Jaffa's 'Renewal' Aims at Expulsion of Palestinians

The ground floor of Zaki Khimayl's home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa's beach, a stone's throw from Tel Aviv, the business should be thriving.

Mr. Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighborhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya, is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind: his eviction from Jaffa.

Sitting on the cafe's balcony, Mr. Khimayl, 59, said he felt besieged. Bulldozers are tearing up the land by the beach for redevelopment and luxury apartments are springing up all around his dilapidated two-story home.

He opened a briefcase, one of five he has stuffed with demands and fines from official bodies, as well as bills from four lawyers dealing with the flood of paperwork.

"I owe 1.8 million shekels [$500,000] in water and business rates alone," he said in exasperation. "The crazy thing is the municipality recently valued the property and told me it's worth much less than the sum I owe."

Jaffa is one of half a dozen "mixed cities" in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens supposedly live together. The rest of Israel's Palestinian minority, relatives of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, live in their own separate and deprived communities.... Antiwar

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