At the bottom of a steep and densely populated valley just below Jerusalem\u2019s old city walls, the earth has been shaken in recent weeks by jackhammers and bulldozers.<\/p>\n
These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades as the Israeli state has relentlessly sought to stamp a uniformly Jewish identity on to the occupied east of the city, while erasing its Palestinian character.<\/p>\n
Typically it is workers for the state and municipality at the wheel of the bulldozers, but in the al-Bustan neighbourhood, in the shadow of the 11th-century al-Aqsa mosque, the clamour is from a more recent development.<\/p>\n
It is the sound of Palestinians demolishing their own family homes.<\/p>\n
\u2018This is something bitter,\u2019 said Jalal al-Tawil as his family\u2019s home was demolished. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is something really hard. This is something bitter,\u201d Jalal al-Tawil said as he watched a tractor he had hired, with a front loader at the front and jackhammer at the back, rip apart the last remnants of the house his father had built, which in turn had been on the site of his grandparents\u2019 home.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday morning, most of the walls had been brought down to their foundations and the rubble pushed into a single pile. Al-Tawil left the thick knotty root of a 35-year-old grapevine until last.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt used to provide grapes for all of al-Bustan,\u201d he said. The spring vine leaves had already sprouted along the trellis above him, but he was resigned to the fact they would never again bear fruit.<\/p>\n
Al-Bustan: red dots mark homes already demolished and green those with existing demolition orders.<\/p>\n
The experience of demolishing his own family\u2019s home and history had drained al-Tawil, but it came down to brutal economics. The Jerusalem municipality had told him it would cost him 280,000 shekels (\u00a372,000) if its workers demolished the house. Hiring his own equipment and labour would cost al-Tawil less than a tenth of that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlso, if they do it, they will uproot the land and make a complete mess,\u201d he said. For him it was like being given the choice between suicide or being murdered, he said.<\/p>\n
More than 57 homes in al-Bustan, part of the larger Silwan district of East Jerusalem, have been demolished in the past two years with at least eight designated for demolition in the next few weeks. On the site a biblical theme park called the Kings Garden is to be built, supposedly where King Solomon took his leisure three millennia ago.<\/p>\n
The park is designed to be part of a spreading, largely settler-driven, archaeological project <\/a>focusing exclusively on Jerusalem\u2019s Jewish past and centred on what has been called the City of David \u2013 despite the view of many Israeli archaeologists that the visible remains date to other eras, before and after King David\u2019s iron-age reign.<\/p>\n Aviv Tatarsky, a senior researcher at Ir Amim<\/a>, a group advocating for an equitably shared Jerusalem, says al-Bustan encapsulates the erasure of Palestinians from both geography and history.<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael is not willing to recognise the bi-national, multi-ethnic, multicultural reality of Jerusalem and it is wiping out first and foremost Palestinians \u2013 but really anything that is not Jewish, and then glossing it over with this Disneyfied nonsense,\u201d he said. \u201cIf this happens to the end, Israelis will go there and they will see the story of the park and they will be completely ignorant of the fact that lives were destroyed, a whole community was destroyed to make space for it.\u201d<\/p>\n King Solomon is said to have taken his leisure on the site where the theme park is to be built. Photograph: Alamy<\/p>\n The shadow of the Kings Garden theme park has hung over al-Bustan for nearly two decades, but the bulldozers have been held back until now by Palestinian resistance, combined with international opposition and some ambivalence within Israeli politics.<\/p>\n All three barriers have fallen since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, the ensuing Gaza war and the restoration of Donald Trump as US president. Ambassadors from other countries still visit and pledge support, but with Washington\u2019s support, their combined intervention has proved ineffectual.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are stray dogs who go around the neighbourhood at night who feel more safe and secure than we do,\u201d said Mohammad Qwaider, 60, a father of six. He recently demolished the part of the house which has been a family home for more than half a century, in the hope of appeasing the planners. This week, however, a man from the municipality came to warn him that the bulldozers would be back to level the rest of it.<\/p>\n \u2018You cannot take our land\u2019: Mohammad Qwaider, 60. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Qwaider has chronic back problems, a son with special needs, and an infirm elderly mother who is unable to move, and he argues they have no other options.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they demolish our house, we will put up a tent. We will not leave,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe they misunderstand our mentality as Palestinians. We are not an easy target. You cannot take our land.\u201d<\/p>\n His mother, Yusra, is confined to a bed in a small ground-floor room. Her life story embodies 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 (the Catastrophe), the mass displacement which is the other side of the historical coin of Israel\u2019s independence in that year.<\/p>\n