Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinian community ‘left to fight our own battles’

Ala’ e-Din Street lies in the heart of the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem’s old city. The cobblestone street starts at a busy, enclosed intersection of clothes, spice and souvenir stalls and ends at Bab Al-Majless, one of the main gates to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

While overseeing a coffee stall on the street, Saeed (25), describes how altercations between Muslim worshippers and Israeli security personnel in Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the most important religious sites in Islam, can spill on to Ala’ e-Din Street, with stun grenades and tear gas forcing residents to take shelter. When asked how relations are between local residents and the Israeli authorities, Saeed replies: “It’s an occupation.”

Saeed is a member of the Afro-Palestinian community which lives in the two buildings that hem Ala’ e-Din Street. His grandfather originally came to Palestine as a pilgrim from Sudan in the 1940s during the British Mandate. He stayed and fought on the Arab side of the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

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Jerusalem’s small African quarter has attracted visits in recent years from members of the US Black Lives Matter movement and Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson. The community takes pride in its active role in the Palestinian resistance movement, with several members serving lengthy prison sentences for militant activities. The first female Palestinian political prisoner was Fatima Barnawi, born in Jerusalem to a Nigerian father and a Palestinian-Jordanian mother. After spending 11 years in an Israeli prison for attempting to bomb a cinema in 1967, Barnawi served with the Palestinian leadership in exile and later established the Palestinian women’s police force in Gaza.

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Mahmoud (25), whose grandfather came to Jerusalem from Nigeria in the 1930s, takes us through a door where a sign says: “From Africa to Palestine, hand in hand.”

Inside the Mamluk-era buildings housing about 450 people are winding passageways and small courtyards. Hanging in one courtyard are several murals with African and Palestinian iconography and maps of Africa and Palestine with its pre-1948 borders.

In his office, Mousa Quos, the head of the African community centre, explains that these buildings were once used as prisons by the Ottomans and given to Jerusalem’s African community in 1920, after one of its members died while saving the life of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Amin al-Husseini.

The Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem’s old city are predominantly descendants of Muslim pilgrims from Chad, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan. After making the hajj to Mecca in modern-day Saudi Arabia, some African Muslims settled in the old city near Al-Aqsa Mosque and served as guards for the religious site – a role which is now undertaken by Israeli soldiers and police.

Quos’s father came to the old city from French-controlled Chad in 1942 and fought in the 1948 war; while his mother is a Palestinian from Jericho in the West Bank. African Jerusalemites like Quos’s father were denied the Jordanian passports granted to Arab residents like his mother, when Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank after the 1948 war. Today, Quos has only the Israeli ID that has been granted to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem since Israel ousted Jordan and began its occupation in 1967.

The Israeli ID permits him to travel to the West Bank and Israel, while a separate Israeli travel document (that lists his citizenship as Jordanian) allows Quos to travel overseas to countries with diplomatic relations with Israel. “I can’t visit [most] Arab countries with the Israeli travel document,” says Quos, but “we prefer not to apply for any citizenship to preserve our right to continue to live in Jerusalem.”

“Palestinians living in Jerusalem mostly live under the poverty line and the situation is getting worse,” says Quos. According to 2021 figures from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, 60 per cent of Arabs in Jerusalem live in poverty compared with 31 per cent of Jews.

Most families in the African quarter do not accept services from the Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality and Quos says most Palestinian organisations in Jerusalem boycott funding from the US and the EU due to the conditions they impose. “We depend mostly on funding from Arab countries like Morocco,” he says. “We are not a big, rich organisation; we are poor, but we provide services for our women, children and kids.”

Quos describes the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority which administers the West Bank as “corrupt” and “not legal” after failing to hold elections in 17 years. “We are left alone to fight our own battles,” he says.

Yet, if Palestinian elections were held in East Jerusalem – a move which the Israeli authorities oppose – Quos believes the majority of his community would support Fatah, with a small group voting for the Islamist militant and political group Hamas.

Senior officials from the Palestinian Authority travelled to Saudi Arabia earlier this month to discuss concessions that Riyadh could demand from Tel Aviv on behalf of Palestinians in exchange for normalising relations. Israel has had diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco since the US-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020.

“We don’t feel that we are benefiting from these normalisations,” says Quos.

“I don’t think that will affect us, or affect the treatment that we receive from the Israelis ... Perhaps there’ll be more tourists to the old city and that will benefit the store owners.”