On December 9 in Jaffa, the parents and five children of the Sawaf family were thrown into the street. As of this writing, they are living in a tent. The story contains the main ingredients of what is happening in Jaffa today: on one side, the greed of real-estate speculators, on the other side, poverty and ignorance. There is also, in this case, the spice of a local celebrity. The incident is a test case. Jaffa is at a crossroads. The Sawafs must receive justice, and the takeover of Arab neighborhoods must stop before more families are homeless. The eviction of the Sawafs is the fruit of a policy known as "judaization". In the seventies, long before the term 'ethnic cleansing' came into use, the Zionist movement coined this term, signifying the transformation of an area from non-Jewish (read 'Arab') to Jewish. The means to this end is not religious conversion, rather eviction. We have a prime example in Jaffa, where judaization and gentrification are practically synonymous.

The Deal
The Sawaf parents are Da'ud and Ruweida. Da'ud grew up in a one-room apartment at 57 Kedem Street in Jaffa, where his father had the status of protected tenant. The apartment belongs to a house, two and a half rooms of which were sealed. Fifteen years ago, when Da'ud married Ruweida, the young couple took over the sealed portion as squatters. He received a government loan, however, to renovate the flat – an indication that his squatting was semi-approved. There the Sawafs raised five children. The Israel Lands Administration (ILA) issued an order of eviction against them, but it never tried to implement it. Because of restrictive laws and the high price of housing, a great many families have to live as squatters with the ILA sword hanging over them, not only in Jaffa, but in the other mixed cities as well (Lod, Ramla, Haifa, and Acre). In 1973 an Israeli actor named Yosef Shiloah, known as politically progressive, bought the rights – bought, that is, the status of protected tenant – on the upper floor of the same house, which was then still in the midst of an Arab neighborhood. After a decade he moved to another apartment in an already judaized area, but he kept his rights at 57 Kedem Street. In the nineties his "ship came in". The municipality gave the green light to turn Jaffa into a Neapolitan-style appendix of its larger daughter, Tel Aviv. Plans were made to gentrify the slums. Rights would be auctioned to the highest bidder. There was no place in the scheme for the indigent indigenous Arabs. Thus by a stroke of the pen, Shiloah's apartment on Kedem Street, with its view of the sea, shot up in value. He offered to sell his rights to a real estate company called Mishkenot Yaffo, but the latter agreed only on condition that it be able to buy the whole house. Shiloah took it upon himself, therefore, to persuade the two Sawaf families, father's and son's, to vacate. In May 1995, he visited them, together with his lawyer, and convinced them to sign a handwritten contract. The Sawafs, for their part, had no lawyer. In the contract, Shiloah committed himself to finding them protected flats, two and a half rooms for the father and a two-room flat for Da'ud. Since the father, at the time, had only one room, and since Da'ud would be exchanging an insecure status for a secure one, it seemed a good deal. The contract did not specify, however, the size or value of the future apartments. For reasons which will appear in a moment, Shiloah also included a clause stating that the contract in no way obviated the ILA eviction order against Da'ud.

Eviction # 1: March 1996
Da'ud's father received his new flat. To Da'ud, however, Shiloah offered lodging that the former described as "unfit for horses". (Shiloah, we have learned, wanted to keep his payment down to $40,000; a decent protected two-room apartment, big enough for seven, cannot be found in Jaffa at such a price.) The actor claims to have shown the Sawafs nine apartments, and since they refused them all, he considers himself released from his contract. Da'ud approached the Housing Advice Team (HAT) of Hanitzotz Publishing House, which puts out this magazine and the Arabic Al-Sabar. We agreed with him that the procedure seemed unfair, and we decided to take up his case. In January 1996, on the strength of the ILA eviction notice, Shiloah procured a court order to have the family removed. On March 3, Shiloah told Da'ud that if they would vacate in peace, he would reconsider his retreat from the contract. The Sawafs did not agree, and an open dispute was declared. Shiloah did acknowledge responsibility, however, insofar as he rented a three-bedroom flat for the family. The Sawafs moved into this apartment. Meanwhile, HAT made the case public and helped the family find a lawyer. The Sawafs proceeded to sue Shiloah for breach of contract.

Eviction # 2: December 9, 1998
For two and a half years after the first eviction, the Sawafs lived in the apartment rented for them by Shiloah. Their landlady, for reasons of her own, filed with the court to evict them. Since their own case against Shiloah was pending, however, the family had nowhere to go. At this time HAT launched a public exhibit on the problem of housing in Jaffa. For our title we took an advertising slogan of the real-estate companies: "To live in a picture". (Challenge # 42). Our poster, however, did not show a peaceful oriental paradise, but rather a huge boot aimed at the house on Kedem Street. Around this time, also – HAT has learned – Mishkenot Yaffo paid Shiloah $1,175,000 for the rights to the Kedem-Street house. The company plans to replace it with eleven luxury apartments facing the sea. Early in 1998, the landlady won her case against the Sawafs. Eviction proved difficult at first, because of the moral implications and the publicity that might attend the case. Shiloah, for his part, remained adamant: he would not fulfill his part of the contract.
On December 9, Ruweida Sawaf returned from the market and found all her family's furniture, clothing, and other possessions, down to the children's school books, out on the street. The locks in the apartment above had been changed. HAT, by this time, had formed a Committee for Solidarity with the Sawaf family. Its members loaded their belongings into a car and took them to a park in Jaffa. By the afternoon, a tent was up – soon replaced by a better one from the Islamic Club. We put out press releases and distributed leaflets among Jaffa's 20,000 Arabs. Since practically every Arab family in Jaffa has a housing problem, the case served as a shock, as if to say: "Here it is! Judaization has fully arrived. This is what we shall come to." People began joining the solidarity committee. The women who study at our Mothers' School provided hot meals. Others helped the family with showers and laundry. On the second day the children returned to school, and Da'ud and Ruweida to work.

Eviction No. Three - December 17, 1998
On this date, a Thursday, at three in the morning – while missiles fell on Iraq – a large force of police and city inspectors stormed the tent, hauling the family from their beds. Two social workers stood by, joking with the police. Within minutes the tent and all its contents, including the schoolbooks, were en route, by truck, to a city warehouse. The family was left outdoors in pajamas. HAT members reached the park at once and undertook negotiations for the return of the belongings. The municipality wanted us to sign a commitment not to put up a new tent, but we made it clear: Until a permanent solution is offered, the family will live there in a tent, even if we have to set up a new one each time. By noon the family had received, in fact, a new one (the third on the spot), the loan of a kibbutz. By order of Micha'el Roeh, Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the belongings were returned. On December 22, the police gave the Sawafs yet another eviction order. The Solidarity Committee prepared to raise another tent. We also called Micha'el Roeh again, saying that we could not anticipate the reactions to an eviction in the midst of Ramadan. The deputy then met with the mayor, it seems, and persuaded him to postpone the eviction until the end of the holy month. We have made it clear that we shall keep erecting tents, if necessary, until a just solution is found for the Sawafs.

The Sawaf case is a human problem of many dimensions, one of which is political. Its outcome will help determine whether the indigent Arab community of Jaffa will be prey to the greed of real-estate speculators, or whether it will have a fair chance to maintain itself and improve its conditions. Until now "coexistence" has been a one-way street: the municipality bruits this word about as a means of getting footholds in the Arab neighborhoods. Jews can move to Jaffa, but Arabs cannot move to Tel Aviv. (Where the Jewish National Fund has bought the land, it forbids the sale of the houses built on it to non-Jews; other less official forms of racism do the rest.) Nor does the danger stop in Jaffa. Judaization is also underway, as said, in the other mixed cities. Under the guise of the "rules of the market", the racist drive to transfer the Arabs can end, if unchecked, in thousands of Sawafs. We say, therefore: We are all Sawafs! Help us hold on!

We urge the readers of this report to send letters to the municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa demanding: 1) that the Sawafs not be evicted again and that a fair solution be found for them; 2) that the first priority in Jaffa be to improve the housing conditions of the city's Arabs without disrupting their community, and that Jaffa's space not be exploited instead as a market for speculative real-estate ventures. We urge our readers to inform Tel Aviv's "sister" or "twin" cities in their countries about the Sawaf case and its wider implications.

Letters should be sent to: Mayor Ron Khulda'i Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality Israel Fax: 972 - 3 - 521 6425 Please send copies to Asma Agbarieh of the Solidarity Committee: The Committee for Solidarity with the Sawaf Family Tel:03-6839145 Fax: 03-6839148 e-mail: alsabar@goldnet.net.il