Fights, settlers and a luxury hotel: an opaque land sale puts Jerusalem's Armenians on the warpath

Although he lives nearby, Setrag Balian spent the night in a tent. He and other young Armenian activists take turns so that someone can raise the alarm if the bulldozers return to their neighborhood in the historic walled citadel of Jerusalem, as happened by surprise last November, when the war in Gaza monopolized the attention. Dozens of people, some armed and with dogs, showed up at dawn to begin raising the ground in compliance with an opaque real estate operation that has put on a war footing a normally quiet neighborhood populated for 1,500 years by the oldest Armenian community. in the diaspora.

The activists stopped him and – in an unprecedented image in an area best known for its cathedral and its ceramists – installed fences, barbed wire and Armenian flags in the middle of the large parking lot that the patriarch and a monk rented for 98 years from an Australian businessman. -Israeli to build a luxury hotel. In another place on the planet, it would have been a simple sale, but everyone looks at each other with suspicion in the old city of Jerusalem because ultra-nationalist Jewish organizations have been acquiring properties for years through straw men, in a hidden struggle to colonize it little by little. “It is the biggest existential problem that our community has experienced here. We are not stupid, nor were we born yesterday. It is enough to join the dots,” says Balian.

The situation has not stopped escalating since last April, when the community learned of the content of the contract, signed in 2021. It affects 11,500 square meters: a large outdoor parking lot (on land known as the Garden of the Cows), some buildings that belong to the Patriarchate and five private houses. It is 25% of the part of the neighborhood under Armenian control, since it also houses a large police station or the Tower of David Museum, in Israeli hands. The price: two million dollars (1.85 million euros), well below such a coveted location. An apartment with a view in the Jewish Quarter annex of the old city can cost up to six million shekels (1.5 million euros). The Armenian quarter, which has been losing population (about 1,500 today), contains the only way to reach the Western Wall by car through the citadel, as well as the gate that gives access to Mount Zion.

Upon finding out, a good part of the Armenian neighborhood rose up against the patriarch, Nourhan Manougian. He barely left the convent and had to listen to demonstrations every Friday in which they called him a “traitor” and displayed a cloth to mark a “red line.” It was the culmination of the gap that had been cultivating between young people and the Patriarchate, which manages civil and religious affairs of the Armenian community. Manougian, 75, one of the signatories of the agreement, blamed and expelled Baret Yeretsian, the cleric who coordinated it and who had to be protected by Israeli police from an angry mob before escaping to California.

“The community's reaction had moral reasons, but also practical ones. We cannot add a single room here, while in the Jewish quarter they build five-story buildings. Parking is a huge problem and there are people who come from Bethlehem to school,” explains George Hintlian, historian of the Armenian presence in Jerusalem, one of its main figures and former number two of the Patriarchate, at the community center. “There was also an element of surprise and anger at discovering the amount of land in the contract. At first the Patriarchate was not clear about that,” he adds.

Like everything in the Holy Land, the matter soon acquired a political dimension. The president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmud Abbas, and Jordan withdrew recognition of Manougian as patriarch, preventing him from carrying out transactions or signing contracts in both territories.

At the end of October, the patriarch announced the cancellation of the contract to the counterparty, the company Xana Gardens, arguing that it was achieved with lies. The legality of the reversal is now in court, but the decision changed the situation: the young activists bite the bullet and accepted the patriarch in the protests, while the promoters lost patience and sent in the bulldozers, which demolished a small wall and raised part of the floor. “They thought that since all the media was busy with Gaza, they could behave like hooligans and physically take control of the place,” says Balian, who wears a patch with the flag of Artsakh on his sweatshirt, the self-proclaimed republic in Nagorno Karabakh in 1991 and formally dissolved on January 1, after the Azerbaijani military victory and the flight of practically the entire Armenian population.

In an unusual show of unity and that the controversy transcends real estate, the leaders of all the churches in the Holy Land issued a joint statement in which they showed their “serious concern” about the events and the risk that they “weaken and jeopardize danger the Christian presence” in the area.

On January 23, the tension rose a few more degrees. At least a dozen men (several masked or covered with hoods and sunglasses) showed up at the scene and one began cutting the fence with an electric saw. A stone fight broke out that ended with several arrests.

It was in the same parking lot where the signatory appeared as a buyer: the Canadian-Israeli Danny Rothman, who sometimes uses the last name Rubinstein and other times uses both. He founded the company

Rothman transferred half of the shares to George Warwar, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship recently arrested for assaulting an Armenian activist in front of the police. Warwar – who declined to make any statements to this newspaper, expressing his hope that “the situation will calm down soon” – was recently photographed in a hotel in the city meeting, among others, with Matti Dan, founder of Ateret Cohanim, the movement extremist who advocates the Judaization of all of Jerusalem. In 2005, the group bought to the Orthodox Patriarchate three buildings in the Christian quarter of the old city, well below the market price and through a shell company in a tax haven. The then patriarch, Irenaeus I, was deposed shortly after after being accused of corruption. The Israeli Supreme Court put an end to almost two decades of legal battle in 2022 by confirming the validity of the controversial purchase.

Ateret Cohanim denies being involved in the operation in the Armenian neighborhood. However, Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and activist specialized in the city's geopolitics and founder of the NGO Land Jerusalem, has little doubt that “the initiative is supported by extreme settler organizations in East Jerusalem.” He frames it in the policies of recent years aimed at “surrounding the old city with Jewish settlements” to change its character, “marginalizing the rest” of identities. “I can't corroborate it, but based on recent history and some circumstantial evidence, some settlers are acting in collusion with the Israeli government,” he says by phone.

As a background, there are also pending accounts. The Armenians, whom some Palestinians accused of appeasement with the Israeli authorities, do not forget the firm arms – mainly drones – and technological support that Israel provided to Azerbaijan both in the 2020 clashes in Nagorno Karabakh and in its final victory, last September, with a capitulation of the Armenian enclave in just 24 hours. In the previous weeks, numerous Azerbaijani military flights were recorded between Israel and a base near Nagorno Karabakh. “Rather than helping Azerbaijan, Israel participated almost directly. And Artsakh is a very painful topic for us,” says Hintlian.

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