An investigation by BBC News Arabic has found that Russian oligarch and owner of Chelsea football club, Roman Abramovich, controls companies that have donated $100 million to Elad, a settler organization operating in occupied East Jerusalem.
Elad calls Silwan, an East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood, “Ir David,” the “City of David” in Hebrew.
Elad also runs the City of David archaeological sites, which are a massive tourist attraction in the area, visited by over a million people a year. Elad’s former Marketing Director, Shahar Shilo, told the BBC that Elad’s strategy is using tourism “to create a different political reality in the City of David.”
Elad relies on donors to fund its work. Nearly half of the donations it received between 2005-2018 came from four British Virgin Island companies. The person behind these companies had remained anonymous, until now.
The names of the four donating BVI-companies also appear in a set of bank documents known as the “Fincen Files.”
In the documents, banks report information about financial transactions and ownership of companies. Those documents were leaked to Buzzfeed News who shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the BBC.
In the documents, the name Roman Abramovich appears. He is named as the ultimate beneficial owner of three companies that have made donations to Elad, and he controls a fourth. Elad’s accounts show those companies have donated more than $100 million to Elad in today’s conversion rate.
That means the Chelsea football club owner has been the biggest single donor to Elad over the last 15 years.
Archaeological digs on occupied territory are governed by much debated laws, and Israel could be breaking international law by allowing Elad to carry out exploratory work in Silwan. In addition, by allowing settlement activity in the area Israel is considered to be in breach of international law.
A spokesman for Abramovich has told the BBC, “Mr Abramovich is a committed and generous supporter of Israeli and Jewish civil society, and over the past 20 years he has donated over five hundred million dollars to support healthcare, science, education and Jewish communities in Israel and around the world.”
Without those funds Elad would not have been able to so quickly and successfully pursue their goal of strengthening the Jewish presence in this Palestinian neighborhood.
Some of the houses where Elad settlers live were purchased from their previous Palestinian owners. But other Palestinian families were evicted from others, based on a controversial Israeli law titled “The Absentee Property Law.”
The law enables Israel to take over property of Palestinians who, according to Israel, have left or fled their houses during conflict.
At the center of one such case is the Sumarin house, which is located right next to Elad’s Visitor Center, where 19 family members currently live there, the youngest is less than two months old.
Amal Sumarin, mother of the family, said: “When I got married I moved here. My husband was living here with his uncle Haj Moussa Sumarin.” After his wife died, she remembered, “I started taking care of him, cooking and feeding him. My husband used to help him in the shower and used to take him to the doctor. He used to tell me this house is yours my child. It's for you and your husband."
Moussa Sumarin passed away in 1983, and his house was claimed by the state of Israel under the absentee law in 1987. It was then sold to Hemnutah, a subsidiary of the Jewish National Fund (JNF.)
One of the JNF’s stated objectives is to buy and develop land on behalf of the Jewish people. In 1991 Hemnutah asked the court to evict the Sumarins from their home. With support and funding from NGOs and the Palestinian Authority, the Sumarin’s legal battle has continued since.
Mohammed Dahle, the Sumarin’s lawyer for 10 years, told the BBC that “the probability of the survival of a Palestinian property, after it’s been declared that it’s a Jewish or Israeli property…is most likely zero.”
And indeed, in August the family lost its appeal to Jerusalem’s District court. They are now appealing to Israel’s Supreme Court which will hear the case in April 2021.
BBC News Arabic has found that Elad has been pushing forward the eviction by agreeing to pay all legal costs associated with the case, in a letter sent to Hemnutah in 1991, along with the eviction cases of several other families in the Silwan area. Hemnutah did not respond to questions about the case and Elad has not confirmed if they have continued to fund the case.
Elad said that all their properties have been gained fairly and legally. “No Palestinian has ever been removed from their home in the City of David without due process without court, without a case, without them being able to present their case on either side,” says Doron Spielman.
But Mohammed Dahle says, “It’s a situation where one ethnic group makes laws for its own interests, and another ethnic group suffers under these laws.”
Elad’s influence has grown alongside its funding. US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a strong supporter of Israeli settlements and has taken part in an opening ceremony at the City of David.
Friedman was one of the patrons of the 2019 US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And in 2020, when President Trump announced his peace plan, it named many of Elad’s sites as historical or spiritual places in need of protection. All of which are in occupied territory.
(Credit: BBC News Arabic)
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