THE INFORMATION centre is behind a red metal door in a stone wall on Wadi Helweh street.
Ahmad Karaeen greets me as I climb out of the taxi and leads the way to his office, limping slightly and leaning on an aluminium crutch.
He offers me a tumbler of cold water before telling me his story.
“On September 11th, 2009, I had just returned home after Ramadan prayers in al-Aqsa mosque [in the Old City] when I heard shouting in the street. I went out to see what was happening. Two settlers were hitting my sons, 10 and 11. One put the muzzle of an M-16 against the head of my son. I told him in Hebrew, ‘It’s not the time for problems.’
“One of the soldiers tripped over the kerb. An off-duty soldier shot me in the thigh, shot a 15- year-old boy riding by on a bicycle and then shot me in the knee. The soldiers took my children for interrogation and told them they were to blame.”
Ahmad was doubly unlucky, while the knee of the boy on the bicycle was only grazed.
The centre not only provides information on the situation in this, the most bitterly contested neighbourhood in east Jerusalem, but offers a range of extra-curricular activities – sports, yoga, cooking, computer, Hebrew and mosaic classes – to a community ignored by Jerusalem’s Israeli municipal council.
As we make our way along the street, Ahmad points out houses and lots taken over by settlers. We enter a narrow alleyway, dubbed Karaeen passage. “My family owned all the land here.”
He greets his father sitting in a tiny shop selling sweets and soft drinks.
“The Israelis tried to close it down, but since he did not build anything, they failed,” observes Ahmad.
The passage opens on to an elegant street paved with cobble-stones and provided with handsome street lights – for settlers who live here. On the opposite slope of the Kidron valley, Christian pilgrims throng the porch of the Church of All Nations next to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before his crucifixion.
Above Gethsemane is the Mount of Olives. On its summit, a tall building flies a large blue and white Israeli flag. “The army takes over the top floor of a Palestinian building and puts up the Israeli flag to show that this place is theirs,” remarks Ahmad.
We stroll to a vantage point overlooking a natural rock platform where tourists straggle across the rugged surface behind an Israeli guide.
“When I was a boy I used to play here. I caught frogs in puddles left by the rain. Now I am not allowed to enter.”
He points to the al-Bustan neighbourhood below. “All 88 [Palestinian] houses have demolition orders. The Israelis want to make an archaeological park.”
At the corner of Karaeen Passage and Wadi Hilweh, Ahmad’s mother invites us into her cosy kitchen for coffee.
“This is my grandfather’s house,” Ahmad says. “My family has always lived here. We are the largest family in Silwan, maybe 3,000 people. We will never leave Silwan.
“ I don’t know how long my family has been here, some say since the time of the Canaanites. We may have been Jews and Christians before becoming Muslims. Others say we came with Salaheddin in the 12th century.
“Wadi Hilweh was named for my grandmother, who was killed by settlers in 1936 [during Palestinian-Jewish clashes under the British Mandate government].
“The settlers talk about 3,000 years ago and then jump to 1884” when the Zionist movement was founded, he continues.
“Nothing exists for them but their own history.”