The neighborhood of Silwan sits just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, tumbling down the slopes of the Kidron Valley in a dense weave of stone houses, rooftop water tanks, and narrow alleyways. Roughly 50,000 Palestinians live here — families whose presence in these hills predates the State of Israel. For many of them, daily life now moves to a different rhythm: the thud of an archaeological excavation, the arrival of a demolition notice, the slow encroachment of a settler organization that controls both the tourist infrastructure beneath their feet and the legal pressure bearing down on their homes above.
Silwan is not simply a disputed neighborhood. It is the clearest living example of how archaeology, settler finance, and Israeli state policy combine to displace an indigenous urban population — quietly, incrementally, and largely out of international view.
Elad and the City of David: Tourism as a Displacement Tool
At the heart of Silwan’s crisis is a registered Israeli non-profit called Elad (an acronym for “To the City of David”). Founded in the late 1980s, Elad operates the City of David National Heritage Site — a heavily visited archaeological park that sits directly beneath the residential core of Wadi Hilweh, Silwan’s most pressured sub-quarter. The Israeli Nature and Parks Authority formally granted Elad management authority over the site, a public national park, handing a settler organization effective control over both the land and the narrative.
The arrangement is lucrative and politically potent. Elad raises tens of millions of dollars annually, much of it from diaspora donors in the United States, channeled through linked American nonprofits. According to financial disclosures analyzed by Israeli investigative outlets, those funds flow into two parallel streams: archaeological excavation that physically restructures the ground beneath Palestinian homes, and property acquisition designed to move Jewish Israeli families into Silwan.
The Palestinian residents are not incidental to this project — they are its target. As the Israeli human rights organization Ir Amim, which monitors East Jerusalem planning, has documented in multiple reports, the City of David’s expansion plans and the adjacent King’s Garden development scheme would require the demolition or displacement of hundreds of Palestinian families. Ir Amim’s research shows that Elad has acquired or facilitated the acquisition of dozens of properties in Silwan, frequently through opaque legal mechanisms that Palestinian families contest in court for years before losing.
The Sumarin Family: Three Decades of Legal Siege
No single case illustrates the legal dimensions of Silwan’s dispossession more starkly than the Sumarin family of Wadi Hilweh. Their story begins in the 1980s, when an absent Palestinian landlord’s property — a building in which multiple families had lived as tenants for generations — was declared “absentee property” under Israel’s Absentee Property Law of 1950, a statute that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both characterized as a tool of dispossession. The Custodian General, an Israeli state body, transferred custodianship of the property to Elad.
The family spent more than three decades in Israeli courts arguing that the transfer was unlawful and that their tenancy rights had been violated. In 2021, after years of litigation, the Jerusalem District Court ruled against them. The ruling set the stage for eviction. The Sumarin case became a focal point for Palestinian legal advocates and was cited by Al-Haq, the Ramallah-based human rights organization with UN ECOSOC consultative status, as emblematic of how Israeli property law in East Jerusalem systematically advantages settler organizations over Palestinian residents.
The family’s situation drew comparisons to the Sheikh Jarrah eviction cases — different neighborhood, identical legal machinery: the 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which allows Jewish Israelis (but not Palestinians) to reclaim pre-1948 properties in East Jerusalem, combined with the Absentee Property Law, creates an asymmetric legal system that courts have repeatedly declined to remedy.
Demolition Orders and the Planning Trap
For families not targeted by property-transfer proceedings, the threat takes a different form: the demolition order. Because Israel has never extended legal planning frameworks to East Jerusalem that would allow Palestinian residents to build or expand homes, the vast majority of construction in Silwan over the past five decades has proceeded without permits — permits that, as Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights) and Ir Amim have documented, are effectively impossible for Palestinians to obtain.
The result is a city within a city where almost every addition to a family home — a room built for a married son, a second floor for aging parents — is technically “illegal.” According to data compiled by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, thousands of demolition orders are outstanding against Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem at any given time. In Silwan specifically, the municipality has issued orders against hundreds of structures in Wadi Hilweh and adjacent areas. Residents live under what advocates describe as a Damoclean condition: the order may sit dormant for years, then be enforced at any moment.
The Rweidi family, also of Wadi Hilweh, faced this reality acutely when Israeli authorities moved to demolish a residential structure on the grounds that it was built without a permit in a zone affected by archaeological planning restrictions tied to the City of David site. Their case, documented by Ir Amim and reported in Israeli and international press, illustrates how archaeological designations function as an additional legal layer — one that further narrows the already near-impossible path to legal residence for Palestinian families.
International Law and What It Says
International legal frameworks are unambiguous, if unenforced. East Jerusalem is occupied territory under international humanitarian law. UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016), adopted 14–0 with one abstention, reaffirmed that Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory — including East Jerusalem — have “no legal validity” and constitute a “flagrant violation” of international law. The resolution specifically called on Israel to cease all settlement activity.
The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 49, prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory, and Article 53 prohibits the destruction of property except where rendered “absolutely necessary by military operations.” Forced evictions and home demolitions in Silwan satisfy neither exception. The International Court of Justice in its 2004 advisory opinion on the separation wall, and more recently in its July 2024 advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israeli occupation, found Israel’s settlement enterprise in East Jerusalem unlawful.
Yet the demolitions continue. Elad continues to excavate. Families continue to receive envelopes from the Jerusalem municipality that may mean the end of the only home they have known.
A Neighborhood That Refuses to Disappear
Silwan endures. Community organizations document every order and every eviction. Palestinian lawyers file and refile. Families who lose in the District Court appeal to the Supreme Court, knowing the odds and proceeding anyway. Children walk to school past tourist groups filing into an archaeological park built in the space beneath their grandparents’ houses.
The question Silwan poses is not archaeological. It is moral and political: whether the international community will treat the displacement of 50,000 people through legal bureaucracy and selective law enforcement as the human rights emergency it plainly is — or continue to classify it as a complex, intractable “dispute” requiring further study. For the families of Wadi Hilweh, study has never been the shortage.
Sources
- Ir Amim, Settler Organizations in East Jerusalem: Elad and the City of David and associated annual reports — ir-amim.org.il
- B’Tselem, Planning and Building in East Jerusalem — btselem.org
- Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, reports on East Jerusalem planning restrictions — bimkom.org
- Al-Haq, documentation on Sumarin family case and East Jerusalem property law — alhaq.org
- UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (23 December 2016)
- Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Articles 49 and 53
- International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004
- International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024
- Human Rights Watch, reporting on the Absentee Property Law and East Jerusalem evictions — hrw.org
- Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians (2022), sections on East Jerusalem — amnesty.org
