| EXHIBITION MENU: | MY STORY by Ali Ayad Surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences, the Cliff hotel stands there at the top of the hill. On the roof, observation cameras are clearly visible and so is the white and blue of the Israeli flag placed on one of the corners of the roof. The hotel is no longer occupied by lively guests, children and laughter; but rather soldiers and guns. Both at the front and at the back of the hotel, the wall snakes its way towards it. The back yard, once used for camping, has been cut off from the front by a fence with a portal for passage. The garden in the front is no longer full of flowers but rather pieces of broken glass. The hotel, once my home, is now nothing but another mere observation area taken over for “security purposes”. It was in the beginning of the 50s that my family decided to build a new home on that plot of land. My grandfather owned part of it and so he and my father bought the remaining bits and pieces from the other owners (cousins, neighbours) before they began construction. It was not odd for that exact plot of land to be chosen since it overlooked the old city of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem-Amman route. Since my family held a certain social standing, it was an appropriate choice. When the building did begin, construction workers were hired from the area and my family helped. My mother would go up and down the hill balancing a bucket of water on her head for the builders; whilst I enjoyed playing on the land behind the house in the ditches and barracks left behind by the many occupiers of the land. A well was built at the back to collect the rainwater and after moving into the house, it was not a strange sight to see women from the village climbing up the hill to collect water from our well, which my parents gladly allowed. My grandfather also opened the doors for several families to stay in the house and I can remember two families of refugees from the 1948 catastrophe staying with us for a long time. All such refugees (if you can be a refugee in your own land) had been forced to leave their homes during the war and in the aftermath had been forced into refugee camps scattered in many villages all over the West Bank; some even had to live in caves. My grandfather also welcomed a group of gypsies into our home for 6 months who had been thrown out of one of their camps for fighting. Their presence brought much joy into the house and every night was a celebration. In the beginning of the 1960s work began again on the house to transform it into a hotel, and it didn’t take long until guests from all over the world started arriving especially from Poland, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. Then came the war of 1967 with the second catastrophe and the West Bank and Jerusalem fell under the Israeli occupation. The Israeli forces took over and it became very difficult to run the hotel. Later on attempts were made to renovate and restore the hotel and for some years the property was rented and run as a psychiatric hospital. When my father passed away in 1978 I returned from abroad and decided to reopen the hotel, once again receiving guests from all over the world including many political activists and peace workers. It was through one of these groups of volunteers that my wife Signe stayed at the hotel in 1984. Five years later in 1989 we were married in the front garden of the hotel surrounded by friends and family both from Palestine and Norway. Joy was always plentiful at Cliff. There was always food, laughter and good company. Many parties and barbeques were held; some guests even decided to get married in the garden – friendships that have lasted a lifetime. In 1992 my first daughter Sara was born and so she spent the first years of her life in the hotel and then in 1995 came my second daughter Chiara. It was not easy for the guests staying at the hotel during the first Intifada (1987–1994) since the Israeli forces would intimidate them at the checkpoints and tell them it was unsafe to stay there. Hopes were raised following the Oslo agreement, when a tourist and economic boom was expected in the West Bank and so in 1996 we tried to find funding to renovate the hotel once more. But alas the happiness was short lived when the Israeli forces took over the hotel and threw out the renovation workers announcing it a closed military area once again. And then after much pressure from the Norwegian press and some political intervention the Israeli government shut down and left the hotel without further comment. In 2001 we finally managed to raise funding for the renovation of the hotel and when completed, it was rented out to the Al-Quds University for its Professors to stay in. But it did not take long before the Israeli forces once again attempted to terrorize the inhabitants by firing live ammunition in the back garden and barging in, in the middle of the night, to investigate the professors and confiscate their passports. It also did not take long before the very last teacher gave up and left the hotel. After these incidents the Israeli government came up with an offer to the family to rent the estate with full refusal on the family’s side, but we knew without a doubt that all they wanted was to take it over. After the Israelis realised there was no way we would ever rent them the hotel, they published a statement announcing the family of owners “absent” and declaring that the hotel in fact lies in Jerusalem and not the West Bank. So since Jerusalem was now an occupied territory, West Bankers could not own or inherit it because they were absent. They also announced that even a family member carrying a Jerusalemite ID card could not own it. My father, who was a West Banker and whom we inherited from, was also, under the law of absentees, not entitled to the land and hence his children could not inherit what was not his. And so we began a complex and expensive legal battle during which the Israeli government has resorted to many scare tactics including their claim that a Jewish family owned the land! A claim to which my only response was that if they could prove without a doubt that they owned the land, then I would hand it over willingly. Naturally they could not, and so this family has gone and the Absentee Property Law is back. It didn’t truly just start in 2001 with the court battle. It started long before; some time in the 1948 catastrophe when a foreign people found they could take over our land and claim it as theirs. And here we are now, over 50 years after building began and here the hotel stands; the hotel my grandmother would sit in front of shoeless until the last day of her life, the hotel I would play behind as a young boy, the home that was once full of laughter and celebration, the place that brought me and my wife together, the place we were married in and where we brought both our daughters home from the hospital. There it is, surrounded by fences and doors we aren’t authorized to enter through; and that flag in blue and white waving from the roof. |
| ABOUT THE EXHIBITION | |
| CLIFF HOTEL - HISTORY SUMMARY | |
| MY STORY, by Ali Ayad | |
| ABSENTEE PROPERTY LAW | |
| SETTLEMENT UPDATE | |
| THE EXHIBITION | |
| SOURCE REFERENCES | |
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