Fakhri Abu Dhiyab and his wife in front of the rubble of their house in the town of Silwan in Jerusalem (Al Jazeera)

Occupied Jerusalem -

Maqluba “Silwaniya” will not sit on Amina Abu Dhiab’s table on the first day of Ramadan this year because the fangs of the occupation bulldozers demolished her house on February 14, displacing Amina and her husband and depriving 16 grandchildren of gathering around the iftar table during the holy month.

In front of the rubble of their house in the Al-Bustan neighborhood in the town of Silwan, the Jerusalemite couple Amina and Fakhri Abu Dhiyab received Al Jazeera Net to talk about the absence of joy and the extinction of joy with the arrival of the month of Ramadan, due to the tragic conditions the country is going through on the one hand, and the sadness this family is going through after the stones of their home were demolished and the past was demolished with them. And the present and the future.

Hairi walks among the rubble of the house, inspecting her crops and the remains of her house’s furniture. Then she walks to the farthest corner of it and suddenly says, “Here are my clothes in the washing machine. When they stormed the house to demolish it, the laundry was almost finished.”

The sighs of sadness never disappeared from her voice, and whenever she remembered something about the contents of the house, she rose from her plastic seat facing the rubble and got up to look for it, but nothing remained as it was except for some birds whose cage the bulldozers did not reach.

Amina Abu Dhiyab inspects a masterpiece containing Qur’anic verses that she extracted from the rubble of her house (Al Jazeera)

Preparations have ended

It was not easy for her to express her feelings about welcoming the month of Ramadan for the first time away from her greenhouse, where she has lived since 1986. After a long silence, she said, “I am preparing for Ramadan, like most women, by preparing pickles and decorating the house with exceptional lighting that the people of the neighborhood enjoyed looking at... my children.” My daughters and grandchildren gather around the table in our house, and I prepare for them the first day of maqluba, the way the people of Silwan do, which is the town from which my husband and I come from.”

In addition to members of her extended family, her home will not receive dozens of diplomats, employees of human rights institutions, the European Union, and press crews for breakfast this year, for whom Fakhri Abu Dhiyab’s house is an address to learn about the suffering of the people of the Al-Bustan neighborhood, who are threatened with forced displacement.

Amina will miss not only these moments, but also the sound of the call to prayer that echoes from the minarets of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is only 300 meters away from her home, which is the harshest thing she will be deprived of, according to her expression.

Before her husband, the activist and member of the Silwan Lands Defense Committee, Fakhri Abu Dhiyab, resumed his speech to Al Jazeera Net, Amina said with deep sadness, “Since the demolition of the house, I feel very tired when I visit it and I do not go to sleep that night... How can someone who is displaced from his most beautiful memories sleep at night?”

What remains of Fakhri Abu Dhiab’s family kitchen, where his wife used to spend the best times while preparing breakfast in Ramadan (Al Jazeera)

Without shelter or rituals

There are many memories that Fakhri deeply engraved in his memory as well. He was the one who was born in 1962 in this house, through whose garden full of fruit trees the waters of Ain Silwan pass, and he was the one whose mother told him in his childhood many stories about this orchard, the spring of running water in it, and the myths that circulated. Turn it around.

“I still water the trees in my home garden with the spring’s water, and I water my pets as well, and I perform ablution with it, as it is the first water that touched my body when I was born. In the past, the women of Silwan used to deliberately bathe their newborns for the first time with the water of this spring, due to many stories circulated by residents about its holiness and blessing,” Fakhry added.

By demolishing his house, this Maqdisi says that the occupation erased his history and memories and blew up his present, future and dreams, and that nothing can compensate for a moment of his presence in this house near Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was and still is his daily destination at dawn every day.

From the dirt road of “Tantour Pharaoh,” which is familiar to the people of Silwan, Fakhri Abu Dhiyab used to go to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque on foot throughout the year, and in the month of Ramadan he returns to his home before breakfast in the same way, carrying with him falafel, hummus, and Ramadan juices that sit on the tables of Jerusalemites in Ramadan, but this year he lost his shelter and exceptional rituals.

He sighed deeply and then said, "Since the demolition of the house in which I lived with two of my sons and their families, we have only met in the street or in restaurants because the house that used to bring us together has become an ugly rubble."

The chicken coop is what remains of Al-Maqdisi Fakhri Abu Dhiyab from his house and garden (Al-Jazeera)

The goal is revenge

This man knows very well that the attack on his house and its demolition in light of the war on Gaza was not a mere coincidence, but rather in retaliation and an attempt to silence him and prevent him from speaking through the media about violations and Judaization in Jerusalem on the one hand, and from receiving various delegations to highlight the suffering of the neighborhoods threatened by forced displacement in Silwan on the other hand. On the other hand.

But he did not stop this or that, as he still appears in the media on a daily basis, and now receives delegations on the ruins of his demolished house, because the issue of displacement did not stop with the demolition of his house, as he says.

The occupation claims - according to Al-Maqdisi Abu Dhiyab - that the house stands as an obstacle to the municipality that seeks to establish a Judaization project in the Al-Bustan neighborhood, which is a “national park” that will bear the name “King’s Garden,” to immortalize the place that was - according to the Israeli story - “a garden of King David.”

Therefore, they "punished me to pressure me and silence me. This is the true face of the occupation, which wanted to break my strength and destroy my morale, but it did not succeed in demolishing my steadfastness or my convictions."

According to this Jerusalemite activist, Al-Bustan is one of 6 neighborhoods in the town of Silwan threatened by the threat of forced displacement. The neighborhood occupies an area of ​​70 dunums (a dunum equals a thousand square metres) in which 1,550 people live, and the number of homes that received demolition orders or demolition implementation orders reached 116. A home until the end of 2023.

Source: Al Jazeera