Mughrabi Quarter
[b] The quarter was razed by Israeli forces, at the behest of Teddy Kollek, the mayor of West Jerusalem, three days after the Six-Day War of 1967, in order to broaden the narrow alley leading to the Western Wall and prepare it for public access by Jews seeking to pray there.
According to the 15th-century historian Mujir ad-Dīn, soon after the Arabs had wrested back Jerusalem from the Crusaders the quarter was established in 1193 by Saladin's son al-Malik al-Afḍal Nurud-Dīn 'Ali, as a waqf (a mortmain consisting of a charitable trust)[c][2] dedicated to all North African immigrants.
The boundaries of this ḥārat or quarter, according to a later document, were the outer wall of the Haram al-Sharif to the east; south to the public thoroughfare leading to the Siloan spring; west as far as the residence of the qadi of Jerusalem, Shams al-Din; the northern limit ran to the Arcades of Umm al-Banat, otherwise known as the Qanṭarat Umam al-Banāt/Wilson's Arch causeway.
[7] Al-Afḍal's waqf was not only religious and charitable in its aims, but also provided for the establishment of a madrassa law school there, thereafter called eponymously the Afḍaliyyah, for the benefit of the Malikite Islamic jurists (fuqaha) in the city.
[8][9][10] On 2 November 1320, a distinguished scion of an Andalusian Sufi family of mystics, Abū Madyan, who had settled in Jerusalem in the early 14th century, drew up a larger waqf endowment consisting of a Zāwiyah near the Bāb al-Silsilah, or Chain Gate, of the Harat, for the Maghrebis.
[11] It consisted in a waqf property at 'Ain Kārim and another at Qanṭarat Umam al-Banāt at the Gate of the Chain—the latter as a hospice exclusively for newly arrived immigrants—the usufruct (manfa'ah) of both to be set aside in perpetuity for the Maghrebis in Jerusalem.
[15] Attached to the document was a stipulation that the properties be placed, after the donor's death, under the care of an administrator (mutawalli) and supervisor (nāzir) selected on the basis of the community's recognition of his outstanding qualities of piety and wisdom.
[19] The narrow space dividing the Western Wall from the houses of the Mughrabi Quarter was created at the behest of Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century in order to allow prayers to be said there.
The plan foundered on Jewish, rather than Muslim objections was shelved after the chief rabbinical Haham of the Jerusalemite Sephardi community stated that he had had a "providential intimation" that, were the sale to go through, a terrible massacre of Jews would ensue.
[35][33] In the first two months after the Ottoman Empire's entry into the First World War, the Turkish governor of Jerusalem, Zakey Bey, offered to sell the quarter to Jews, requesting a sum of £20,000 which, he said, would be used to both rehouse the Muslim families and to create a public garden in front of the Wall.
[37] In April 1918, Chaim Weizmann, then a prominent Zionist leader on a visit to Jerusalem, sent a letter via Ronald Storrs offering the sheikhs £70,000 in exchange for the Wall and the buildings of the Mughrabi quarter.
[38]The wall as well as the Mughrabi Quarter nonetheless, throughout the British Mandatory period, remained Waqf property, while Jews retained their longstanding right to visit it.
[9] In 1965, Palestinian squatters in Jewish properties on the edge of the Mughrabi Quarter were evicted by the Jordanian government and resettled in the Shu'afat refugee camp, four kilometers north of the Old City.
The Waqf Abu Madyan depended on the village's agricultural output for income and was thus left in a precarious financial situation, precipitating France's sovereignty claim.
[41] The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs used its position in Jerusalem to curry favor with Israel, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco by providing financial support to the waqf and, therefore, North African Muslim pilgrims.
[42] For example, in 1954 French intellectual Louis Massignon organized a charitable collection at the gates of the Great Mosque of Tlemcen in Algeria in support of the waqf in an effort to improve Franco-Algerian relations.
[42] On 12 February 1962—four days after the Charonne Métro station massacre and about one month prior to the signing of the Évian Accords, a ceasefire agreement between France and Algeria—France abandoned its claim to the waqf.
[44] Responsibility for demolishing the Mughrabi Quarter is contested between several figures: Teddy Kollek, Moshe Dayan,[l] Colonel Shlomo Lahat, Uzi Narkiss[m] and David Ben-Gurion.
[n] According to one source, the retired Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion played a pivotal role in the decision to demolish the quarter.
[46] Teddy Kollek in his memoirs wrote that it was necessary to knock down the quarter because a pilgrimage to the wall was being organized with hundreds of thousands of Jews, and their passage through the "dangerous narrow alleys" of the "slum hovels" was unthinkable: they needed a clear bright space to celebrate their return to the site after 19 years.
[51] On Saturday evening 10 June, the last day of the Six-Day War, coinciding with the end of the Jewish Sabbath, a number of searchlights were positioned and floodlit up the quarter's warrens.
In the face of this reluctance, lieutenant Colonel Ya'akov Salman, the deputy military governor, issued an order to an Engineering Corps officer to start bulldozing, and, on striking one particular structure, caused the whole building to collapse.
The reason given by an Israeli soldier was that they were pressed for time, since only two days remained before the feast of the "Passover" (actually Shavuot), and many Jews were expected to arrive on the following Tuesday at the Western Wall.
[50] In addition to 135 houses, the demolition destroyed the Bou Medyan zaouia,[56] the Sheikh Eid Mosque, – claimed to survive from the time of Saladin.
"[53] Two years later, another complex of buildings close to the wall, that included Madrasa Fakhriya (Fakhriyyah zawiyya) and the house in front of the Bab al-Magharibah that the Abu al-Sa'ud family had built and inhabited since the 16th century but which had been spared in the 1967 destruction, were demolished in June 1969.
"[62] Lieutenant Colonel Yaakov Salman, the deputy military governor in charge of the operation, aware of possible legal trouble on account of the Fourth Geneva Convention forearmed himself with documents from the East Jerusalem municipality testifying to the poor sanitary conditions in the neighborhood and Jordanian plans to eventually evacuate it.
[65] Archeological excavations in early January 2023 revealed walls nearly a metre (3 ft) high, traces of paint, a cobbled courtyard and a system to drain rainwater.
[67] According to Gershom Gorenberg, The action fit the pre-state strategy of the Zionist left, which believed in speaking softly and "creating facts"; using faits accomplis to determine the political future of disputed land.
