At the foot of a steep and densely populated valley, just below the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, the ground has been shaking from jackhammers and bulldozers for the past few weeks.
These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades, as the Israeli state tirelessly seeks to impose a uniform Jewish identity on the occupied eastern part of the city, erasing its Palestinian character, writes the British newspaper The Guardian.
Usually, state and municipal workers are behind the wheel of the bulldozers, but in the al-Bustan neighborhood, in the shadow of the 11th-century Al Aqsa Mosque, the noise now stems from a more recent development.
It is the sound of Palestinians demolishing their own family homes.
"This is really hard. This is bitter," said Jalal al-Tawil, watching the tractor he rented, with a front-end loader and a jackhammer on the back, demolish the last remains of the house his father built on the site of his grandparents' house.
By Wednesday morning, most of the walls had been demolished and the rubble piled up in a single pile. Al-Tawil left the thick, gnarled root of a 35-year-old vine for last.
“She gave grapes to all of al-Bustan,” he said. The spring leaves of the vine had already sprouted along the pergola above him, but he had resigned himself to the fact that it would never bear fruit again.
The experience of demolishing his own family home and history had exhausted al-Tawil, but it all came down to harsh economics. The Jerusalem municipality told him it would cost him 280.000 shekels (£72.000) if its workers demolished the house. Hiring his own equipment and workers would have cost him less than a tenth of that.
"Also, if they do that, they will plow the land and create complete chaos," he said. For him, he said, it was like being given the choice between suicide and murder.
More than 57 homes in al-Bustan, part of the wider Silvan neighborhood in East Jerusalem, have been demolished in the past two years, and at least eight more are scheduled for demolition in the coming weeks. The site is set to be used to build a biblical theme park called the King's Garden, supposedly on the site where King Solomon rested three millennia ago.
The park is conceived as part of a broader, largely settler-based archaeological project, focused exclusively on Jerusalem's Jewish past and centered around what is called the City of David - despite the view of many Israeli archaeologists that the visible remains date from other eras, before and after the Iron Age reign of King David.
Aviv Tatarsky, a senior researcher at the Ir Amim organization, which advocates for an equally divided Jerusalem, says al-Bustan embodies the erasure of Palestinians from both geography and history.
“Israel is not ready to acknowledge the bi-national, multi-ethnic, multicultural reality of Jerusalem and erases the Palestinians first and foremost – but in fact everything that is not Jewish, and then covers it up with this disenfranchised nonsense,” he said. “If it is carried through to the end, Israelis will go there and see the story of the park, completely unaware of the fact that lives were destroyed, that an entire community was destroyed to make room for it,” the Guardian writes.
The shadow of the King's Garden theme park loomed over al-Bustan almost two decades ago, but the bulldozers have so far been held back by Palestinian resistance, combined with international opposition and a certain ambivalence in Israeli politics.
All three barriers fell after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the ensuing Gaza war, and the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency. Ambassadors from other countries continue to come and pledge support, but, backed by Washington, their joint intervention has proven ineffective.
“The stray dogs that roam the neighborhood at night feel safer than us,” said Mohamed Kwaider, a 60-year-old father of six. He recently demolished part of the house that had been his family’s home for more than half a century, hoping to appease city planners. This week, however, a man from the municipality came to warn him that the bulldozers would be back to level the rest.
Kvaider has chronic back problems, a son with special needs, and a disabled elderly mother who cannot move, and says they have no other options.
"If they demolish our house, we will put up a tent. We will not leave," he said. "Maybe they misunderstand our mentality as Palestinians. We are not an easy target. You cannot take our land."
His mother, Yusra, is bedridden in a small ground-floor room. Her life story mirrors modern Palestinian history. She was born 97 years ago in Jaffa, but her family was forced to flee in 1948, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe – a mass displacement that is the other side of the historic coin of Israel’s independence that year.
Nakba Remembrance Day was marked on Friday, the day after Israeli Jews marked Jerusalem Day with a nationalist march through the Old City, chanting "death to the Arabs."
From Jaffa, the family of Yusra Kwaider sought refuge in the village of Yalo, in Jordanian-controlled territory west of Jerusalem. In 1967, they were expelled again in the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, and Israeli forces demolished their house and the rest of the village. From there, in 1970, they went to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, but they were only able to stay there for three years, before the new rulers of the city demolished large parts of the area.
"After the Jewish quarter, we came here, to Silvan. We're not leaving here. Neither I nor my children," she said.
Two houses away, Fakhri Abu Diab, a community leader in al-Bustan, made the same decision when his family home was demolished in 2024. Now he and his wife, Amina, live in a prefabricated cabin amidst the ruins of what was once the family home of four generations. Only part of the old house's kitchen remains among the rubble.
"We used to eat here with my children, my grandchildren," Abu Diab said. "They destroyed our past. They destroyed our memories. They destroyed our dreams. They destroyed my childhood, our childhood, and they destroyed our future."
He compared the torture of living in the ruins of his family's history to a physiological illness. "My heart is burning," he said. "You may see me sitting here talking to you, but inside I'm burning."
Abu Diab is still paying a 43.000 shekel (nearly 13.000 euros) fine imposed by the municipality to cover the costs of demolishing his home, at a rate of 4.000 shekels (1.193 euros) per month. He said he also had to pay 9.000 shekels (2.691 euros) for sandwiches that police ate while conducting a multi-day operation.
The Jerusalem Municipality did not respond to a request for comment on its actions in al-Bustan, but told the +972 portal that the planned theme park is “being built for the benefit of all residents of the city” and that the houses in al-Bustan were built illegally.
"This area was never intended for residential use, and the Jerusalem Municipality is now working to build a park in an area that suffers from a serious lack of open public spaces," she stated.
The municipality also stated that it had "tried for years to find a solution for the residents that would include a housing alternative, but they have not shown serious interest in achieving a solution."
Abu Diab pointed out that the community had long presented a master plan for a neighborhood with plenty of green space, which he says was rejected at the political level. When it comes to permits, he said that some houses, like his, date back long before the Israeli occupation.
The municipality routinely denied building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, while routinely granting them to Israeli Jews. Moreover, Abu Diab claims, the same rules never apply to the unauthorized settlement buildings that are constantly springing up in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Amina Abu Diab, a teacher and social worker, said her main concern now is the children in her care, who face a future of homelessness and uncertainty.
"A house is a child's dream of the future, and if someone comes to tear it down, it destroys the dreams and the child's sense of security," she said. "And then what do children think of us? That we can't protect ourselves and that we can't protect our children."
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