Israeli policies on housing have been — and continue in new ways to be — discriminatory, according to the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Raquel Rolnik.
Rolnik concluded a 12-day official visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory [oPt, in UN terminology] on Sunday, and discussed her preliminary findings with the media at a press conference given in the American Colony Hotel [a long-standing site of Palestinian interaction with international figures that is now too expensive for most Palestinians but where Israelis feel comfortable], in East Jerusalem.
An official visit to Israel means that a visa was issued by the Government, indicating an official welcome. This official visit, said Rolnik, came after an official invitations from the Government of Israel, and from the Palestinian National Authority.
The invitation came in the wake of unprecedented public protests in Israel last summer [by groups and individuals referred to as the J-14 movement], which involved the establishment of “tent cities” in major Israeli cities, over the soaring and now-unaffordable prices of both rental and owned housing in Israel. [In Israel, despite confusing “reforms” in ownership laws, most of the land is ultimately owned by the State].
Rents are also soaring in the oPt — where many people own both the land on which their homes are built, as well as the structures as well — but with a different dynamic, based on the calculation over how much the employees of international embassies, organizations, and NGOs are willing, with substantial allowances from their employers, pay. Rents for decent apartments in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem rival prices in New York and Geneva — starting at $2500 dollars and rising — and internationals simply just pay, telling themselves + their organizations that they are helping Palestinians stay in their homes, though this has nothing to do with the extortionist prices being asked, and it does not at all benefit those Palestinians who are actually living under threat.
Rolnik started her remarks by noting that while “Israel has a very impressive record of providing adequate housing for waves of Jewish refugees and immigrants, deliberate state policy since the 1990s has made housing in Israel unaffordable for many … new public housing projects have stopped, except for the elderly, while the stock of public housing units has shrunk except in the periphery [in isolated locations, where there is little public transportation and few work opportunities] … and rent assistance subsidies have not been updated vis-a-vis the recent dramatic rise in rents … The policy now is to offer state lands only for the highest price … and housing has been provided [also for the highest price] mainly by the private sector since the 1990s”.
Rolnik said, “In my view, more revision [= review] of this policy is needed”.
It is also important to note, she said, that “laws in Israel are discriminatory, and directly or indirectly violate the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and deny the rights of equal access for all” to adequate housing.
She said that there would be an opportunity for a period of consultations with both the Israeli government and with the Palestinian Authority after her preliminary report is presented to both. The final version of her report will be discussed during a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in July 2013, she said. It will then probably be forwarded to the UN General Assembly for adoption at the end of 2013, together with a whole confusing package of reports [that may seem confusing + duplicative because they will be publicized at various points along the way] that will be submitted first to the UN Human Rights Council.
Rolnik was one of three UN Human Rights rapporteurs who received last October the report prepared by Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition [ICAHD] about Israel’s “ethnic discrimination” — which Sfard said at the time seemed to be a deliberate and possibly criminal policy aimed at getting rid of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. ICAHD asked the UN Special Rapporteurs to investigate — and Sfard also said that the Israel Government itself should conduct an investigation of the findings. Sfard said at a press conference organized by ICHAD at the time that “our observations bring us for the first time to the conclusion that, yes, there is a place between the Jordan River and the [Mediterranean] Sea where Israel is trying to chase Palestinian residents away – and that place is East Jerusalem. This is a very, very severe allegation”. This is discussed at length in an article published in the current issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly, here.
In her oral presentation, Rolnik did use the word “Judaization” twice — a fairly brave act, even for an official independently affiliated with the UN — and at one point she was asked [by Phil Weiss of the Mondoweiss blog] to clarify what she meant. ICAHD Co-Director Itay Epshtain quickly reported via email afterwards that Rolnik said: “Throughout my visit, I was able to witness a land development model that excludes, discriminates against and displaces minorities in Israel which is being replicated in the occupied territory, affecting Palestinian communities. The Bedouins in the Negev – inside Israel – as well as the new Jewish settlements in area C of the West Bank and inside Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem – are the new frontiers of dispossession of the traditional inhabitants, and the implementation of a strategy of Judaisation and control of the territory.” This taken from the “Transcript” of Rolnik’s remarks, and was also picked up and used in the title + the text of an article published by Ma’an News Agency here.
Rolnik did not mention in her remarks or her “transcript” that many Palestinian citizens of Israel are either themselves internally displaced, or descended from those internally displaced, during the 1948 War of Independence.
And, while hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, from 1947 through the early 1950s, many thousands of Jewish immigrants were housed in urban homes built and owned by Palestinians who fled during the turmoil that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel.
Those Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee during the fighting, but who did not remain inside the armistice lines negotiated by the UN, became refugees. Many of them, and their descendants, still live inside refugee camps in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — as well as in neighboring countries Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. [There are no recognized Palestinian refugee camps, administered by UNRWA, anywhere else in the world, including in Egypt, which refused to have them.]
Rolnik added that it was “an extremely complex legal situation”, and that while Israeli housing policy focussed on “Jewish refugees and immigrants from the holocaust, from Arab countries in the Middle East, and from the crumbling USSR”, it has “discriminated against certain groups according to their ethnic origin”.
In the Jaffa and in Akka, she said, there was a marked process of “gentrification + discrimination”.
And, she said, there has been “disregard of social and cultural specificity … and everything which is not European should be transformed by planning” — including Palestinian villages and Bedouin camps in the Negev which “predate the State of Israel and which are established on their own ancestor’s land”. But, she said, “why should they have to relocate to have adeequate housing — why can’t they have adequate housing where they are now?” She did refer briefly to the Israeli argument that it wanted to develop the “touristic potential” of some of these sites. Bedouin villages in the Negev have been repeatedly demolished over the past year because of a plan for the Jewish National Fund to plant new forests there.
Rolnik also noted that although she had been given extensive briefing on the pending Government law on the proposed relocation of the Bedouin communities in the Negev, but that according to views expressed by the Bedouin themselves as well as by civil society groups, “the proposed law strips the Bedouins of their democratic right to participate meaningfully in the planning of their own regions on their own historical sites”.
The Jahalin Bedouin, who were earlier displaced from the Negev and who have been living in the desert areas in the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, have also been targeted by recent Israeli army-ordered home demolitions, “on the grounds that these areas are not suitable for residence, so they have to move, while the very same area is planned for the expansion of Maale Adumim”.
Rolnik said, in answer to a question, that although she asked Israeli officials many times how much is Israel allocating for settlements to expand, “I never got an answer [though] I raised it many, many times in many, many meetings”.
In East Jerusalem, Israeli policies severely restrict Palestinian building, Rolnik said — although she noted that Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat told her that the municipal budget was allocated equally to both the eastern and western parts of the city [comments from participants in the press conference urged her to look into facts that contradict Barkat’s statement.]
Rolnik noted, in a written “transcript” of her remarks [and also in her oral presentation], that she “was informed that enforcement of building and planning laws, including demolition and the levying of fines, is executed in a discriminatory manner. According to the information received, even though numerically Palestinians are accountable for only approximately 20% of the building infractions in the city, more than 70% of the demolitions are carried out against Palestinian buildings”.
There were restrictions even in Ramallah [the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority], she said, and added that she found the situation in Hebron “extremely tense” — having witnessed that the presence of Israeli soldiers to protect the Israeli settlers [living in the city center] has “created a climate of fear and intimidation”.
“Israel is obligated under international law to find housing for protected persons living under their occupation”, Rolnik said at the press conference.
She carefully noted, in her oral presentation, that she “was not provided by the PA with a scheme for housing for vulnerable persons in the West Bank — except planned communities for middle-income Palestinians”, which she said was “worrying”.
“Middle-income” Palestinians are almost uniformly employees of the PA — which depends on international donor support to pay both salaries and pensions — or a few employees of international or non-governmental organizations. Their salaries were cut for over a year by donors after the Hamas victory in 2006 elections, and were only restored after an international donor “love-in” with the Ramallah-based PA after the Hamas rout of PA/Fatah Preventive Security forces in Gaza in mid-June 2007. [New and tightened sanctions were imposed on Gaza, while funding was lavished on Ramallah.]
These same “middle-income” Palestinians have become newly-vulnerable again this year — after having all sorts of mortgages, bank loans for new cars, and other consumer credit schemes were offered and readily snapped up — because of the Palestinian “UN bid” for full membership in the UN that was formally deposited with, but not yet disposed of by, the UN Security Council in New York.
Additional threats accompany every move towards Palestinian reconciliation [mainly, Fatah + Hamas], which has moved slowly alongside the Palestinian “UN Bid”…
The pre-prepared “transcript” of her remarks noted that “As a whole, it is clear that Israeli policy and practices for the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank violate international human rights and humanitarian law. Israeli is obliged under international law to find an appropriate housing solution for the protected persons, the Palestinian residents, living under its occupation”.
By the organization of material, Rolnik’s presentation seems to finesses the matter of whether Israel still occupies the Gaza Strip — though the UN’s official position was sent by the International Court of Justice 2004 Advisory Opinion on The Legality of the Construction of a Wall”; the ICJ itself referred to the Oslo Accords agreed between Israel and the PLO, which state at several key points that the West Bank and Gaza constitute a single political unit.
In any case, the transcript of Rolnik’s remarks on Gaza says that she “witnessed the dire conditions faced by the population and the detrimental effects of the Blockade [sic] on the housing situation and on infrastructure, which added additional burden to the already existing overcrowding and limitations due to the exiguity of the Gaza Strip and the added territorial limitations … At the same time, I was impressed by the degree of active engagement of Gaza inhabitants undertaking the reconstructions [n.b. – no cause for the need for reconstruction was noted] and amelioration of their living conditions … [and] strategies adopted by UN Habitat, IDB and UNDP of self-help reconstruction, making available direct funds to the households to rebuild demolished houses, have a very positive impact. I was, however, concerned that these self-help schemes are available only to those with registered legal titles over the land, so that the most needy, those who are squatting public land, are left with no other alternative other than waiting for many years for the international donor projects to be completed”.
In her final prepared remarks, Rolnik noted that:
- “In different legal and geographical contexts, from the Galilee and the Negev to the West Bank, I received repeated complaints regarding lack of housing, threats of demolition and eviction, overcrowding, lack of community development, the disproportional number of demolitions affecting Palestinian communities and the accelerated development of predominantly Jewish settlements. The Barrier [n.b. – here, again, Rolnik uses Israeli terminology, and not the UN terminology] makes visible what the territorial planning regime has silently implemented for decades, and the blockade [sic] is the most extreme expression of separation as a restriction to survive + expand.
In all my interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as my visits to Palestinian communities, I was impressed by the collective sense of frustration and extreme insecurity with regard to their housing and property rights. I also observed a complete lack of faith that the Israeli military, political or judicial authorities would take effective action to protect their rights, which are enshrined in international instruments to which Israel is party. It is important to note that Israel’s spatial strategy has been heavily shaped by security concerns, given the belligerent, conflictive nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations, with waves of violence and terror. But certainly the non-democratic elements in Israeli spatial planning and urban development strategies appear to contribute to the deepening of the conflict, instead of promoting peace. Additionally, within Israel, privatization, deregulation and commercialization of public assets has undermined the declared goal of the Jewish foundation of the State of Israel — to provide a safe and adequate home for all Yishuv, regardless of nationality or income level. It would appear, therefore, that the Israeli planning, development and land system now violates the right to adequate housing not only of Palestinians under Israeli control, but also of low income persons of all indentities, who find it increasingly difficult to obtain housing under existing policies. Both aspects of this discriminatory system should be changed to allow all people under the Israeli regime to attain the most basic human right for adequate housing, within the framework of dignity and equality”.
Rolnik has served as the UN Human Right’s Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing since 2008. From Brazil, Rolnik is an architect + urban planner, as well as an academic.