Twenty years ago, a settler association took over the property of the family of former Attorney General Michael Ben Yair in Sheikh Jarrah, without the family’s knowledge. The settlers managed to collect hundreds of thousands of shekels in rent from the Palestinian residence who live in the house and planned to replace them with settlers. When the Ben Yair family learned of this, they began a fight for their home with the help of Peace Now, and about a month ago, the final verdict was given that returned the property to its rightful owners. The family intends to allow the Palestinian residents to continue living in their home for many years to come.
Peace Now: The fight of Michael Ben Yair and his family over his childhood home reveals a mechanism of dispossession in which the Israeli authorities are working hand in hand with settlers to take over properties in East Jerusalem and dispossess the Palestinians. Under the auspices of a discriminatory set of laws that allows Jews the right to return to property they lost before 1948 but prevents this from Palestinians, and with the help of high walls of secrecy and the support of government mechanisms, settlers managed to take control of dozens of properties in East Jerusalem and expel the Palestinians from them.
The house of Sara Jana, the grandmother of Michael Ben Yair, in Shikh Jarrah, 1938 (in red). photo: The Library of Congress.
Michael Ben Yair, the former Attorney General, was born in 1942 in the “Nahalat Shimon” (“Umm Haroun”) neighborhood in Sheikh Jarrah. During the 1948 war, he and his family, along with all the residents of the Jewish neighborhood, were evacuated from their home and received alternative housing in west Jerusalem from the Jewish national institutions. “We had two apartments and a shop; we received two apartments and a shop,” Ben Yair said. After the war, Sheikh Jarrah remained under Jordanian control. The family home was managed by the Jordanian government, which rented it to Palestinian tenants.
During the 1948 war, tens of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes in Jerusalem. About 2,000 of them, from the Old City, Sheikh Jarrah and Musrarra, were Jews who moved to Israel and immediately received alternative housing from the Israeli authorities. About 35,000 of them, from Talbiya, Baka’a, Katamon and other neighborhoods, were Palestinians who arrived in refugees camps in the West Bank or to neighboring countries.
After 1967, East Jerusalem, including Sheikh Jarrah, was annexed to Israel. The properties in East Jerusalem that were managed by the Jordanian authorities were moved to the management of the Israeli General Custodian who continued to rent them to the Palestinian tenants. Then the Knesset legislated a law that allowed Jewish owners to regain their properties that had been in Jordanian hands until 1967.
Another law enacted by the Knesset a few years earlier, the Absentees’ Properties Law, stipulated that Palestinians would not be able to regain the properties they had lost in 1948. Based on these discriminatory laws, settlers began to take over properties in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. They located the original owners or their heirs, bought the rights to the properties from them, and began eviction proceedings against the Palestinian residents.
Now it turns out that the settlers did not always bother to find the legal heirs. As happened in the case of the Ben Yair family, they managed to take over properties even without the owners knowing about it and against their will.
Michael Ben Yair has always opposed the exercise of the “right of return” of Jews to properties in East Jerusalem, claiming that it is in Israel’s interest not to reopen the 1948 “file.” That is why he has refrained from asking for his home back all these years. For him, the moral and just thing is that the Palestinians who live in his childhood home continue to live there undisturbed. In the previous decade, at the height of the long struggle against the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, Ben Yair participated in demonstrations in the neighborhood, and even published a book about Sheikh Jarrah in which he sharply criticizes the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah and the legislation that enables it.
At one of the protest events, Ben Yair told the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood:
“If the government was honest with all its residents, including you, it should have expropriated the properties in the neighborhood and given them to the Palestinians who live there today. My family and my cousin’s family, who were evicted from the neighborhood in January 1948, received properties belonging to Palestinian refugees … If the government will conduct land registration in Sheikh Jarrah, I will claim ownership of the building that belonged to my family and hand it over to the Palestinians who live there today. The existing law, which allows double compensation only for Jews, for lost properties from the time before 1948 is unjust.”
However, when Ben Yair announced his intention to give his house to the Palestinian tenants, he did not know that about ten years earlier, settlers had managed to get their hands on his house. He learned of this a year later by chance.
In July 2018, Peace Now contacted the Israeli General Custodian and asked for a list of all the eviction proceedings he had conducted against Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The Custodian replied that compiling the full list of cases would involve too much investment of resources, instead he provided a list of the 35 eviction lawsuits that were being processed in the courts at the time. Among these lawsuits was a lawsuit against the Abu Aloul shop, which is adjacent to Ben Yair’s childhood home (on 8/10/24, the Magistrate’s Court ruled that the family must vacate the property, and its appeal is pending before the District Court).
When Ben Yair heard about this from Peace Now, he decided to make sure that it was not his family’s property and contacted the General Custodian. In a meeting between Michael Ben Yair and his sister and the General Custodian in March 2019, they learned that the house had been transferred to members of a settler association operating in Sheikh Jarrah.
1. The endowment:
In 1927, Ben Yair’s grandmother, Sarah Jana, wrote a will, in a form that was accepted at the time among traditional Jews. At the Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem she declared that the house and shops she owns will pass to her descendants after her death, and if, God forbid, they have no offspring, the property will be dedicated to the benefit of the synagogue of the Georgian community in the neighborhood. This form of will is known as a family endowment.
Another type of endowment is a public endowment whose owners have dedicated it to specific public purposes, charity, welfare, etc., and it is managed by trustees whose job is to ensure that the assets that were dedicated are used for the purposes defined for the endowment.
Endowments are supervised entities. The Ministry of Justice has a Registrar of Endowments, which, like the Registrar of Associations, is responsible for ensuring that the trustees of the endowment are indeed acting lawfully to realize its goals. But according to the law in Israel, endowments created at a rabbinical court are managed and supervised by the Israeli Rabbinical Courts.
2. The Rabbinical Court:
By law, all files and hearings of the Israeli Rabbinical Court, which usually deals with family law, are confidential. In 2002, members of the Settler of Zion Association, which worked to dispossess Palestinians from neighborhoods in East Jerusalem in favor of settlements, appealed to the Rabbinical Court and asked it to recognize Sarah Jana’s endowment and appoint them as its trustees. The court agreed. At this point, no one tried to find Sarah Jana’s heirs and tell them that the property had been dedicated to them, neither the settlers nor the Rabbinical Court. Not even the General Custodian who managed the property. And since all proceedings in the Rabbinical Court are confidential, no one could have known about it.
3. The General Custodian
The General Custodian is a body in the Ministry of Justice whose job is to manage all abandoned properties. Land and funds of people who died without heirs, or their heirs are unknown, are transferred to the management of the General Custodian. In East Jerusalem, the Jewish properties that remained under Jordanian control in 1948 were managed by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Properties, who leased them to Palestinian families. After 1967, the Israeli General Custodian took over the management of these properties and continued the lease with the Palestinian families. By virtue of his role, the Custodian is supposed to safeguard the properties for the benefit of their owners, and it is his duty to try to find the owners and release the property to them. In Ben Yair’s case, it turns out that the Custodian not only failed in the simple research of finding the heirs, but was downright negligent and transferred the property to settlers who had no connection to the property.
After winning the management of the endowment in the Rabbinical Court, the settlers turned to the General Custodian and asked to receive the property. The Custodian agreed and released the property to them. From that moment on, they became the actual owners of the property; they also received from the Custodian all the money he had collected from the Palestinian tenants over the years.
At the meeting of Ben Yair with the General Custodian in March 2019, she informed him that the property was no longer under the Custodian’s management and had been released to the hands of the Settlers of Zion association a decade before.
4. The method: taking over the endowment and then the property
Among the properties of Jews in East Jerusalem, there are dozens if not hundreds of properties that were dedicated as endowments. Many of them were family endowments and others were public endowments, such as the Benvinisti endowment in Batan Al-Hawa in Silwan. In the late 19th century the Bevinisti family dedicated 5 dunams in Silwan for the benefit of the Yemenite poor Jews of Jerusalem. Today, in its name, the people of the Ateret Cohanim settler organization are demanding the eviction of hundreds of Palestinians from their legal homes.
Settler associations such as Ateret Cohanim and the Settlers of Zion found those endowments and turned to the Rabbinical Court to become the trustees of the endowment. This way they managed to take control of dozens of properties in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and in the eastern Musrara neighborhood. As trustees of the endowment, they turned to the General Custodian, who released the properties to them.
5. Ben Yair’s struggle to receive the property
With the help of attorney Michael Sfard and the assistance of Peace Now, Michael Ben Yair began a journey that exposed the methods of the settlers and the cooperation of the Custodian and the Rabbinical Court. The first challenge was to obtain permission from the Rabbinical Court to review the endowment file, to know how to move forward and with whom to act in order to receive management of the endowment.
The request to review the file was submitted on March 27, 2019. Six months later, the court finally gave its decision on the request and ruled not to give Ben Yair permission to review the file. The reason: He showed an inheritance order proving his relationship to his mother, but not an inheritance order from his grandmother. It took another full year of struggle until, in August 2020, the court finally gave Ben Yair permission to review the file.
A review of the endowment file revealed the magnitude of the absurdity. A few years after the settlers took possession of the property, an association that describes itself as working for the Georgian community in Israel approached the Rabbinic Court. It asked the court to transfer the endowment to it, because the dedicator wrote that if there were no descendants, the property would be dedicated to a synagogue for the Georgian community, and as an association who represents the Georgian community, it is a more appropriate entity to manage the endowment. The court accepted the request and transferred the endowment from the settlers to the Georgians. It is worth mentioning that in a similar case, of another endowment of a Georgian Jew, in eastern Musrara, the court refused their request and left the property in the hands of the settlers.
The settlers who took over Ben Yair’s property rented it to Palestinian tenants and used the rental money to finance their settlement activities. The members of the Georgian association used the money for unknown purposes.
No one, neither the court, nor the settlers, nor the Georgian association, thought of looking for the dedicator’s heirs, who could not have known that someone had taken over the property for them. Worse still, it turns out that in the Rabbinic Court’s protocol, a representative of the Georgian association said: “I was told that it belongs to Professor Michael Ben Yair, we are trying to locate him.” If he bothered to Google “Michael Ben Yair,” he would not only find him but also discover that he had written a book about Sheikh Jarrah with the story of the house in which he was born.
6. Request to change the trustees
But the struggle did not end there. Ben Yair submitted a request to the Rabbinic Court to change the trustees and return the property to the family. The Georgians and the court did not give up easily. One of the claims was that because of Ben Yair’s past statements about the future of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and that the Jewish properties there should be given to Palestinians, he was unfit to manage the endowment.
Thus, a private property that was dedicated to him in a family endowment became property that the court considers to be property of the Jewish people. Ultimately, after years of deliberations, on January 26, 2025, the court decided to return the property to the Ben Yair family.
Ben Yair’s house is not an isolated case. In a similar way, settlers have taken over dozens of endowments and demanded the evacuation of the Palestinian residents. Thus, dozens of settlements have already been established in the Old City, in the Palestinian Musarra, and in Sheikh Jarrah. These days, hundreds of Palestinian families are in danger of eviction in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah because of this system, and they are facing eviction lawsuits from settlers in the courts. Dozens of families have received eviction rulings from the Magistrate’s Court in recent weeks.
Palestinian residents of Batan Al-Hawa, Silwan, 2018. All of them are under threat of eviction. Photo: Emil Salman, Haaretz.