[News] NY Times' Jerusalem property makes it protagonist in Palestine conflict

[Anti-Imperialist News]

NY Times' Jerusalem property makes it protagonist in Palestine conflict

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11109.shtml


During an appearance at Vassar College in early February, 
controversial New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was 
asked about the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families from homes 
in East Jerusalem which Israel occupied in 1967. Israeli courts have 
ruled that Jewish settlers could take over some Palestinian homes on 
the grounds that Jews held title to the properties before Israel was 
established in 1948.

Bronner was concerned, but not only about Palestinians being made 
homeless in Israel's relentless drive to Judaize their city; he was 
also worried about properties in his West Jerusalem neighborhood, 
including the building he lives in, partially owned by The New York 
Times, that was the home of Palestinians made refugees in 1948. Facts 
about The New York Times' acquisition of this property are revealed 
for the first time in this article.

"One of the things that is most worrying not just the Left but a lot 
of people in Israel about this decision is if the courts in Israel 
are going to start recognizing property ownership from before the 
State [of Israel was founded]," Bronner said according to a 
transcript made by independent reporter Philip Weiss who maintains 
the blog Mondoweiss.net.

Bronner added, "I think the Palestinians are going to have a fairly 
big case. I for example live in West Jerusalem. My entire 
neighborhood was Palestinian before 1948."

The New York Times-owned property Bronner occupies in the prestigious 
Qatamon neighborhood, was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a 
distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar (1905-2007). 
Karmi was forced to flee with his family in 1948 as Zionist militias 
occupied western Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods. His was one of an 
estimated 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem that Jews took 
over that year.

The New York Times bought the property in 1984 in a transaction 
overseen by columnist Thomas Friedman who was then just beginning his 
four-year term as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Hasan Karmi's daughter, Ghada, a physician and well-known author who 
lives in the United Kingdom, discovered that The New York Times was 
in -- or rather on top of -- her childhood home in 2005, when she was 
working temporarily in Ramallah. One day Karmi received a call from 
Steven Erlanger, then The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, who 
had just read <http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6564.shtml>her 
2002 memoir <http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6564.shtml>In 
Search of Fatima.

Karmi recalled in a 15 May 2008 interview on Democracy Now! that 
Erlanger told her, "I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you 
know, I think I'm living above your old house ... From the 
description in your book it must be the same place" 
("<http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/15/as_palestinians_mark_60th_anniversary_of>Conversation 
with Palestinian Writer and Doctor Ghada Karmi").

At Erlanger's invitation, Karmi visited, but did not find the elegant 
one-story stone house her family had moved into in 1938, that was 
typical of the homes middle- and upper-class Arabs began to build in 
Jerusalem suburbs like Qatamon, Talbiya, Baqa, Romema or Lifta toward 
the end of the 19th century. The original house was still there, but 
at some point after 1948 two upper stories had been built.

Erlanger, responding to questions posed by The Electronic Intifada 
via email, described the residence as "built over the Karmi family 
house -- on its air rights, if you like. The [New York Times] is not 
in [the Karmi] house." Erlanger described the building as having an 
"unbroken" facade but that it consisted of "two residences, two 
ownerships, two heating systems," and a separate entrance for the 
upper levels reached via an external staircase on the side.

Questions The Electronic Intifada sent to Thomas Friedman about the 
purchase of the property were answered by David E. McCraw, Vice 
President and Assistant General Counsel for the newspaper, who wrote 
that the original Karmi house itself "was never owned even partly by 
The Times. The Times purchased in the 1980s a portion of the building 
that had been constructed above it in the late 1970s." The purchase 
was made from "a Canadian family that had bought them from the 
original builders of the apartment."

McCraw acknowledged in a follow-up conversation that as a general 
principle of property law, the "air rights" of a property -- the 
right to build on top of it or use (and access) the space above it -- 
belong to the owner of the ground.

Exiled from Qatamon

Hasan Karmi hailed originally from Tulkarem, in what is now the 
northern West Bank. In 1938, he moved his family to Jerusalem to take 
up a job in the education department of the British-run Palestine 
Mandate government. Ghada -- born around November 1939 (the exact 
date is unknown because her birth certificate along with all the 
family's records, photographs, furniture, personal possessions and an 
extensive library were lost with the house) -- has vivid memories of 
a happy childhood in what was a well-to-do mixed neighborhood of Arab 
Christians and Muslims, foreigners and a few Jewish families. The 
neighbors with whom her parents socialized and with whose children 
the young Ghada and her siblings played included the Tubbeh, Jouzeh, 
Wahbeh and Khayyat families. There was also a Jewish family called 
Kramer, whose father belonged to the Haganah, the Zionist militia 
that became the Israeli army after May 1948.

Karmi describes the house at length in her memoir -- but she told The 
Electronic Intifada her fondest memories were of the tree-filled 
garden where she spent much time playing with her brother and sister 
and the family dog Rex. The lemon and olive trees she remembers are 
still there, Erlanger noted to The Electronic Intifada.

In the mid-1940s, the lively Qatamon social life gave way to terror 
as the dark clouds of what would come to be known as the Nakba 
approached. Violence broke out all over Jerusalem after the UN's 
devastating recommendation to partition Palestine without giving its 
people any say in the matter. Spontaneous riots by Arabs were 
followed by organized violence from Zionist groups and mutual 
retaliatory attacks that claimed lives from both communities. This 
climate provided the pretext for the Haganah's premeditated campaign 
to seize Jerusalem.

Poorly armed and disorganized Arab irregulars, who had nevertheless 
succeeded in disrupting Zionist supply convoys to Jerusalem, proved 
no match for highly-trained and well-armed Zionist militias which, on 
the orders of David Ben-Gurion, began a well-planned campaign to 
conquer the western parts of the city. The occupation of western 
Jerusalem and some 40 villages in its vicinity was executed as part 
of the Haganah's "Plan Dalet." These events are well documented in 
books including Benny Morris' The birth of the Palestinian refugee 
problem, 1947-1949 (1987), Walid Khalidi's (ed.) All That Remains: 
The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 
(1992), Salim Tamari's (ed.) Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods 
and their Fate in the War (1999) and Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic 
Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

Zionist militias used frequent bombings of Arab civilians to 
terrorize residents into fleeing. These attacks were amplified by 
posters and warnings broadcast over loudspeakers that those choosing 
to remain behind would share the fate of those killed in atrocities.

Karmi wrote that one night in November 1947, their neighbor Kramer 
came to see her father and said, "I have come to tell you at some 
risk to myself to take your family and leave Jerusalem as soon as 
possible .... Please believe me, it is not safe here." Many Qatamon 
families left after the Zionist bombing of the nearby Semiramis 
Hotel, which killed 26 civilians including the Spanish 
consul-general, on the night of 4-5 January 1948.

The Karmis however held on, and Ghada records in her memoir her 
mother steadfastly saying, "The Jews are not going to drive me out of 
my house ... Others may go if they like, but we're not giving in."

Toward the end of April, bombardment by Zionist militias against 
virtually undefended Arab areas became so heavy, and the terror 
generated by the Deir Yassin massacre earlier that month so intense, 
that the Karmis relented and departed by taxi for Damascus, via 
Amman, with nothing but a few clothes. Their intention was to bring 
the children to safety at their maternal grandparents' house while 
the adults would return home to Jerusalem. A few days after reaching 
Damascus the elder Karmis tried to return to Jerusalem but were 
unable to do so. So began the family's exile that continues to this day.

As Arabs left their homes, Jews were moved in by the Haganah. "While 
the cleansing of Qatamon went on," Itzhak Levy, the head of Haganah 
intelligence in Jerusalem recalled, "pillage and robbery began. 
Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and 
took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food" 
(quoted in Pappe, p.99). Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli scholar and 
former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, wrote in his book Sacred Landscape 
of personally witnessing the "looting of Arab homes in Qatamon" as a 
boy. Palestinians also lost art work, financial instruments and -- 
like the Karmis -- irreplaceable family records, as the fabric of a 
society and a way of life were destroyed.

Jerusalem return denied

The Karmis' story is a variation of what happened to tens of 
thousands of Jerusalem-area Palestinians during the Nakba, in which 
approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their 
homes all over the country and never allowed to return. (In my book 
One Country I describe the departure under similar circumstances of 
my mother's family from Lifta-Romema.)

As of 1997, there were 84,000 living West Jerusalem refugees (23,000 
born before 1948), according to Tamari. Half lived in the West Bank, 
many just miles from their original homes, but thousands of others 
were spread across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip.

Arab property is well-documented through administrative and UN 
records, but tracing the fate of an individual house or proving title 
is extremely difficult if not impossible for Palestinians scattered, 
exiled and forbidden from returning home. Some, who have foreign 
passports that allowed them to make brief visits, have attempted to 
locate their family properties. In recent years a small Israeli group 
called Zochrot (Remembering) has even joined in -- taking some 
displaced Palestinians back to their original villages and homes, 
whose traces Israel often made deliberate efforts to conceal or 
destroy. But such activities are not welcomed by most Israeli Jews 
still in denial about their state's genesis.

Ghada Karmi recalls an earlier attempt to revisit her family home in 
1998. The residents were unwelcoming and would not give her the phone 
number of the landlord, though a plaque outside bore the name "Ben-Porat."

The owner of the original, lower-level house at the time The New York 
Times bought the upper levels was Yoram Ben-Porat, an economics 
professor who became president of the Hebrew University and was 
killed with his wife and young son in a road accident in October 
1992. According to Erlanger, the house remained with heirs from the 
Ben-Porat family who rented it out until it was sold in 2005 to an 
Israeli couple who did some remodeling. It is unknown when the 
Ben-Porats acquired the house or if they were the ones who had the 
upper levels built.

During Karmi's 2005 visit, Erlanger invited her to see his part of 
the house and introduced her to the Israeli tenants in the lower 
level who gave her free access while Erlanger took photographs. For 
Karmi, revisiting the house was disconcerting. She described to The 
Electronic Intifada its occupants as "Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis, 
liberals, nice people who wanted to be nice." She felt like asking 
them, "how can you live here knowing this is an Arab house, knowing 
this was once owned by Arabs, what goes through your mind?" But, she 
explained, "in the way people have of not wanting to upset people who 
appear to be nice, I didn't say anything."

The New York Times

In the early years after their original residents left, many of the 
former Arab neighborhoods were run down. But in the 1970s, wealthier 
Israeli Jews began to gentrify them and acquiring an old Arab house 
became a status symbol. Today, Israeli real estate agencies list even 
small apartments in Qatamon for hundreds of thousands of dollars or 
more, and house prices can run into the millions. In Jerusalem, such 
homes have become popular especially with wealthy American Jews, 
according to Pappe. The New York Times did not disclose what it paid 
for the Qatamon property.

It was a curious decision for The New York Times to have purchased 
part of what must obviously have been property with -- at the very 
least -- a political, moral and legal cloud over its title. Asked 
whether The New York Times or Friedman had made any effort to learn 
the history of the property, the newspaper responded, "Neither The 
Times nor Mr. Friedman knew who owned the original ground floor prior to 1948."

As Friedman prepared to make the move to Jerusalem from Beirut where 
he was covering the Lebanon war in the early 1980s, The Times hired 
an Israeli real estate agent to help him locate a home. According to 
McCraw, Friedman's wife Ann went ahead to Jerusalem and looked at 
properties "and she, working with the agent, made the selection for 
The Times." During the process Friedman visited Jerusalem and looked 
at properties as well, a fact he mentions in his book From Beirut to 
Jerusalem. By the time the property was selected, Friedman had moved 
permanently to Jerusalem and oversaw the closing.

The choice of the Qatamon property -- over several modern apartments 
that the real estate agent also showed -- makes The New York Times a 
protagonist and interested party in one of the most difficult aspects 
of the Palestine conflict: the property and refugee rights of 
Palestinians that Israel has adamantly denied. It also raises 
interesting questions about what such choices have on news coverage 
-- with which the newspaper itself has had to grapple.

In 2002, an Electronic Intifada article partly attributed the 
pervasive underreporting of Israeli violence against Palestinians to 
"a structural geographic bias" -- the fact that "most US news 
organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv 
or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are 
being killed and bombarded on a daily basis" ( Michael Brown and Ali 
Abunimah, 
"<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article691.shtml>Killings of 
dozens once again called 'period of calm' by US media, 20 September 2002).

In 2005, The New York Times' then Public Editor Daniel Okrent echoed 
this criticism, writing:

"The Times, like virtually every American news organization, 
maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their 
families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in 
the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some 
advocates of the Palestinian cause call this 'structural geographic 
bias.'" ("The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and 
Palestine," 24 April 2005).

Okrent recommended that in order to broaden the view of the 
newspaper's reporters, it should locate a correspondent in Ramallah 
or Gaza -- where she or he would share the daily experiences, 
concerns and risks of Palestinians. This advice went unheeded, just 
as Executive Editor Bill Keller recently publicly rejected the advice 
of the current public editor that current Jerusalem Bureau Chief 
Ethan Bronner should be reassigned because of the conflict of 
interest created by Bronner's son's voluntary enlistment in the Israeli army.

Thus, in a sense, Bronner's structural and personal identification 
with Israel has become complete: when the younger Bronner joins army 
attacks in Gaza, fires tear gas canisters or live bullets at 
nonviolent demonstrators trying to save their land from confiscation 
in West Bank villages, or conducts night arrest raids in Ramallah or 
Nablus -- as he may well be ordered to do -- his father will root for 
him, worry about him, perhaps hope that his enemies will fall in 
place of his son, as any Israeli parent would. And on weekends, the 
elder Bronner will await his soldier-son's homecoming to a property 
whose true heirs live every day, like millions of Palestinians, with 
the unacknowledged trauma, and enduring injustice of dispossession and exile.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.



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