Palestinian Arabs May Face Eviction From Historic Inns In Jerusalem’s Christian Quarter
Petra Hotel in Jerusalem’s Old City in the Christian Quarter. Creative Commons photo.
JERUSALEM— While the religious quarrel between Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine has been going on for more than a century, the dispute is also a multi-faceted real estate conflict.
An 18-year legal wrangle over the validity of a contract by which the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem leased two church-owned landmark hotels in the city’s Christian Quarter to an Israeli right-wing nongovernmental organization for 98 years — with an option to renew for a similar period or transfer the leases — reached Israel’s top court this month.
With the Supreme Court of Israel’s ruling on June 9 upholding the Jerusalem District Court’s recognition of that lease agreement to the Ateret Cohanim — translated as “crown of the priests” — the conflict has now moved into its final phase: The Jewish group may proceed through the courts to evict the Palestinian Arabs who are the Imperial Hotel’s and Petra Hotel’s protected tenants.
While Ateret Cohanim legally purchases Arab-owned property in east Jerusalem, those sales are typically hidden behind straw men and offshore companies. Palestinians caught selling land to Jews, often at inflated prices, are routinely tortured and executed as traitors.
But in the case of the two historic hotels, both just inside the walled medieval city’s Jaffa Gate, the two properties were sold for a pittance: $1.25 million, significantly lower than their market value. In a scandal that rocked the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, then Patriarch Irenaios denied knowledge of the sale at the time and claimed it was void. He later backtracked and said it was the work of the church’s director of finance, Nicholas Papadimas, who Irenaios claimed carried out the shady transaction without the church’s authorization and was bribed by Ateret Cohanim to promote the deal. Papadimas was charged in Greece for stealing church funds in a separate case.
In 2005, when Israel’s lively media broke the story of the sale, Irenaios was forced from office by Greek Orthodox officials. He was replaced by the current patriarch, Theophilos III, who rejected the hotel lease sales and took the case to the Jerusalem District Court. That body ruled Irenaios was authorized to sign the contract, leading to the Supreme Court appeal.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate had requested the retrial based on an affidavit of an individual named Ted Bloomfield, who worked for Ateret Cohanim in the 1990s. Bloomfield claimed the organization routinely bribed senior church officials and on occasion provided them prostitutes, according to the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz.
In an attempt to null the lease transfer and hold onto the properties for Christian pilgrims, the patriarchate in 2019 claimed to produce evidence to the courts that Ateret Cohanim and its companies knowingly “forged documents and initiated court proceedings based on these forged documents.”
The Supreme Court ruling has angered Russia and led to diplomatic pressure on Israel. Before World War I broke out in 1914, czarist Russia was the protector of Palestine’s Eastern Orthodox Christians, while France defended the Ottoman Empire’s Roman Catholics. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence has diminished since Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Israelis typically “own” their real estate property through long-term and renewable leases from the Israel Lands Authority or the Jewish National Fund. A third major landholder is the cash-strapped Greek Orthodox Church — which began issuing long-term leases on land in Jerusalem in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union stopped funding the patriarchate and halted heavily subsidized pilgrimages of Russian peasants to the Holy Land.
Abu Walid Dajani, 80, whose business card identifies him as the owner of the Imperial Hotel, said in a press conference Thursday that he has operated the boutique hotel since 1949, shortly after his clan fled their 14 homes in the German Colony on the west side of the city during the Nakba — meaning “catastrophe” — which Israelis refer to as the War of Independence.
Dajani, who is Muslim, warned that if yeshiva students were allowed to occupy the hotel’s 44 rooms, they would likely pelt the weekly procession of the Latin Patriarch to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with tomatoes and rotten eggs.
He called for an international committee to prevent Ateret Cohanim from taking over the building. While a July 2020 statement signed by 13 leaders of various Christian denominations in Jerusalem condemned the sale, the appeal was powerless to affect the legal proceedings.
Dajani noted that on June 9, following the Supreme Court ruling, a group of Jews moved into the neighboring Petra Hotel and are now living there in a tense standoff.
Standing in front of the Petra Hotel, Daniel Luria, the Australia-born executive director of Ateret Cohenim, measured his words, saying “no one is being kicked out.” He said plans call for restoring the two buildings as boutique hotels rather than as rabbinical seminaries.
Adding complexity to the conflict, the Petra Hotel was built in 1841 by Joseph Amzalaq, a Jewish merchant from Gibraltar. At the time, Jerusalem’s Old City was heterogeneous, and faith communities lived side-by-side. Besides offering rooms for rent, the kosher complex was home to his extended clan, a synagogue and yeshiva, and various shops. Amzalaq died in 1845, and the hotel repeatedly changed management. One of the owners was the Amdursky family from Amdur, near Moghiliev in Belarus, who took possession in 1898.
Following the earthquake of 1927 and the riots of 1929, the Amdurskys sold their Central Hotel to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and relocated their business to Ben Yehuda Street in the New City. That hotel was blown up in a terrorist bombing in February 1948 as Mandatory Palestine slipped into chaos and civil war.
“I smell antisemitism and racism trying to enforce Judenrein areas in united Jerusalem,” Luria said.
“Jews are the indigenous people in Israel,” he added, saying other claims are “unacceptable.”
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.