“‘Our soul is here.’”

The Judaization of Jerusalem.

A taxi dropped me off on a busy street outside of the Jaffa Gate near the old city of Jerusalem. It was already dark. I had just flown into Ben–Gurion Airport to begin work on “Palestinian Voices.” Tired from travel and sweating profusely in the heat, I dragged my suitcase over the rough stone paving and through the massive arch that frames the ancient portal. 

It was Passover week. All about me, Jews in large family groups streamed into the city headed for the Western Wall. The women wore skirts and mitpachats, many of them pushing strollers. The men were dressed in somber black suits. Children were equally somber. The ceaseless din was startling. 

Somewhere before me was the New Imperial Hotel—“just inside the Jaffa Gate,” according to the description on booking.com. But where? I stepped tentatively forward searching for a hotel sign. As I wandered deeper into the Old City, a man approached from out of the darkness. 

“New Imperial Hotel?” he asked. 

“Yes,” I replied feeling even more confused. 

“This way.” He reached for my suitcase.

■

Jacob had noticed me from the shadows as he went about the work of shutting down his juice-vending cart. An Arab Israeli Christian, he was a natural in the role of Good Samaritan. With the quiet dignity I would come to recognize in the many Arabs I met throughout my journey, he escorted me up a dark alley to the front door of my hotel. 

“Do you know where I can get a falafel for dinner?” I asked before stepping into the lobby. “Meet me down here in ten minutes,” was his reply. “I’ll take you out for a shawarma,” a Middle Eastern wrap stuffed with grilled marinated meats and garnished with a medley of vegetables.

Ten minutes later, his juice cart washed and closed for the night, Jacob and I walked to the Arab quarters just outside the Damascus Gate. He took me to a typically bustling Arab eatery—little more than a hole in the wall with a long counter, a line of condiments, and a cooler storing bottled water and soft drinks. He had a shawarma. I ate a falafel.

Later, as we wandered the long way back to the hotel, Jacob showed me how to use the local public transportation and pointed out the nearest ATM machine with the best exchange rates. In the United States, a display of such unseemly kindness would have aroused suspicion. I felt mostly curiosity and gratitude. 

Over the next few days, as I had the opportunity to visit with and observe Jacob at his job, I came to understand that his attentiveness to others, his helpfulness and generosity were natural expressions of his Christian faith.

And something more, now that I think about it: Those same qualities were an affirmation of his own humanity and worth. And also therefore a profound act of resistance to his second-class status within “the Jewish state” and the ever-present hostility and violence that shrouds the Holy City. Jacob didn’t profess his beliefs; he embodied them.

While I was in Jerusalem preparing to cross into the West Bank, I passed Jacob’s cart several times a day in my comings and goings from the hotel. Juice venders are common in Old Jerusalem, but Jacob’s colorful concoctions were anything but ordinary: beet, ginger, turmeric, carrot, apple, turnip. Pure pomegranate. I ordered several a day. 

“Making the healthiest juice I can is one way to help people,” he explained, as we sat in the shade of the alley one hot afternoon. “It’s what I’m supposed to do as a Christian. Help people. It’s the work God wants me to do.” 

Jacob’s juice cart stood at the entrance to the alley where the New Imperial was located, at the other end of which, and dead-ending in a small plaza, his brother ran a restaurant. While tending his own business, Jacob frequently helped at the restaurant. Both brothers were struggling in an economy that has more or less collapsed since the Israelis imposed crippling restrictions on the movements of West Bank Palestinians, while simultaneously strengthening the apartheid system in Israel, following events of 7 October.

It was a difficult time to own a business in the Old City. Arab business owners, dependent upon tourism, had been gradually recovering from the economic devastation of the COVID pandemic prior to 7 October. Tourism had again picked up, but since the Gaza crisis erupted it had once more come to a standstill. Many shopkeepers were barely surviving. 

My hotel, as I discovered the following day, was nearly empty of guests. 

■

Conveniently located—and affordably priced in a notoriously expensive city—the New Imperial Hotel is a favorite of Holy Land tourists from the United States and Europe. Thick stone walls keep the interior pleasantly dark and comfortable as the days soar into the 90s. Photographs and prints hanging haphazardly on the walls depict the Old City before al–Nakba. Historic details lend the hotel, aging and past its prime, an air of dignity and grace. My room—No. 7 and not quite large enough for a bed that took up most of the space—looked straight out onto the Jaffa Gate. Having chosen the hotel blindly from the internet, I could not have been better situated.

Heading to the hotel’s dining room for breakfast the morning after my arrival, I mentioned the purpose of my visit to a handsome middle-aged Arab woman sitting behind the front desk. I’m a writer,” I explained. “I’ve come here to learn what life is like for Palestinians under occupation.” 

Her face was guarded and impossible to read. Arab Israelis have never ceased being, or identifying as, Palestinian. But they are necessarily cautious. One mistake can land an Arab in prison. “I plan to publish a series of stories for a project called ‘Palestinian Voices.’” 

“You should speak with my father,” she suggested. “He’ll be in his office at ten.” She pointed to a closed door to the left of the front desk. “He manages the hotel.”

Shortly after ten o’clock I knocked on a worn and highly polished wooden door that stood slightly ajar. Behind the desk, an Arab man looked up and smiled, “Please come in.” He was in his late twenties, plainly not the father of the woman I had just met.  

I entered the office and stepped into a truly Byzantine tale of corruption, skullduggery, and land theft.

An older man in his late 70s rose to greet me. His hair was white,  his face deeply lined. He had been seated at a smaller desk tucked into a corner of the room and piled high with papers. Tired though he appeared to be—I later learned that he rarely slept—there was character etched in his expression and warmth in a smile that reached his eyes.

“Welcome,” he said. “My name is Abu el–Walid Dajani. I’m Rania’s father,” he said, referring to the concierge, “and this is my nephew, Adi Dajani.” He gestured to the younger man. “Please sit here,” Abu el–Walid Dajani ushered me to a chair. Because the story I am about to share has been widely reported over the years in the Israeli and European press, if rarely in the U.S.— The New York Times reported on the scandal once, when it first broke in 2005—in this case I am using real names.

I introduced myself in return and explained my reason for traveling to Palestine. With none of the reserve his daughter had displayed, Abu el–Walid Dajani began a story that extended over several days of conversation and had my head spinning.

■

“Our family owned a lot of property and houses in Jerusalem before 1948. It was all destroyed and taken from us. When the violence started we fled to Old Jerusalem. The Israelis thought we wouldn’t survive, but our soul is here.” The elder Dajani spoke in a deep voice and with a melodious Arab accent I would come to recognize in my travels. His English was perfect.

“In 1949, after the Nakba, my father rented this hotel from the Greek Orthodox Church. The Greek Patriarchate was the second-largest owner of land in Israel. The Church still owns around one thousand homes and shops inside the Old City. Including this hotel.”

Dajani paused in his recitation. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked. Out of respect for the Palestinian culture of hospitality, I never declined an Arabic coffee, or, indeed, anything else that was offered whether or not I wanted it. My “yes” that morning established a habit I was to follow throughout my travels.

My host returned some minutes later balancing a tray with three cups of espresso on it. He set it down, lit a cigarette, and continued his story.

“In 2005 I received a letter from the lawyers of a company I’d never heard of before. The Richard Martin Corporation, located in the Virgin Islands. The letter identified the company as the legal lease holder. It said that I needed a new contract for our family’s lease on the hotel.” The Richard Martin Corporation would later turn out to be a shell company fronting for a right-wing Israeli settler organization. 

To Abu el–Walid Dajani, a savvy businessman who had successfully managed the hotel for decades, the letter made no legal sense. The Dajanis’ lease, dating to 1950, was with the Greek Orthodox Church. “The lawyers said they would give me a new lease, but only if I could prove in court that our original contract with the Church was legitimate.” This was the first indication of the trouble that was to come and the beginning of nearly two decades of legal battles.

The Dajani family, who are Muslim, has a distinguished history as custodians in the Holy Land. The 16^th century Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent proclaimed Sheikh Ahmed Dajani and his descendants the hereditary guardians of King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion. This was done by decree to stop the violence that periodically erupted between Christians and Jews over control of the site. 

In recognition of the honor the name Daoudi was added to Dajani. For four hundred years the Dajani Daoudi family cared for the tomb, a responsibility that was forcibly ended in 1948, when the new Zionist state seized ownership of the site. 

The family next took over custodianship of the New Imperial Hotel.

■

Unbeknownst to Abu el–Walid Dajani and the larger Palestinian community, including those who are Greek Christians, the Greek Church had been quietly selling off land and leases to right-wing Jewish organizations. These sales were a sort of business front in the continuing dispossession of Palestinian land and the intensifying Judaization of Jerusalem, including the Old City. 

Only a decade ago King David’s Tomb was vandalized repeatedly in a continuing processes of Judaizing holy sites and erasing any Muslim presence. It is now a Jewish synagogue. The secretive sale of the Dajanis’ lease on the New Imperial to a rabid right-wing Israeli settler organization, Ateret Cohanim, was a critical blow to the Christian quarter of Old Jerusalem, which has now lost its historic presence at the Jaffa Gate, the main entrance to the Old City. 

As reported by The Times of Israel, in June 2022:  

In 2004, in circumstances that have been heavily disputed, the Patriarchate, which owns the building [the New Imperial Hotel] and the land on which it was built, sold long-term leases for the Imperial Hotel (for $1.25 million), the Petra Hostel next door ($500,000), and a third property in the Christian quarter called Muzamiya House ($55,000) to three British Virgin Islands-registered shell companies connected to Ateret Cohanim.

Ateret Cohanim is a religious Zionist organization committed to settling Jews in non–Jewish-owned buildings in and around the Old City.

The leases were sold for a fraction of their actual value. Why that was, no one will ever know for sure. But greed and venality almost certainly played a role. “This was a land deal done in the night,” Dajani said.

He wasn’t shy about his opinion as to why the Church would sell three valuable leases for a pittance. In a follow-up conversation the next day, Dajani alluded to human weakness and the appetites of men that make them vulnerable to manipulation. He didn’t use these words, but I will: bribery, blackmail, and bullying. Short of bribery and blackmail—the latter a well-established Israeli tactic—there was no demonstrable reason, or benefit, for the Church essentially to give the leases away. 

There is no doubt as to the official, to say nothing of unofficial, bullying that took place. As reported in 2017 by NPR, the Church had been increasingly pressured by the Israeli courts and government, with threats of multi-million-dollar fines and expropriation of an historic monastery, to sell additional land, much of it in highly desirable neighborhoods. All of this is touched upon in a 2017 NPR report: 

. . . in recent years, church leaders have quietly sold off several properties to anonymous investors fronted by companies registered in far-flung tax havens. Israeli and Jewish businessmen were later identified as some of the buyers.

And again, 

Other church properties were sold, either to generate income or to get rid of properties that had caused the church problems, he [an official] said. One was sold after the church was found in breach of the lease and an Israeli court ordered it to pay millions of dollars in damages, even threatening Israeli expropriation of a Greek Orthodox monastery property in a politically sensitive part of East Jerusalem, the official said.

Ateret Cohanim, the investor that anonymously acquired the Dajani lease—much of whose support and funding comes from wealthy American Jews—is an openly racist and Jewish-supremacist organization that advocates and works for the Judaization of Old Jerusalem. On its website, the groups advertises itself as “the leading urban land reclamation organization in Jerusalem, which has been working for over 40 years to restore Jewish life in the heart of ancient Jerusalem.”

Land “reclamation” and “redemption,” as Israelis call these operations, are well established euphemisms used since al–Nakba to describe the appropriation of Palestinian land for Jews—through violence, illegal settlements, or quasi-legal purchases, such as the underhanded deal that expropriated Abu el–Walid Dajani’s long-term lease. We see violence and armed aggression every day in the West Bank. This is a variant, conducted just as aggressively but out of sight and on paper.  

The Dajani’s contract with the Church granted the family a 99–year lease beginning in 1950, with a first right of renewal. They also had a “protected tenancy” under Israeli legislation passed in 1972. No matter. The Israeli courts, thoroughly corrupted by political pressure and Zionist ideology, routinely rule against Palestinians. 

Abu el–Walid Dajani fought his legals battles all the way to the Supreme Court which, no surprise, ruled, in 2022, in favor of Ateret Cohanim. The Dajani family now faces eviction from the hotel and court-ordered back payment (to 2004) of rent, a total of 10 million shekels ($2.9 million U.S.), to Ateret Cohanim, the legally recognized owners of the lease. They also face the foreclosure of all bank accounts of every family member. In short, total ruin of one branch of one of Jerusalem’s most prominent Arab families going back centuries. 

Their loss in court is more than a tragedy for one Palestinian family. As Dajani told me the day we spoke in his office, “It means a loss to the Christian heritage of the Jaffa Gate.” It is a loss Abu el–Walid Dajani takes to heart. It is one reason he doesn’t sleep at night. 

Dajani’s office is a memorial to his fight for justice. It is full of photographs of him with the Greek and Jordanian Patriarchs and the many officials he has met over the nearly two decades he has waged this battle—in the press and in the corrupt Israeli courts—to protect the Christian quarters of the Old City and stop the relentless erasure of Christian and Muslim history and heritage.

 Al–Nakba has never ended. The dispossession of Palestinian land continues in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and wherever Palestinians live and still own homes and land. Israel won’t stop until the erasure of Arabs is complete and there is no more land to steal. 

Four generations of Dajanis have managed, lived in, and worked at the famous hotel where I stayed on my arrival. The New Imperial is one of the oldest within the Walled City. What the Dajanis will do when they are evicted will be another story. Of the future, Abu el–Walid Dajani didn’t speculate. “We are under the protection of God.”