“Poor Sarah has to have impossible documentation, but those Bedouin get to live and build whatever they want, wherever they want?”
The property in 2015; the car in the photo is Ms. Berman’s, one of her attempts to assert use of the lot. The remains of a fence she had erected lie against a neighboring house; the fence had cut off residents of the property in the rear from entering or exiting, and their landlord tore it down.
Jerusalem, November 23 – A self-proclaimed heir to a property in the center of Israel’s capital city voiced her anger today at the double standards of local law enforcement that allow vast areas of the Negev to enter possession and ownership of people living there with no title, but who keep removing her and her possessions from a lot she wishes to develop in this lucrative real estate neighborhood, but to which she has insufficient legal ownership documentation.
Sarah Berman, 55, expressed her outrage today after yet another in a series of frustrating encounters with rival claimants, neighboring residents, and police, during which she again failed to establish any right to an 80-square-meter lot in the Nachlaot neighborhood by leaving an old car on the property in a bid to deny others’ use of the land. Her outrage included an accusation of unfair treatment in contrast to Bedouin takeovers of public land in the country’s southern region, a phenomenon that the government lacks the political will to combat.
“Oh, poor Sarah has to have impossible documentation, but those Bedouin get to live and build whatever they want, wherever they want?” she challenged a policeman. “I have a better claim to this land than they do to the parts of the Negev they’re taking over, but you come and harass me instead of upholding clear violations of the law.”
Ms. Berman, a resident of Nes Tziyona, near Rehovot, claims to represent the heirs of a relative who died abroad more than ten years ago, and whose will listed the lot in question among the estate’s assets. Other heirs dispute her authority to perform any actions on the property in question unilaterally. A synagogue down the street also claims the property, and appears in some official records as the true owners. Synagogue members and Ms. Berman have waged a back-and-forth fight to establish rights to the property by installing “facts on the ground,” and by removing or destroying the other party’s facts on the ground.
Complicating matters, the property has always lain empty and undeveloped, while through the decades, it became a passage for several residences behind it, access to an abutting house’s cooking gas supply, and available free parking in an area where spaces are at a premium and only local residents may park on the street.
Neighbors recalled numerous incidents: Berman drilling into adjacent buildings to secure both ends of a chain; Berman attempting to erect a fence that both damaged the adjacent house and blocked residents in, prompting the owner of one of the rear properties to destroy the fence with an ax; a synagogue contractor installing posts, only to face a court order to remove them; Berman erecting a shed and laying down gravel, only to find it demolished and dragged away; Berman building a wall to block vehicle entrance, which synagogue members demolished within days; Berman leaving a succession of old cars blocking the lot, only to find them either towed away or dragged into the street to accumulate parking fines.
The episode that prompted Berman’s latest accusations began brewing last month, when a synagogue member engaged workers to drag her latest car, a Volkswagen sedan, into the street. Within a week, Ms. Berman, alerted by messages that her vehicle had been ticketed, came to Jerusalem and arranged for a tow truck to move the car back into the lot. To do so, she had to clear at least one of the three cars now occupying the property; a phone call to the police intimidated one car owner into removing his. The tow truck, however, could not enter the narrow street to perform its slated task; in the meantime, the driver of a different car in the lot, foreseeing that Berman intended to block his car in, moved his vehicle into the now-vacated spot, foiling Ms. Berman’s plans, or so he thought.
Upon her return from negotiations with the tow truck operator, Berman decided instead to have him park the car lengthwise across the front of the lot, its left side protruding only minimally into the street and thus not attracting a fine. This blocked in both cars still parked in the lot; she then returned to Nes Tiyona.
That evening, the driver of one of the blocked-in cars, concerned he would be unable to pick his post-surgery daughter up from the hospital, phoned the police; the latter, however, saw the issue as outside their mandate, as it pertained only to a private property dispute, which they deemed the province of the civil courts. The frustrated man shared his situation and anxiety with others, some of whom decided to spend part of their evening moving a two-ton vehicle crossways into the street, where it blocked car passage entirely. The man with the hospitalized daughter moved his car farther out, forestalling replacement of the offending dead vehicle. Within minutes, two or three angry drivers had summoned police yet again, who this time warned Ms. Berman by phone that failure to move her car by a certain hour would incur heavy fines and other penalties. The following morning, after threatening the man with the hospitalized daughter, she had her car towed away.
One synagogue member, who works as a renovation and construction contractor, then drilled into the bedrock and installed two 100-kg iron pylons, one at each end, secured in the ground with steel-reinforced concrete. He strung a chain across the lot entrance to prevent Ms. Berman from repeating her exploits. She hired a worker to cut the chain, but the contractor had friendly neighbors as lookouts, who alerted him. He arrived and prevented Berman from leaving by standing in front of her vehicle and having a relative record the incident on his phone in case she attempted escape through vehicular assault. Arrival of the police resulted eventually in officers warning her against another attempt.
However, two weeks ago Friday, she returned with yet another hired worker, resulting in yet another confrontation and police visit. Sunday, the contractor arranged for a restraining order against Ms. Berman, a development that she views as unjust not merely because of a family claim she insists gives her rights to the property, but because she at least has some claim, whereas the Bedouin squatting and taking over half the Negev and spreading mafia-like lawlessness throughout the region continue to enjoy impunity.
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