It is cold in the mountains of Jerusalem. Mist invades the heights. Soon it may be snowing. It will be less beautiful in the district of Kafr Aqab than in the center of the Holy City, but Salah Hamouri has no choice: he is confined there by the Israeli authorities, on pain of losing his permanent residence in Jerusalem. It is here that he will spend New Years Eve, without his wife and two children, stranded in France and banned from Israeli territory.
“I don’t really work anymore, adds the Franco-Palestinian lawyer, attached to the Palestinian legal aid association Addameer. I can’t go to court anyway, and then our organization is in turmoil. “ The NGO is one of a group of six organizations that have been designated as “Terrorists” by the Israeli authorities last October. Salah Hamouri has been on the front line of the conflict that has pitted the Israeli authorities against Palestinian civil society for several years: he was even part of a group of militants targeted by the Pegasus cybersurveillance software between April and September.
Son of a Palestinian and a Frenchwoman, Salah Hamouri, 36, was born and raised in Jerusalem. At the end of October, Israel’s justice minister Ayelet Shaked officially declared that he should be expelled. Like the vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Mr. Hamouri has a simple permanent resident status in his hometown. According to the NGO B’Tselem, nearly 15,000 Palestinians have had this title and the rights that go with it confiscated since Israel’s annexation of the city in 1967.
For Salah Hamouri, the decision was taken under the aegis of a new amendment to an Israeli law, passed in 2018, which stipulates that the residence can be revoked following a “Violation of allegiance to the State of Israel”. The terms are vague, but for Mr. Hamouri as for his lawyer, Lea Tsemel, the reasoning does not hold: “Jerusalem is occupied territory, and those under occupation are not required to be loyal to the occupying power. “
“Twenty years of relentlessness”
An appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court has been filed but, in the meantime, Mr. Hamouri is confined to Kafr Aqab, a neighborhood that is included within the boundaries of the Jerusalem Municipality, but is on the Palestinian side of the separation wall. He saw the last episode there “About twenty years of relentlessness”, rages his wife, Elsa Lefort, reached by telephone in France.
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