Demolition

Riots Shatter Veneer of Coexistence in Israel’s Mixed Towns

Mr. Sweetat is prepared to make compromises in a land where few are ready to do so. He believes cooperation in pursuit of shared prosperity, however difficult, is the only way forward. “If we don’t like it,” he said, “we can pack our bags and go to Switzerland.”

I asked him if he felt like an equal citizen in Israel.

“Of course, I don’t feel equal,” he said, “but I can achieve everything I want.”

Still, he said, “I don’t see new Arab villages being built. I don’t have enough space in my own village. I wanted to buy a piece of land near Tarshiha, but I couldn’t. I want my son, who is 2, to grow up here. Ask the country why I can’t find land here.”

“So, you can’t achieve everything you want?” I asked.

“There are things you can’t change, but we can improve them. The change can start from people.”

Overcoming Mutual Incomprehension

When Tal Becker, the legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, drafted the preamble to the normalization treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates last year, he expected pushback on this clause:

“Recognizing that the Arab and Jewish peoples are descendants of a common ancestor, Abraham, and inspired, in that spirit, to foster in the Middle East a reality in which Muslims, Jews, Christians and peoples of all faiths, denominations, beliefs and nationalities live in, and are committed to, a spirit of coexistence.”

There was no dissent, despite the fact that the wording made clear that both Jews and Arabs belong in the Middle East.

A widespread view among Palestinians and throughout the Arab world has long been, on the contrary, that Israel and its Jewish population represent an illicit colonial projection into the Middle East that will one day end.

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Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Israel-Gaza Conflict

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An eviction in East Jerusalem lies at the center of a conflict that led to war between Israel and Hamas. But for millions of Palestinians, the routine indignities of occupation are part of daily life.

By David M. Halbfinger and Adam Rasgon

May 22, 2021

JERUSALEM — Muhammad Sandouka built his home in the shadow of the Temple Mount before his second son, now 15, was born.

They demolished it together, after Israeli authorities decided that razing it would improve views of the Old City for tourists.

Mr. Sandouka, 42, a countertop installer, had been at work when an inspector confronted his wife with two options: Tear the house down, or the government would not only level it but also bill the Sandoukas $10,000 for its expenses.

Such is life for Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation: always dreading the knock at the front door.

six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem set off a round of protests that helped ignite the latest war between Israel and Gaza. But to the roughly three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war and has controlled through decades of failed peace talks, the story was exceptional only because it attracted an international spotlight.

For the most part, they endure the frights and indignities of the Israeli occupation in obscurity.

Even in supposedly quiet periods, when the world is not paying attention, Palestinians from all walks of life routinely experience exasperating impossibilities and petty humiliations, bureaucratic controls that force agonizing choices, and the fragility and cruelty of life under military rule, now in its second half-century.

Underneath that quiet, pressure builds.

If the eviction dispute in East Jerusalem struck a match, the occupation’s provocations ceaselessly pile up dry kindling. They are a constant and key driver of the conflict, giving Hamas an excuse to fire rockets or lone-wolf attackers grievances to channel into killings by knives or automobiles. And the provocations do not stop when the fighting ends.

Home on the Edge

No homeowner welcomes a visit from the code-enforcement officer. But it’s entirely different in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians find it nearly impossible to obtain building permits and most homes were built without them: The penalty is often demolition.

shot and killed a teenager who was wandering among the rock-throwers and spent tear-gas canisters.

Al Mughrayyir was one of the few villages still mounting regular Friday protests. They began after settlers cut off access to some of the villagers’ farmland. The boy’s death became a new rallying cry.

The army says it raids Palestinian homes at night because it is safer, and ransacks them to search for weapons, in routine crackdowns aimed at keeping militance in check.

But the raids also inspire militance.

Mr. Abu Alia seethed as he described seeing his son outside in the dark, “afraid, crying because of the soldiers, and I can do nothing to protect him.”

“It makes you want to take revenge, to defend yourself,” he went on. “But we have nothing to defend ourselves with.”

Stone-throwing must suffice, he said. “We can’t take an M-16 and go kill every settler. All we have are those stones. A bullet can kill you instantly. A little stone won’t do much. But at least I’m sending a message.”

Settlers send messages, too. They have cut down hundreds of Al Mughrayyir’s olive trees — vital sources of income and ties to the land — torched a mosque, vandalized cars. In 2019, one was accused of fatally shooting a villager in the back. The case remains open.

A Family Divided

For Majeda al-Rajaby the pain of occupation never goes away. It slices straight through her family.

A twice-divorced teacher, Ms. al-Rajaby, 45, is divided from her five children by the different ways Israel treats Palestinians depending on where they are from.

She grew up in the West Bank, in Hebron. But both her ex-husbands were Jerusalem residents, allowing them to travel anywhere an Israeli citizen may go. The children were entitled to the blue IDs of Jerusalem residents, too. Hers remained West Bank green.

Both her husbands lived in Shuafat refugee camp, a lawless slum inside the Jerusalem city limits but just outside Israel’s security barrier. West Bankers are not allowed to live there, but the rule is not enforced.

She had thought she was marrying up. Instead, she said her husbands “always made me feel inferior.”

After the second divorce, she was left on her own, with her green ID, to raise all five children with their blue IDs. The distinction could be life-threatening.

When a daughter accidentally inhaled housecleaning chemicals, Ms. al-Rajaby tried to race her to the closest hospital, in Jerusalem. Soldiers refused to let her in. As a teacher in Shuafat, she had a permit to enter Jerusalem, but only until 7 p.m. It was 8:00.

Her children are older now, but the distinction is just as keenly felt: Ms. al-Rajaby allows herself to be excluded from joyful moments and rites of passage so her children can enjoy advantages unavailable to her.

She stays behind on the Palestinian side of the security barrier while they head off to Jaffa or Haifa, or on shortcuts to Hebron through Jerusalem, a route forbidden to her. “West Banker,” they tease her, waving goodbye.

One daughter is 21 now and engaged and goes on jaunts into Israel with her fiancé’s mother. “I should be with them,” Ms. al-Rajaby said.

Last summer, Ms. al-Rajaby moved out of Shuafat to a safer neighborhood just outside the Jerusalem city limits, in the West Bank. That means her children could lose their blue IDs if Israel determined that their primary residence was with her.

“I’m not allowed to live there,” she said of Shuafat, “and my daughters are not allowed to live here.”

Constrained as she is, Ms. al-Rajaby wants even more for her children than freedom to move about Israel.

In 2006, her daughter Rana, then 7, was burned in a cooking accident. An Italian charity paid for treatment at a hospital in Padua. Mother and child stayed for three months.

The experience opened Ms. al-Rajaby’s eyes. She saw green parks, children in nice clothes, women driving cars.

“It was the moment of my liberation,” she said. “I started thinking: ‘Why do they have this? Why don’t we?’”

Today, she urges all her children to see the world, and holds out hope that they might emigrate.

“Why,” she asked, “should someone keep living under the mercy of people who have no mercy?”

Working for the Occupation

Try as they might to make their accommodations with Israel, Palestinians often find themselves caught in the occupation’s gears.

Majed Omar once earned a good living as a construction worker inside Israel. But in 2013, his younger brother was spotted crossing through a gap in Israel’s security barrier. A soldier shot him in the leg.

Mr. Omar, 45, was collateral damage. Israel revoked his work permit just in case he had ideas about taking revenge — something Israel says happens too often.

He sat unemployed for 14 months. When Israel reissued his permit, it only allowed him to work in the fast-growing West Bank settlements, where workers are paid half as much, searched each morning and supervised by armed guards all day.

Which is how he came to be the foreman on a crew that remodels Jewish homes and expands Israeli buildings on land the Palestinians have long demanded as part of their hoped-for state.

In a small way, it’s like digging his own grave, Mr. Omar said. “But we’re living in a time when everyone sees what’s wrong and still does it.”

The Checkpoint

Violence is often sudden and brief. But the nagging dread it instills can be just as debilitating.

Nael al-Azza, 40, is haunted by the Israeli checkpoint he must pass through while commuting between his home in Bethlehem and his job in Ramallah.

At home, he lives behind walls and cultivates a lush herb and vegetable garden in the backyard. But nothing protects him on his drive to work, not even his position as a manager in the Palestinian firefighting and ambulance service.

Recently, he said, a soldier at the checkpoint stopped him, told him to roll down his window, asked if he had a weapon. He said no. She opened his passenger door to take a look, then slammed it shut, hard.

He wanted to object. But he stopped himself, he said: Too many confrontations with soldiers end with Palestinians being shot.

“If I want to defend my property and my self-respect, there’s a price for that,” he said.

His commute is a 14-mile trip as the crow flies, but a 33-mile route, because Palestinians are diverted in a wide loop around Jerusalem along a tortuous two-lane road of steep switchbacks. Even so, it ought to take less an hour — but often takes two or three, because of the checkpoint.

The Israelis consider the checkpoint essential to search for fleeing attackers or illegal weapons or to cut the West Bank in two in case of unrest. Palestinians call it a choke point that can be shut off on a soldier’s whim. It is also a friction point, motorists and soldiers each imagining themselves as the other’s target.

Idling and inching along, Mr. al-Azza compared traffic to blood flow. Searching one car can mean an hour’s delay. The soldiers are so young, he said, “They don’t feel the weight of stopping 5,000 cars.”

He thinks only of those delayed. “When they impede your movement and cause you to fail at your job, you feel like you’ve lost your value and meaning,” he said.

A few nights each week, delays force him to sleep at work and settle for video calls with his three children.

On weekend outings, the checkpoint takes a different toll on his family.

“I try to keep my kids from speaking about the conflict,” he said. “But they see and experience things I have no answer for. When we’re driving, we turn the music on. But when we reach the checkpoint, I turn it off. I don’t know why. I’ll see them in the mirror: All of a sudden, they sit upright and look anxious — until we cross and I turn the music back on.”

Deadly scenarios constantly play out in Mr. al-Azza’s head: What if a tire blew out or his engine stalled? What if a young soldier, trained to respond instantly, misconstrued it as a threat?

“It’s not possible to put it out of mind,” he said. “When you’re hungry, you think about food.”

In the Bubble

No Palestinian is insulated from the occupation’s reach — not even in the well-to-do, privileged “bubble” of Ramallah, where Israeli soldiers are seldom seen.

Everyone Sondos Mleitat knows bears the scars of some trauma. Her own: Hiding with her little brother, then 5, when Israeli tanks rolled into Nablus, where she was raised.

In the dark, she said, he pulled all his eyelashes out, one by one.

Today, Ms. Mleitat, 30, runs a website connecting Palestinians with psychotherapists.

Instead of reckoning with their lingering wounds, she said, people seek safety in social conformity, in religion, in the approval gleaned from Facebook and Instagram likes. But all of those, she said, only reinforce the occupation’s suffocating effects.

“This is all about control,” she said. “People are going through a type of taming or domestication. They just surrender to it and feel they can’t change anything.”

After her uncle was killed by Israeli soldiers at a protest, she said, his younger brother was pushed into marriage at 18 “to protect him from going down the same path.”

But a nation of people who reach adulthood thinking only about settling down, she said, is not a nation that will achieve independence.

“They think they’re getting out of this bubble, but they’re not,” she said.

Homeless

Mr. Sandouka earns about $1,800 in a good month. He hoped the lawyer could quash the demolition order. “I thought they would just give us a fine,” he said.

Then he got another panicked call from home: “The police were there, making my family cry.”

Khalas, he said, enough. He would tear it down himself.

Early on a Monday, his sons took turns with a borrowed jackhammer. They almost seemed to be having fun, like wrecking a sand castle.

Finished, their moods darkened. “It’s like we’re lighting ourselves on fire,” said Mousa, 15.

“They want the land,” said Muataz, 22. “They want all of us to leave Jerusalem.”

In 2020, 119 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem were demolished, 79 of them by their owners.

When all was rubble, Mr. Sandouka lit a cigarette and held it with three beefy fingers as it burned. His pants filthy with the dust of his family’s life together, he climbed atop the debris, sent photos to the police and contemplated his options.

Moving to the West Bank, and sacrificing Jerusalem residency, was unthinkable. Moving elsewhere in Jerusalem was unaffordable.

A friend offered a couple of spare rooms as a temporary refuge. Mr. Sandouka’s wife demanded permanency.

“She told me if I don’t buy her a home, that’s it — everyone can go their separate ways,” he said.

He turned his eyes uphill toward the Old City.

“These people work little by little,” he said. “It’s like a lion that eats one, and then another. It eventually eats everything around it.”

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Nottingham’s Dilemma: Robin Hood or High Tech?

NOTTINGHAM, England — Hilary Silvester still recalls the moment she first saw the Broadmarsh Center, a bleak 1970s shopping mall that symbolized Nottingham’s modernization in a scorned architectural era but is now being consigned to history.

“To be honest, I started to cry,” said Ms. Silvester, executive chairwoman of the Nottingham Civic Society, describing how the center created a giant wall across the city, obliterating the familiar skyline behind. “I couldn’t see one building that I recognized.”

Main streets and malls across Europe are in retreat, with retail stores closing right and left, and when it is bulldozed completely, this aging, unloved edifice will become a symbol of that decline. While retailers were already fighting a losing battle against online competition, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the trend, scuppering any chance of replacing the Broadmarsh with another mall.

So in a preview, perhaps, of what many cities throughout the world may soon face, Nottingham is mulling what to do with this soon-to-be gaping hole at its core. And at the heart of that debate lies an intriguing question: Should the city of the future look more like the past?

hilltop castle, elegant Georgian streets and a hidden maze of around 500 sandstone caves, some dating to the Middle Ages.

Bath, look at York, you look at the visitor traffic they are getting,” said Ms. Blair-Manning, referring to English cities that have long been tourist magnets. She added that Mr. Rogan’s ideas “would make complete and utter sense if you were building something that actually was focused on heritage tourism.”

Others are not so sure. David Mellen, the leader of Nottingham City Council, favors a blend of living space and green areas, with cafes and some shops. The lease on the Broadmarsh was handed back to the council when plans for a new mall collapsed, but the site will still have to generate income.

Mr. Mellen favors drawing more tourists to the city’s unusual network of caves, which include Britain’s only medieval underground tannery and were often carved into the sandstone as cellars and used over the centuries for everything from store rooms and dwellings to factories and air raid shelters. But he isn’t convinced about readopting the old street pattern.

“Cobbles were there for a purpose at that particular time,” he said. “You can’t go back to the past unless you are in some kind of theme park, and we are not a theme park, we are a core city of the U.K.”

Greg Nugent, who leads an advisory committee on the redevelopment, likes the idea of creating a symbolic link to Sherwood Forest but is also cautious about readopting the old street plan.

“I like it but I’d want it to be based on more than ‘Let’s bring those streets back,’” he said. “I think there’s a bigger idea in there.”

With so much empty space concentrated in the center of Nottingham, he sees an unrivaled opportunity for the city to steal a march on rivals coping with the decline of central malls and main streets. One option might be to devote part of it to businesses working on the green technologies of the future, said Mr. Nugent, who was the director of the organizing committee of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

“I think there is a beginning of a renaissance for Nottingham,” he said. “It’s a really interesting city, very creative — it has a bit of an attitude. It’s not London, it’s not Manchester, it’s got a certain bravery about it.”

Perhaps that was not best reflected in the Broadmarsh, which — never mind the architecture — always had to play second fiddle to the Victoria Center, a more upmarket competitor nearby.

Inside the demolition zone, the Broadmarsh feels like a time capsule. Movie posters still hang on the wall of one empty store that sold videos, music and books. “Open for shoppin’” reads the mural not far from a disconnected A.T.M. surrounded by building debris.

Beneath this area builders have discovered one ancient burial site, and Georgian and Victorian brickwork can be seen in an area close to some of the city’s caves.

Mr. Nugent’s committee should have completed its work by the summer, and at least everyone agrees what should not replace the Broadmarsh. “In our consultation with the public we have had over 3,000 individual responses and there’s nobody who’s come and said, ‘We’d like another shopping center please,’” Mr. Mellen said.

Finding an alternative that will satisfy a sometimes rebellious city like Nottingham might prove harder, however. Mr. Nugent muses that in the 1970s, at a time when going shopping became a sort of British religion, the Broadmarsh was a sort of cathedral.

“What we all need to do now is work out what we will worship next, into this new decade and century,” he said. “That is the code that we have to crack, and it’s exciting that Nottingham gets to start this.”

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What Is Happening in Israel and Gaza? Here’s What to Know.

JERUSALEM — Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.

It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honors those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.

The incident was confirmed by six mosque officials, three of whom witnessed it; the Israeli police declined to comment. In the outside world, it barely registered.

But in hindsight, the police raid on the mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, was one of several actions that led, less than a month later, to the sudden resumption of war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, and the outbreak of civil unrest between Arabs and Jews across Israel itself.

recognized the city as Israel’s capital and nominally moved the United States Embassy there. There were no mass protests after four Arab countries normalized relations with Israel, abandoning a long-held consensus that they would never do so until the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had been resolved.

Two months ago, few in the Israeli military establishment were expecting anything like this.

In private briefings, military officials said the biggest threat to Israel was 1,000 miles away in Iran, or across the northern border in Lebanon.

When diplomats met in March with the two generals who oversee administrative aspects of Israeli military affairs in Gaza and the West Bank, they found the pair relaxed about the possibility of significant violence and celebrating an extended period of relative quiet, according to a senior foreign diplomat who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.

Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. With a final court decision on their case due in the first half of May, regular protests were held throughout April — demonstrations that accelerated after Palestinians drew a connection between the events at Damascus Gate and the plight of the residents.

video and images showed they engaged in violence themselves. As the images began to circulate online, the neighborhood turned into a rallying point for Palestinians not just across the occupied territories and Israel, but among the diaspora.

The experience of the families, who had already been displaced from what became Israel in 1948, was something “every single Palestinian in the diaspora can relate to,” said Jehan Bseiso, a Palestinian poet living in Lebanon.

And it highlighted a piece of legal discrimination: Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim land in East Jerusalem that was owned by Jews before 1948. But the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes that year have no legal means to reclaim their families’ land.

sight of stun grenades and bullets inside the prayer hall of one of the holiest sites in Islam — on the last Friday of Ramadan, one of its holiest nights — was seen as a grievous insult to all Muslims.

scenes that were broadcast across the world.

At the last minute, the government rerouted the Jerusalem Day march away from the Muslim Quarter, after receiving an intelligence briefing about the risk of escalation if it went ahead.

But that was too little, and far too late. By then, the Israeli Army had already begun to order civilians away from the Gaza perimeter.

Shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday, the rocket fire from Gaza began.

Rami Nazzal contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, and Iyad Abuhweila from Gaza City.

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As Gaza conflict heightens, a wave of Arab unrest spreads across Israel.

As rockets and airstrikes have pummeled targets across Gaza and Israel, a different conflict has erupted in the streets of Arab neighborhoods and mixed Arab-Jewish towns across the state of Israel.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have rioted in several cities since Monday night, burning cars and Jewish-owned properties, as anger at the Gaza conflict, as well as at decades of discrimination dating back to the foundation of the state of Israel, found its expression in street violence.

In the central city of Lod, known in Arabic as Lydd, the government declared a state of emergency on Wednesday morning, after a synagogue, a school and several vehicles were torched by Arab rioters on Monday and Tuesday nights.

A Palestinian citizen, Moussa Hassouna, was shot dead by a Jewish resident during the disturbances on Monday night, and another wave of unrest followed his funeral 24 hours later.

Jewish communities have been built in Israel’s history, but only seven for Arabs. In the Negev, dozens of Bedouin towns have never been given planning permission, leading to the demolition of hundreds of structures there every year.

The question of land has particular resonance in Lod: Thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes there in 1948, never to return, and the trauma of that event still lingers today.

“I still feel unsure whether I can keep living here,” said Ms. Naqib. “I fear they will try to expel us from our homes.”

And while it was Arabs who rioted in Lod and destroyed people’s property this week, Ms. Naqib said, it was a Jew who ultimately killed an Arab on Monday night — Ms. Naqib’s second cousin.

“I feel very afraid,” Ms. Naqib said as she arrived at her cousin’s wake. “And I feel a lot of anger that these settlers can start to shoot us.”

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Helmut Jahn, ‘Convention-Busting’ Architect, Dies at 81

Helmut Jahn, a German-born architect who designed buildings around the world but was most influential in his adopted hometown, Chicago, where he conceived of an extravagant downtown home to state government and the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare International Airport, died on Saturday in a traffic accident near the horse farm where he lived, in St. Charles, Ill. He was 81.

His wife, Deborah (Lampe) Jahn, confirmed the death. He had been riding his bicycle in suburban Campton Hills when he was struck by two cars that were heading in opposite directions. A news release from the local police department said that Mr. Jahn failed to brake at a stop sign.

A modernist who began a long flirtation with postmodernism in the 1970s, Mr. Jahn (pronounced “yahn”) designed the Xerox Center, an elegant 45-story office tower with a glass and aluminum curtain wall, a rounded corner and a two-story streetfront that undulates inward that opened in 1980 in Chicago’s Loop.

Philip Johnson called Mr. Jahn “a genuine genius” and “a comet flashing in the sky,” although he added, “I don’t know about him yet.”

At the time, construction of Mr. Jahn’s futuristic design of the State of Illinois Center — a government and retail complex — was nearly complete in the middle of the Loop. The facade is a mix of reflective bluish-turquoise glass; inside, the circular atrium has a mix of salmon-colored and blue metal panels. Multicolored granite lines the base.

In his 1985 review in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger said that the complex’s “squat form, which swoops around one corner in a 16-story-high curve, is one part Pompidou Center, one part Piranesi and one part kitsch 1950s revival. He added, “It is not surprising that it has left even this relatively sophisticated city breathless.”

Reaction to Mr. Jahn’s buildings in Chicago ranged from “dazzling” to the critical observation that it was “unrelated to anything else in the whole of Western civilization.”

Eero Saarinen’s early-1960s designs for Dulles International Airport in Washington and the T.W.A. Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Helmut Jahn was born on Jan. 4, 1940, in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in a nearby suburb. His father, Wilhelm, was a special-education teacher. His mother, Lena (Werth) Jahn, was a homemaker.

As a boy, Helmut loved drawing and painting, but he aspired to be an airline pilot. “But he wasn’t very good at languages, which disqualified him to be a pilot for Lufthansa,” his wife said, “so he chose architecture because it involved a lot of drawing.”

After graduating from the Technische Hochschule in Munich, he earned a master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. After he graduated in 1967, he was hired by Gene Summers, formerly the right-hand man to the modernist giant Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, at the venerable Chicago architectural firm C.F. Murphy Associates.

But five years later the roof collapsed in a rainstorm.

The failure was found to have been caused by the fracture of high strength bolts that helped suspend the roof.

In 1981, Murphy Associates became Murphy/Jahn; Mr. Jahn became the firm’s president a year later and acquired it in 1983. It was renamed Jahn in 2012.

After designing the State of Illinois Center (which would be renamed the James R. Thompson Center, for the Illinois Republican governor who backed it), Mr. Jahn worked with Donald J. Trump to design a 150-floor tower that would have been the centerpiece of a megacomplex on the West Side of Manhattan called Television City.

That plan never came to fruition, and the site later became a pared-down development called Riverside South.

Mr. Jahn’s other projects in Manhattan included the 70-story CitySpire in Midtown, behind City Center, and 425 Lexington Avenue, which the architecture critic Carter Horsley dismissed in The City Review in 1987 for its “Roto-Rooterized top,” which he said looked like a “squished foil to the irrepressible upward thrust of the Chrysler Building just across 43rd Street.”

Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago (2011), with an elliptical, 40-foot-high dome that covers a 180-seat reading room and an underground automated storage and retrieval system.

Writing in The Chicago Tribune, the critic Blair Kamin called the library a “convention-busting marvel” that “students seem to love because it lets natural air pour inside, liberating them from the university’s dimly lit reading rooms.”

Mr. Jahn was working on designs until the end of his life.

“He was so possessed with getting his work done,” Mrs. Jahn said by phone. “He was just a one-man show. He had so many ideas in his head.”

In addition to his wife, whom he met when she was the interior designer for McCormick Place, Mr. Jahn is survived by his son, Evan, a partner in the firm; two granddaughters; and a brother, Otmar.

Earlier this month, Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration accelerated the process, sending developers a request for proposals to sell the building, whose upkeep has been deemed too costly.

Last year, Mr. Jahn offered a proposal to save the building by adapting it to create new offices, a hotel and apartments, and building an office tower on the southwest corner of West Randolph and North LaSalle Streets. He also proposed removing the building’s front doors and turning the enormous atrium into a covered outdoor space.

“A demolition and replacement would not only take a long time but seeks high density without considering public benefits,” he wrote in his proposal. We need not more bigger buildings, but buildings which improve the public space.”

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Israeli Court Delays Expulsion of Palestinian Families in East Jerusalem

JERUSALEM — The Israeli Supreme Court delayed on Sunday a decision on whether to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem after the attorney general requested more time, in part because of the tensions the case has stirred.

The court was to decide on Monday whether to uphold an expulsion order for the families in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, in a hearing that many feared would set off a wave of unrest. Instead, the case was delayed by up to 30 days to allow the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, to review it.

For many Palestinians, the families’ plight has become emblematic of a wider effort to remove Palestinians from parts of East Jerusalem and of the past displacements of Arabs in the occupied territories and within Israel.

Since the start of the month, the prospect of the evictions has prompted daily protests, arrests and confrontations between Palestinians and the Israeli police and Jewish extremists.

form of apartheid and the United Nations rights agency says is a potential war crime.

“This isn’t just about the situation for my family,” said Mr. Skafi. “It’s about the situation for all Palestinians in East Jerusalem.”

Some city officials deny that the replacement of Palestinian families by Jewish settlers amounts to a strategy of displacement. Sheikh Jarrah “is not a political but a legal dispute” over land ownership, said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem.

But others in the city leadership say it is part of a concerted effort to reinforce Jewish control of East Jerusalem and prevent it from being ceded in putative future peace negotiations to a Palestinian state.

Another deputy mayor, Aryeh King, said on Friday that it was “of course” part of a wider strategy of placing “layers of Jews” throughout the eastern half of the city. The goal, Mr. King said, is “to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.”

Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed it.

Settlers in the neighborhood consider the Palestinians squatters on land that was historically owned by Jews. They said the court decision on Sunday was a sign of government weakness.

“I am so sorry that the Israeli government is afraid of the violence of a few young Arab people,” said Yonatan Yosef, a settler leader who lives in Sheikh Jarrah. But he promised that settlers would continue with their efforts to force Palestinians out of the neighborhood.

“The Israeli people will go back to their land, and those who don’t want that should go home,” Mr. Yosef said.

Peace Now, a campaign group that documents the expulsions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, estimated that 200 Palestinian properties in strategic locations near the Old City of Jerusalem, housing several thousand residents, were at risk of eviction.

Up to 20,000 Palestinian homes across the city are under threat of demolition, according to Peace Now. Restrictions on building permits in East Jerusalem have forced Palestinian residents to either leave the city or to build illegal housing vulnerable to demolition orders.

The dispute in Sheikh Jarrah originated in 1876 when the land was under Ottoman rule. That year, Palestinian landowners sold a plot in Sheikh Jarrah to two Jewish trusts, an Israeli court has ruled. The land houses the tomb of a revered Jewish priest from antiquity, Shimon HaTzadik.

Jordan captured the plot in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and built dozens of homes there to house some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had fled from what became Israel.

After Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, it eventually returned ownership of the Sheikh Jarrah homes to the Jewish trusts. The trusts later sold it to right-wing settlers, who have tried to evict the residents ever since. Some families have already been forced out, while the others are in various stages of the court process.

The case has foregrounded the imbalance in who gets to reclaim land in Jerusalem. In East Jerusalem, Jews are allowed to reclaim property that was under Jewish ownership before 1948. But Palestinian families have no legal mechanism to reclaim land they owned in West Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel.

Israelis defend the policy on the grounds that changing it would undermine the Jewish character of the world’s only Jewish state.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Iyad Abuhweila from Gaza City.

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Afghans Fleeing Home Are Filling the Lowliest Jobs in Istanbul

Work dried up in 2014 as the United States began winding down its involvement in Afghanistan and transferring responsibility for security to the Afghan government. The group of friends made their way to Turkey, some legally through the Turkish companies that had hired them in Afghanistan, and some making the two-month trek mostly on foot with smugglers from southern Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey.

Juma Muradi, 44, a painter and plasterer, said he had made the dangerous journey three times after being deported by the Turkish authorities twice. The last trip was the hardest, he said, as stricter border patrols forced the smugglers to take them higher into the mountains. He passed the bodies of two Afghans from an earlier group — they had died on the trail. Of the 200 in his group, most were detained by border guards, he said, and only 40 made it through to Turkey.

“If there was peace in my country, I would never take this risk,” he said.

Yet after six years helping build American military bases around the country, he had ended up jobless, watching the Taliban taking over his rural district of Andkhoi in northwestern Afghanistan, and sought work abroad. He now shares a three-room house with seven others in a rundown neighborhood that is scheduled for demolition.

Mr. Muradi said he worried for his wife and four children on their own at home, since he had no immediate family there to protect them. The Taliban are a mile from his home and have traded mortar fire with government forces sometimes hitting the village, he said.

Their village no longer has cellphone service, so he can talk to his family only when they climb a nearby mountain to catch a signal, he said.

Turkey provides a safe refuge at least, but for many it is just a staging post where they can earn money for the next leap to Europe. Most said they were barely surviving. The group of Turkmens have an advantage in that they can speak Turkish, which is close to their own language. But all of them said the fear of deportation made working in Turkey untenable in the long term.

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Carlton Tavern Was Reduced to Rubble. They Fought to Bring It Back.

LONDON — “Your local pub, it’s a bit like your favorite pair of shoes or jeans, something you just completely take for granted,” Rob Cope said, sitting outside the Carlton Tavern in North London on Monday.

With the glow of the afternoon sun easing the bite of the chilly April air, he gazed at the building’s brick facade and explained, “You don’t really understand that it’s there until it’s gone.”

The Carlton Tavern joined thousands of other pubs on Monday in reopening with outdoor spaces as lockdown restrictions in England eased after months of closures. But its story still stood out in that shared national moment, as its closure was counted not in months but in years.

Its story began when developers tore it down.

Six years ago, people watched in dismay as the Carlton Tavern, built in the 1920s and nestled against a park on the edge of the affluent Maida Vale neighborhood, was reduced to rubble. The building’s overseas owners had skirted local laws and abruptly demolished it to make way for luxury apartments.

Outraged, a group of neighborhood campaigners and local lawmakers fought for years to have the building restored. Eventually, the developers were ordered to rebuild it.

So when glasses were raised and meals shared outside the red brick building on Monday, the patrons were toasting a pub that was simultaneously brand-new and 100 years old as well as celebrating the reclamation of a piece of their community, and, in some cases, a piece of themselves.

Polly Robertson, one of the campaigners at the heart of the fight, laughed and chatted on Monday over fish and chips at the pub with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, flitting among groups of campaigners, the pub’s new owners and neighbors. The generations of families seated around her were why she fought so hard for the place, she said.

“It’s wonderful coming in, just seeing people we haven’t seen in a long, long time,” she said, “not just because of Covid but because we had no location to meet up.”

Before the pub was demolished in 2015, the preservation society English Heritage surveyed the Carlton Tavern as it was being considered for historical status. The society recorded the layout of the pub’s rooms and took molds of its distinctive architectural features, so when it was time to rebuild, there was something to work with.

“It’s identical,” Ms. Robertson said.

From the ocher red letters spelling out “Charrington Sparkling Ales and Famous Stout” on its brick and tile facade to the swooping brass door handles to the elaborate plasterwork inside, the pub’s original charm and character has been recreated.

For some, the reopening was like welcoming back a long-lost friend. Neighbors likened the space to a communal living room where lives had played out and overlapped. They recalled decades of christenings, birthdays, first communions and wakes held within the tavern’s walls by local people who mostly lived in modest flats.

Martin Shannon has lived in London since 1965, and raised a family in the area. He came to the reopening of the pub with his wife, son and daughter-in-law on Monday. They paused to pose for photos at the sign out front and laughed as they shared a cherished memory of celebrating their son’s 30th birthday there more than a decade ago.

“These are the things the system walks over, average people’s ideas and norms all the time,” he said, growing reflective as he talked about the temporary loss of the pub. “It should survive anyway, and not be rolled over and knocked down.”

To many there, the building’s demolition had felt like a personal affront. Mr. Cope said it had amounted to someone coming in and stealing your favorite pair of shoes.

“It’s like someone saying: ‘You don’t matter. And your values don’t matter. Your memories don’t matter,’” Mr. Cope said, pausing to adjust his glasses. “It feels very deeply personal.”

Behind the pub’s reopening are Tom Rees and Ben Martin, business partners who have a connection to the area and a background running pubs. They hope to see the Carlton Tavern once again at the heart of the community.

“There have been people wandering past, wanting to talk to us, telling us great stories about how they used to work here, they used to drink here, how their parents used to drink here,” Mr. Rees said. “It’s amazing really.”

The middle of a pandemic may seem like a strange time to embark on a venture reviving a pub, especially with so many businesses struggling to survive, but Mr. Rees believes the prolonged lockdown brought a new appreciation for local spaces like this one. Their business, aptly named Homegrown Pubs, is focused on local beers as much as it is on the local people the proprietors hope to see return.

“I think the pandemic has forced people to re-evaluate their local area and their relationships to it, and all those great memories they had in these places,” Mr. Rees said.

It seemed fitting to its new owners that the pub’s rebirth would begin 100 years after its founding. The Carlton Tavern first opened its doors in 1921, and was one of the few buildings on the street to survive bombing during World War II.

Its location at the border of Kilburn and Maida Vale is also a junction of two London worlds. On one adjacent street, rows of glass and brick luxury apartment blocks face off against pockets of subsidized housing.

On Saturday, two days before the pub welcomed back visitors, the new owners and an army of workers and volunteers, including Ms. Robertson, were putting the finishing touches on the building. Outside, workers shook the dust from their hands as they heaved the last bits of construction waste into a dumpster, while others tidied inside to ready the Carlton Tavern for its big debut.

As Ms. Robertson flitted between wiping down the wooden bar counter — salvaged from the original tavern — and preparing fresh juice for the other workers, she reflected on the changes she had seen since moving to the area in the 1980s.

For much of the latter half of the last century, the neighborhood was home to waves of immigrants, first from Ireland, then the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia. Then came the developers and with them steep housing costs that pushed many from the once diverse, largely working-class area. But despite that, the community has remained close knit.

Ms. Robertson’s husband grew up in the area, and they raised two children there alongside generations of family. Seeing the Carlton Tavern restored and reopened will mean a lot, she said, particularly for older residents who built decades of memories within its red brick walls.

The whole aim was to save a space where people felt they belonged, in a city that has grown increasingly unfamiliar around them.

“The city can be a very lonely place,” Ms. Robertson said as she wiped a dusty film from a mirror behind the bar. “And this, it’s a familiar place. This is their place as much as anything.”

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