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On October 30, we visited the offices of the Mixed Cities Project in Ramle,  only one block from the location of the now famous home in Sandy Tolan’s “The Lemon Tree.” The lemon tree is now just a dead stump in the play area of the children’s center into which the house was converted.

The Lemon Tree Home: Front The Lemon Tree Backyard Sandbox on top of Lemon Tree Stump

The Mixed Cities Project was launched in 2003 by SHATIL, the New Israel Fund’s Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change Organizations in Israel, with support from the European Union. The Project seeks to empower Palestinian residents in Ramle, Lod, Acco, Jaffa and Haifa to fight for equal access to housing rights, spatial, cultural and overall civic equality and to participate and gain representation in public planning at national, regional and local levels.

We met with Buthayna Dabit, the Director of the Project, and we toured the neglected Palestinian neighborhoods of Lod. Palestinians constitute close to 20% of Israel’s population and live mainly in all Palestinian Arab towns and villages. 90,000 Palestinians live in the mixed cities listed above, but live in isolated, separate and neglected neighborhoods that exist under oppressive spatial constraints and in poverty and without the most basic elements of normal infrastructure such as sewage, refuse disposal, surfaced access roads and street lighting. Israeli planning authorities refuse routine building and planning permits that force Palestinian families to make necessary repairs to homes and businesses that often result in demolition orders that are carried out by Israeli police in the same military fashion as the army in the oPt. Many of the Palestinian neighborhoods are “unrecognized” and are ignored when major highways, rail routes and industrial zones are planned.

Municipalities also facilitate the erosion of Palestinian and Arab cultural identity by refusing to post streets and municipal buildings with Arabic language and by ignoring the need to preserve Palestinian cultural sites in what are known as the “old cities” in the mixed city neighborhoods. These “old city” locations were both the original population centers of the formerly exclusive Palestinian villages and the locations where Palestinians from the villages were forcibly “transferred” in 1948 into small neighborhoods that were then surrounded by fences and referred to as “ghettos”. Now, in some neighborhoods, the Israeli planning authorities have built walls, that look very much like the “Apartheid Wall” inside the West Bank, to separate the Palestinian population from the Jewish residents.

For more information about the Project and the details of the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in the mixed cities, please visit www.nif.org.il or contact Ms. Dabit at [email protected].

Inside 1948 Home: Outside 1948 Home Parking Lot Built and 1948 Homes Destroyed