Charlotte Ritz-Jack
Jewish Currents / December 23, 2025
As Jewish settlers evict families from their homes in an East Jerusalem neighbourhood, a community art project called I Witness Silwan ensures that they are always being watched.
On the afternoon of December 14th, some 20 Israeli police and army officers arrived in the Silwan neighbourhood of East Jerusalem to tell Umm Nasser Rajabi that she and her family of 18 had a few hours to pack and permanently leave their four-story home. Although Rajabi had been issued an eviction notice for early December, and had seen her next-door neighbours forced out the previous month, it still came as a shock when the police showed up. Umm Nasser and her relatives began frantically emptying the home as Israeli settlers, who had been scoping out and photographing the property for months, gathered to watch and celebrate. “This is my house,” Umm Nasser said between tears. “I spent 50 years in this house, raising all my kids here.” After the sun had set and the family’s belongings had been cleared out, nearly a dozen people helped Palestinian Red Crescent staff carry Awad, Umm Nasser’s grandson, out of the house on a hospital bed; since suffering a stroke five years ago, Awad has required full-time care, hospital-grade equipment, and intravenous food, all of which Umm Nasser had specially fitted the first story of her home to provide. As the family drove five miles across Jerusalem to a hastily-rented unit in Beit Hanina that they can’t afford long-term, nearly three dozen settlers seized the house under the protection of police and private security forces.
Along with the police, soldiers, and settlers, other silent witnesses were looking on as the Rajabi family was forced out. Painted on the front of the house in colourful hues are the eyes of Milad Ayyash, a 17-year-old Silwan resident who was shot and killed by settler security in 2011, while etched in bright blue on a balcony is the eye of a younger Umm Nasser, looking protectively over the neighbourhood where she grew up and raised her 11 children. These painted eyes are among dozens adorning the stacked houses of the dense Batan al-Hawa section of Silwan, where more than 85 families—some 700 people—are facing expulsion to make way for ever-expanding Israeli settlements. The product of “I Witness Silwan: Who Is Watching Whom?,” a public art project established in 2015, the murals invert a reality in which Silwan’s residents live under constant surveillance by the regime seizing Palestinian property, turning the gaze—and the accountability that comes with being watched—back outward.
Ateret Cohanim, a settler organization working to Judaize areas of East Jerusalem, began filing dozens of eviction suits against Silwan residents in 2001, claiming legal rights to the land after taking control of a Jewish trust that had operated in the neighbourhood in the late 19th century to aid the poor. Under Israel’s 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters Law, Jews are permitted to reclaim property in East Jerusalem that was lost during the 1948 war, despite the fact that most have already been compensated for lost property—and that those taking over land tend to have no historical connection to the particular property they claim. (Palestinians, who were not compensated for land lost in 1948, are denied the same right.) The Rajabis and the other targeted families waged years-long legal battles in response, but many of their cases ended in June, when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favour of Ateret Cohanim. At least 30 families in Batan al-Hawa, which sits close to the Old City walls, have already been evicted, with more to follow until, ultimately, the section is in the hands of settlers.
As the evictions ramp up, the eyes, bright and unblinking, stare at the settlers. To date, the I Witness project has painted nearly 100 murals on the facades of homes that have been issued eviction and demolition orders. Some murals are painted directly onto Silwan’s concrete walls; others are applied as large vinyl stickers of printed photographs. Often, they are accompanied by touchstones of Palestinian identity—olive trees, lines from the poetry of Mohammed Darwish, or portraits of figures like Edward Said. While they mostly depict the eyes of current or former residents struggling against displacement, a few famous intellectuals and revolutionaries peer out as well: Che Guevara, Sigmund Freud, the Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. On one house, the eyes of George Floyd, the Black American killed by Minneapolis police in 2020, appear next to those of Iyad al-Hallaq, a young Palestinian man with autism killed by Israeli police in East Jerusalem five days after Floyd was murdered.
Another set of eyes, featured on one of the neighbourhood’s largest murals, belongs to Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist murdered by the Israeli military in 2022. Her eyes grace the exterior walls of the home of Zuheir Rajabi, Umm Nasser’s nephew and a community leader who co-directs I Witness Silwan. Zuheir received an eviction notice on November 9th that ordered his family to vacate by December 1st. Now, with the deadline having come and gone, he wakes up knowing that any day could be the one when Israeli officers force him and his family from their home. For Zuheir, Abu Akleh’s eyes—and the murals across the neighbourhood—are part of a struggle for survival. The art “sends a message that people exist and want to continue to live in Silwan,” he said. “Even if we are pushed from our homes, our eyes will remain, always watching.”
Over a five-year period, I Witness Silwan worked with Umm Nasser to paint the entire facade of her home. Facing the main street of Batn al-Hawa, the building was painted with flowers, eyes, and a four-story-tall image of a woman in prayer. Umm Nasser and her extended family were forcibly expelled from their home on December 14th, 2025, after a ten-year struggle, which was then handed over to Israeli soldiers. The settler organization Ateret Cohanim, fully backed by the state, has based its ownership claims on the fact that Yemeni Jews lived in this part of Silwan more than 100 years ago.
Bai Bibiyaon Ligkayan Bigkay is a Lumad leader and Talaingod woman-chieftain in the Philippines, leading her tribe in the indigenous defense of ancestral lands. Her eyes in Silwan make visible connections between the Palestinian liberation struggle and global indigenous struggles against colonization.
Zuheir Rajabi of Silwan said, “George Floyd was killed because of racism and state violence. George Floyd’s story parallels what is happening to us in Palestine.”
Charlotte Ritz-Jack is an editorial fellow at +972 Magazine living and writing in Jerusalem
