Beit Hanina

Beit Hanina stands 5.53 kilometres north of Jerusalem at 769 metres, between Shu’fat to the south and ar-Ram and Bir Nabala to the north, with Hizma to the east. It is the largest Palestinian town inside the boundary Israel declared for Jerusalem in 1967: the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics counted 33,617 people there in 2011. Its community centre gives the town’s founding as more than five hundred years ago and its principal families as the Najjar, Abu Zahriya, Suleiman, Ibdah, Hasan, Silmi, Salim and Salman households.

The name is old enough that its meaning is contested in the same way Shu’fat’s is. Beit Hanina’s own community centre reads it as the house of Hanina, a woman saint; the village council of Beit Hanina al-Balad gives a local tradition of a queen called Hanina, and cites al-Dabbagh for two further possibilities — the Syriac hanina, one who deserves kindness, or hana, an army, giving the house of soldiers. The archive records the readings and does not choose between them.

Eight mosques stand in the town, along with a convent of the Rosary Sisters and two Catholic churches; beneath the main street lie the ruins of an old church.

One town, two sides of a wall

Beit Hanina is really two places, and the wall made the distinction into a border. The town proper falls inside the municipal boundary, in what Palestinian planners call the J1 area, administered by the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem and never subjected to the Oslo A–B–C classification. Beit Hanina al-Balad, the old village, sits 6.15 kilometres north-west of the city, past Bir Nabala, on the far side of the barrier. People who hold the same family names now hold different papers and need different permissions to visit each other.

The land ledger is the same story in dunums. Of Beit Hanina’s 8,877 dunums, ARIJ records 2,927 — 33.1 per cent — confiscated for four Israeli settlements that surround the town on all sides: Ramat Shlomo (Rekhes Shu’fat) to the south-west, and Pisgat Ze’ev, Pisgat Amir and Neve Ya’akov to the east, holding more than 85,000 settlers. In ARIJ’s land-use table those settlements, together with two military bases and the wall zone, account for 3,045 dunums in all — not a further tranche but the inclusive figure, logged as settlements, military bases and wall zone. Commercial farming has effectively ended; ARIJ records the town’s remaining olives at about 55 dunums. Israeli bypass road 21, planned from 2002 and financed from 2005, was routed to cut through the built-up centre of Beit Hanina as it links the northern settlements to each other, putting homes along its line under demolition threat.

For the wider frame, OCHA’s account of the localities the barrier left outside the city — Kafr ‘Aqab, the Shu’fat camp area and the rest — applies directly to Beit Hanina al-Balad’s side of the line: residency retained, taxes paid, services withdrawn, checkpoints crossed to reach what the papers say you are entitled to.

Sources

• Beit Hanina Town Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)
• Beit Hanina al Balad Village Profile — Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem (ARIJ)
• East Jerusalem Palestinian localities behind the Barrier — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, 10 August 2016
• East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA, update August 2014