over warm flat bread and tea under an olive tree on his doorstep.

The house is still sealed two years later. When he went to the Jerusalem municipality to arrange for permits, he discovered he lived nowhere.

"The people there told us we didn't belong to Jerusalem but to Bethlehem," said Shawarwa, who is still paying off his fine in monthly increments. "When we went to Bethlehem, they told us we belong to Jerusalem. So we learned that we don't belong to either side."

Last year, a lawyer for Nuaman and the Israeli government reached an agreement that would allow the families to apply for Jerusalem residency without a guarantee of success, a risky proposition given that failure would likely cost them their homes. The status of the agreement appears uncertain now, and the villagers have appealed to the Jerusalem municipality for the fence to be rerouted in a way that leaves them in the West Bank.

Life in the village, meanwhile, is narrowing.

At the end of April, Israeli work crews installed a steel gate at one end of the road into the village. A lock and chain appeared on it a week later, the only keys in the hands of border police and the work crews in the valley below. No taxis, buses or private vehicles that do not belong to village residents are allowed in.

The village has been without running water for much of this month, shut off by the construction crews working below. Lowering buckets into makeshift backyard wells, men and women fetch their own water just as their parents and grandparents did on the same hilltop decades ago.

Lives Dismantled

Nidal Darawi, a schoolteacher, married in late 2005. The newlyweds added a kitchen to the small house he had built eight years earlier without permits. But the construction job drew the notice of passing border police patrols. The demolition team arrived soon after, on the last day of January.

Using a backhoe, the crew dismantled the house as the family and soldiers looked on. The carefully tended rosebushes rimming the property remain intact, surrounding a heap of rubble and twisted rebar.

"This is a threat to Israel?" asked Yusef Darawi, a brother, looking over the wreckage of the house in the lot behind his own. "This was his blood and the blood of his children -- all of his savings."