The Armenian pottery nameplate beside the door is common, even among Jews, but the painting over the door is a dead giveaway. Only a Christian would display outside his home a picture of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, with its black-domed roof and cross on top. And only an unusual Christian would display it here, in the middle of Israel's biggest Jewish settlement.
Yousef Majlaton is an unusual Christian. An Arab born in the Old City of Jerusalem 49 years ago, when it was under Jordanian control, he decided in 2000 that he, his wife and three sons deserved better housing than what they had in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem. So the engineer and building contractor set out to buy an apartment in Pisgat Ze'ev, just north of Jerusalem.
In doing so, Majlaton started a trend that is raising the ire of a comfortable Jewish settlement, and pitting Israel's democratic values against its Jewish identity.
Pisgat Ze'ev, named for Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the right-wing leader of the Jewish Irgun underground, sits in Israeli-occupied territory. While Israel claims to have annexed it, calling it a neighborhood and adding it to the municipality of Jerusalem, the international community considers it occupied land.
Not that that bothers Majlaton.
He wanted better public services, a larger home and a mortgage to help pay for the place, none of which he could get in Beit Hanina. And he soon found that there was nothing to stop him buying in Pisgat Ze'ev, even though it was an exclusively Jewish community. "The agent only asked for my Jerusalem ID," he explained.
Since the Majlatons' move, more than 200 Arab families have taken up residence in Pisgat Ze'ev, a community of almost 50,000 people, says Jamal Natsheh, a real-estate agent who finds homes for many of them. Another dozen families have bought in the settlement of Neve Yaakov, to the north, and several have bought in the tonier settlement/neighborhood of French Hill, just to the south.
Sami Bashir, a Muslim, is one of them. The 43-year-old Palestinian lawyer and father of four young children is just finishing the renovations to the four-story townhouse he bought in French Hill. Bashir, an Israeli Arab from the Galilee, was fed up with the garbage and confined quarters in Beit Hanina.
"I like the location here," he said, gazing out over a wide view of Jerusalem. "I like the environment. I like the people who live here. It's very high society. They're educated and accomplished."
Most of the moves have come in the past year or so, said Natsheh, sitting at his favorite cafe in the Pisgat Ze'ev mall. Looking around, the mall's customers seem about evenly divided between Arabs and Orthodox Jews.
New Israeli regulations require anyone wanting the benefits of a Jerusalem ID (effectively Israeli citizenship, with health care and other benefits) to actually live in Jerusalem, which includes Pisgat Ze'ev. No longer can families move outside the city, where they are able to build bigger homes, and maintain their Jerusalem documents. As a result of this, and the wall that now separates Jerusalem from the West Bank, Palestinians flooded back to the city and overwhelmed what little housing there was. Unable to build -- homes built without permits are routinely demolished -- they looked elsewhere.
"They soon found there were lots of flats available in Pisgat Ze'ev," Natsheh said, "and no law to prevent them from buying."
The neighbors have not always reacted well to Arabs moving into their building. "They were pretty cool to me," Majlaton recalled. "But no one tried to stop me."
Even today, "there's not a lot of visiting," he said. "But they're like that even with other Jews."
Majlaton, a proud Christian and proud Jerusalemite, recalls the day a rabbi knocked on the door offering to teach Torah. "I pointed to the picture over my door and explained I was Christian. He reacted with horror, telling me to get away from him, like I was dirty. I said, 'Me get away? No, you get away. This is my city. I was born here.' And I shut the door."
Apart from that, Majlaton can cite no other time he was treated badly in his new neighborhood. And while he didn't set out to start a trend, he thinks moving to Jerusalem's Jewish suburbs is a great way for Palestinians, especially Christians, to feel more at home.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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