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US envoy arrives in Israel for talks
By: Associated Press
JERUSALEM - U.S. Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell is in Israel to try and kick start Israeli-Palestinian talks before the two sides meet at the U.N. later this month.
A spokesman for the U.S Consulate in Jerusalem said Mitchell arrived in Israel Saturday night. He is set to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders next week.
Peace talks broke down in December after Israel launched a military offensive in Gaza to stop militants firing rockets on southern Israeli towns.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he is willing to renew talks. The Palestinians insist Israeli construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem end before negotiations begin.
The sides are expected to announce a renewal of talks at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23. |
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CANUCK MPS MONITORING THE CONFLICT WANDER ONTO ONE OF JERUSALEM’S BATTLEGROUNDS
By: Carmelle Wolfson
Jerusalem - Peace activists in Toronto may be protesting TIFF's Tel Aviv Spotlight, but here in the Holy Land, the conflict drags on.
That's what a trio of Canadian MPs found out when they arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in mid-August and discovered they were around the corner from the front lines.
Strolling down to the Old City to grab dinner, Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj, NDPer Libby Davies and BQ rep Richard Nadeau, all members of the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Association, were confronted by police cars.
At the roadside in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah stood a tent just outside the former house of the Gawis family, evicted by authorities in the early hours of August 2.
Further along, the three came upon a collection of plastic lawn chairs on the sidewalk, the makeshift camp of the Hannouns, another evicted family. In the last short while, 53 Palestinians have been ordered from their East Jerusalem homes.
"Obviously, East Jerusalem is going to be key for negotiations," says Wrzesnewskyj. The Etobicoke Centre MP has had his own trouble with negotiations; he had to resign as Liberal foreign affairs critic in 2006 when he caused a firestorm by saying it was time for talks with Hezbollah.
Speaking by phone from Canada on his return, he says that everywhere he went on the August 8 to 13 fact-finding mission, he was surprised by the optimism largely arising from the new U.S. administration. Still, he says, "The removal of families from East Jerusalem coming now almost seems like a challenge to the [U.S] president."
The case of the Hannoun family demonstrates the complexities. They have been living in this area, close to the Green Line separating East and West Jerusalem, since 1956, when the UN Relief and Works Agency made an agreement with the Jordanian government to build them housing.
Decades of legal fighting followed. A court ordered the Hannouns' eviction following an appeal by Nahalat Shimon International, a Jewish settler group claiming ownership of land in Sheik Jarrah based on deeds from the Ottoman rule in the 1800s.
The official complaint was that the family did not pay rent. The Hannouns' position is that paying rent means conceding their right to land they believe they legally own.
The U.S. has already criticized the evictions as destabilizing, and Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesperson Rodney Moore says, "Canada registered its concerns directly to the Israeli government on this issue." |
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Evictions gather pace in fight for East Jerusalem
By: Vita Bekker
Since early August, when two families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem were forcibly evicted from their homes, Muhammad Sabagh has had little sleep. The 61-year-old retired plumber fears that he, his five brothers and their wives and children may soon also find themselves on the street.
The Sabagh family may become the next victim in a nearly four-decade-old battle that has been waged by two Jewish groups to reclaim properties in Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab -district north of Jerusalem's Old City, that they say belonged to them before 1948.
Evictions, demolitions of Palestinian homes built without permits and the building of new settler houses in East Jerusalem have helped spur the deepest rift between Israel and the US on the settlements issue in at least a decade. Israel's staunchest ally has repeatedly urged it to freeze Jewish construction to help renew peace talks with the Palestinians. George Mitchell, the top US envoy to the Middle East, is expected to visit Israel early next week to try to finalise a deal on a temporary lull in -construction.
But even in the midst of negotiations, Israel this week announced the building of 455 flats in the occupied West Bank and plans to bring forward the construction of 486 homes in East Jerusalem. The announcements appeared to be an attempt by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, to mollify the right-wing members of his coalition, who are opposed to a settlement halt.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in a move never recognised internationally. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, while the Israeli government insists the whole of Jerusalem remains its undivided capital.
Sheikh Jarrah, home to 2,700 Palestinians, has become the new front line for control over Jerusalem. Rights groups maintain that settlers are advancing the construction of at least 540 housing units in the neighbourhood, helped by Israel's legal system, wealthy backers and cooperation from the Jerusalem municipality and Israeli government.
The evictions last month prompted condemnation from western countries, in spite of Israel's claim that they were apolitical and the result of a court process after the families failed to pay rent.
At dawn that day, following a court order, police carrying assault rifles removed the 53 members of the Hanoun and Ghawi families, including 20 children, from their homes.
The stone houses were then occupied by settlers who hoisted Israeli flags on the roofs and posted armed guards and security cameras near the front doors. They have refused to talk to journalists.
Mr Sabagh, who faces a court hearing over an eviction order next month, said: "The settlers are a powerful group. They succeeded with the two families and now they are trying to succeed with us. This is a political thing - they don't want just my house, they want the whole area."
Mr Sabagh's family and 26 others live in a part of Sheikh Jarrah in which a settler-related company is trying to get approval to construct a 200-unit -compound.
The families are descendants of Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes during the 1948 war that created Israel.
In 1956, they agreed with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and with Jordan - then in control over East Jerusalem - to forgo their refugee aid in return for becoming owners of properties in Sheikh Jarrah within three years. The ownership transfer was not finalised before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The legal dispute over the homes emerged after Israel conquered East Jerusalem. Using Ottoman-period property deeds that the families' current lawyers say were forged, two Jewish groups in 1972 claimed they were the owners of the land and demanded rent -payments.
A decade later, the then-lawyer for the families did not contest the Jewish groups' ownership claims, instead agreeing that the families would keep their homes as long as they pay rent. Most of them still refused to pay and today claim they were not told of the details in the agreement, which serves as the legal basis for the attempt to evict them.
While their lawyers now intend to challenge the authenticity of the property deeds, the evictions are gathering pace.
Maher Hanoun, a 51-year-old food salesman, chain-smoked as he sat on a white plastic chair in the shade of an olive tree and stared at the house in which he had grown up. "If the Jews have the right to take back their land here, why can't we get back the property my family lost in 1948?" Mr Hanoun said, adding he had little faith in the Israeli legal system. "This is a political issue, so our best hope is pressure on Israel from the US." |
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If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
By: Meron Rapoport
Jerusalem does not have good public relations. In the last few months, since President Obama raised his demand to freeze the settlements, attention has been directed towards the West Bank - to the construction in the illegal outposts, the expansion of settlements and the dismantling of roadblocks. Jerusalem almost never appears on the radar screen, neither in Israel nor anywhere else in the world.
Occasionally, events like the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah appears momentarily in the news but the city's general situation hardly ever enters the public debate. Israel certainly is not looking for such a discussion and neither is the Obama administration, which prefers to concentrate on the "easy" topic of settlements.
Turning a blind eye to what is happening in Jerusalem is no new phenomenon and is understandable. Of all the issues on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation table, the question of Jerusalem is possibly the most complicated. On the one hand, it is clear to all that the Palestinians (as well as the whole Arab and Muslim world) will only agree to a peace treaty that will include a comprehensive and just (from their point of view) solution to the issue of Jerusalem and the holy sites. On the other hand, the reality on the ground - starting with the expansion of Jewish neighbourhoods in areas of East Jerusalem that were annexed to Israel after the 1967 war and ending with the entrenchment of Jewish settlements within the Palestinian neighbourhoods - render every proposal to divide Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
It seems that settlers, the right wing parties and large sections of the Israeli establishment have a good understanding of Jerusalem's complex situation. That's why they are trying to make it even more complicated by "mixing" the city up even further in order to prevent a solution along the lines of the "Clinton parameters" which talked about dividing Jerusalem according to the simple equation of Jewish neighbourhoods for Israel and Palestinian neighbourhoods for Palestine.
Only in this light are the recent events we have been witnessing in the last few months understandable; beginning with the decision to build a new Jewish neighbourhood at the site of the "Shepherd Hotel" in Sheikh Jarrah and the introduction of Jewish families into houses whose Palestinian residents were evicted in that same neighbourhood, and ending with a proposal, recently tendered to the Jerusalem municipality, to construct 110 housing units in the neighbourhood of Ras al Amud in East Jerusalem.
The geographical location of these new settlements is not coincidental. Sheikh Jarrah is located to the north of the Old City and the Temple Mount/Haram el Sharif, and Ras al Amud is adjacent to the Old City from the East. The Jewish settlements in these neighbourhoods will create a Jewish ring around the Old City and will sever it from other Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. Without territorial contiguity and free access to the Haram el Sharif the Palestinians will not be able to establish their capital in East Jerusalem.
In one neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, this process is already becoming a reality. Sixty Jewish families are living in Silwan, which lies to the south of the Old City, very close to the Al Aqsa mosque. The settlers' not for profit organization, Elad, which is active in that neighbourhood, received permission from the state to manage the national park and archaeological sites in the area. With this governmental support, the settlers, who constitute a small minority in Wadi Hilweh (the centre of Silwan as it is called by the Palestinians) or "Ir David" ("City of David" as it is referred to in Hebrew), have de facto control over a large part of its public space. The head of Elad, David Be'eri, doesn't conceal his intention to take over the whole neighbourhood and "judaify" it, as he puts it.
Two weeks ago I visited "Ir David"/Wadi Hilweh. After a few minutes of standing in the main street with a camera, a group of Jewish girls, residents of the settlement in the neighbourhood, walked up the street. Even before I asked anything, one of them explained to me that "Jerusalem is our city - the Jews. It's just too bad that there are Arabs here. The Messiah will come only when no Arab is left". Similar things were said to me by an ultra orthodox family walking by.
The Jewish settlement in Ir David/Wadi Hilweh is part of the creation of the Jewish ring around the Old City. But beyond the fact that this and other Jewish settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem are intended to pre-empt a political solution in Jerusalem, there's another, possibly bigger danger. The sense of hate that I witnessed in Silwan could lead to an explosion, to a terrible outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The increasing presence of settlers in neighbourhoods such as Silwan is turning East Jerusalem into a Hebron: a reality of daily friction between Israelis and Palestinians. In Hebron this friction led to a series of mutual acts of violence, beginning with the massacre in the Cave of the Patriarchs by a Jew, on the one hand, and Palestinian attacks against settlers on the other. In Hebron, Arabs and Jews do not share a common life together. The same is true for those Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem which contain a Jewish settlement.
There is no doubt that the question of Jerusalem is a very complex and sensitive one. But this is precisely the reason why it shouldn't be ignored. If the Obama administration wants to bring about the desired resolution between Israelis and Palestinians, it must not delay the issue of Jerusalem until the end of the process. If Obama succeeds in dismantling the ticking time-bomb that is Jerusalem, he has a good chance of solving the rest of the conflict. Jerusalem might not only be the problem, it might be the solution as well.
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Archbishop of Jerusalem urges Sheikh Jarrah steadfastness
By: Ma'an News Agency
Jerusalem - Ma'an - Greek Orthodox Archbishop Atallah Hanna visited the Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah on Tuesday, one of the East Jerusalem neighborhoods threatened with home demolitions.
Hanna visited the Hanun and Ghawi families who were expelled from their homes, confiscated by Israeli settlers.
Hanna congratulated the families on the occasion of Ramadan and expressed the solidarity of the Jerusalem churches with the families struggle, saying the church would not spare any effort to defend their humanitarian cause.
"The Israeli procedures in Jerusalem are inhuman and a clear violation of the human rights," the Partiachate said, noting the cause of the families was a part of the church's concern for the future of Jerusalem. The future, he added, "will be a dark one if it continues on the same path when we lose one day after the other."
Speaking to all Arabs the Partiachate spoke, saying "if you want Jerusalem to be Arab as it now is, then move for it, do not leave it alone."
The Sheikh Jarrah families expressed gratitude to the Church leader, affirming steadfastness in their neighborhood despite all Israeli actions against them. "We demand all of the involved parties to support us in this crisis," they appealed.
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East Jerusalem: the indignity and illegality of eviction
By: ISM
As our visit to the Middle East was ending, one of the most poignant encounters we had was with Maher Hanoun and his family in East Jerusalem. For several nights three generations of Hanouns have been sleeping in the street - the women and children in cars and the men encamped on the pavement. They were evicted from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem on 2 August 2009 following an Israeli court ruling.
We brought the family food and drink for Iftar, a special time for Muslims during the month of Ramadan as it is the evening meal at which their daily fast is broken. The moment was rendered even more moving as we heard of the difficulties that the Hanouns have experienced since their eviction.
The family are refugees who have lived in their home in Sheik Jarrah since 1948. Now they have not only been evicted, but have watched Jewish families being shown the property and encouraged to move into a home that for generations they called their own.
These houses are situated in occupied East Jerusalem. The Palestinian families that lived in these buildings did so legally, and their presence is supported by international law. This is encapsulated in UN Security Council resolutions 446 and 478 which call upon Israel not to transfer members of its civilian population into occupied Arab territories or to change the character and status of Jerusalem.
To its discredit, the Israeli legal system - to which Palestinians have limited and unequal access - has been used by some settler groups to claim ownership of property purportedly belonging to Jews prior to 1948. The decisions taken by the Israeli courts have sustained the claims of settlers and offer Palestinians no recourse to reclaim their rights to lost land or property.
My fellow Elder Jimmy Carter was unambiguous in his statement that the eviction of Palestinians such as the Hanouns from East Jerusalem "is a political issue… It's an attempt by Israel to take over East Jerusalem, which is part of Palestine". I wholeheartedly agree, and was encouraged to know that several Israeli human rights groups and advocates also agree.
Such enforced evictions are utterly unacceptable; it is no exaggeration to state that this kind of action could be a serious obstacle to a successful negotiation of a two-state solution. The Hanoun family do not have fair and equal access to the Israeli legal system - nor are they the only ones to have been treated this way. The international community and all those in Israel and Palestine who believe in the importance of the rule of law should support their cause and speak out against this infringement of Palestinians' fundamental human rights. |
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First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?
By: Haim Watzman
Mike Huckabee recently made a virulently anti-Zionist remark - and the Jews who accompanied him on his tour of East Jerusalem cheered.
"It concerns me when there are some in the United States who would want to tell Israel that it cannot allow people to live in their own country, wherever they want," declared the once and future Republican presidential candidate and current Fox News pundit. The statement came after he visited a Jewish settlement, Shimon Ha-Tzaddik, in the middle of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
For years, Israeli settler organizations have been moving Jewish families into Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, most prominently in Sheikh Jarrah, Ras al-Amud and Silwan. In many cases, the organizations have been buying up Arab property, often in legally questionable ways. In others, they have asserted claims to houses that Jews once owned, but which were occupied by Palestinian families after Israel's War of Independence left East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule.
The latest hotspot in Sheikh Jarrah is of this second kind. Last May, two Palestinian families were handed eviction orders. The orders resulted from Israeli court rulings that affirmed the Jewish title to their properties, and which voided the tenancy rights of the Palestinian families. Jewish families then entered the houses.
When the Obama administration objected last month that the action sabotaged the peace process, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that "united Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel. Our sovereignty cannot be challenged." Therefore, Netanyahu said, Jews are free to purchase homes anywhere in the city - and, presumably, are thus free to move into Jewish-owned homes in East Jerusalem.
But it's not that simple. I live in a West Jerusalem neighborhood called Baka. "Baka," which means "valley" in Arabic, was the name given to the neighborhood by the middle-class Palestinian Arabs who were its original inhabitants. Nearly all of Baka's Arabs left during the hostilities of 1948. Under the provisions of Israel's Absentees' Property Law, these homes became state property. The new Jewish state used these homes to house Jews who had become refugees as a result of the war, among them former inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and immigrants from the Islamic world.
Israeli courts have ruled, as they must, according to the letter of the law. The Sheikh Jarrah homes are indeed owned by Jews, while the Palestinians who once owned homes in Baka and other West Jerusalem neighborhoods no longer, under Israeli law, have title to those homes.
But the law is clearly asymmetric - it asserts Jewish claims and negates Palestinian ones on both sides of the city. In West Jerusalem, the state asserts, in essence, that the 1948 war voided prior claims. But it simultaneously asserts that, in East Jerusalem, pre-1948 property rights trump subsequent changes in occupancy, changes that resulted from population movements during and after the War of Independence.
The continuing assertion of pre-1948 Jewish claims to property in East Jerusalem (and the rest of the West Bank) is profoundly anti-Zionist. If the basis for property claims is status quo ante that preceded Jewish political independence, then Palestinians will campaign for the return of their former West Jerusalem homes, as Faisal Husseini, the late Palestinian leader in Jerusalem, explicitly warned in 1995 in response to similar attempts to claim Jewish property in East Jerusalem. If the Jews claim a right of return to their property, the Palestinians will claim a right of return to theirs.
But the War of Independence and the birth of the Jewish state created a fundamentally new situation and, as Israeli leaders have long argued, we cannot simply turn back the clock. That's why Israelis - including the majority of us who support an equitable accommodation with the Palestinians - firmly reject the Palestinian claim to a right of return to their former homes, neighborhoods and villages in Israel.
Allowing Jews to settle in Sheikh Jarrah is the first step along the road to the end of the Jewish state and the transformation of the Jews, once again, into an embattled and persecuted minority under foreign rule. True Zionists should oppose these settlers. |
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Families evicted from their East Jerusalem homes after 50 years
By: The Guardian
The police came for them at dawn on a Sunday, heavily armed, wearing helmets and riot shields as they broke down the metal doors of the houses and dragged the two Palestinian families out onto the streets.
It was over in minutes, the Hanoun and the Ghawi families evicted from what had been their homes for the past five decades, and thrown onto the pavement before the sun had fully risen.
Within hours young, religious Israeli settlers had been moved in, guarded by dozens of armed police and their own private armed security guards.
These streets of Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, have become the new front line in Israel's complex battle to extend its control over this divided city; their latest victims 17 members of the Hanoun family and 38 from the Ghawi family.
Both families now sleep on mattresses on the street outside their homes and spend the day sitting in the shade watching settlers walk in and out of their front doors.
"I don't know how they sleep," said Maher Hanoun, 51. "We were here in our house legally. That is the important thing."
It was the second time he has been evicted from the house, but the first time settlers have moved in.
Around the corner sat Nasser Ghawi, 46, facing the same situation. "I am dying a hundred times a day," he said. "This is my house, this is what's left of my furniture. I have no other place to go. This is where I was born."
Israel insists these were apolitical evictions, carried out as a result of court rulings after years of legal hearings and a result of the fact that both the Hanouns and the Ghawis had not paid their rent for years.
Two weeks earlier the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had told his cabinet that Jerusalem was "the capital of the Jewish people and of the state of Israel" and that "our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged."
"We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and purchase in all parts of Jerusalem," he said.
But Jerusalem is not a city like any other. The evictions triggered an unusually strong international protest. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, called the evictions "deeply regrettable". The British consulate said it was "appalled" and that the evictions were "incompatible with Israel's professed desire for peace". Robert Serry, the top UN official in the Middle East, called them "totally unacceptable" and a breach of the Geneva Conventions.
The Hanouns and Ghawis fled or were forced out by the 1948 war from their homes in what became Israel. In 1956 the two were among 28 Palestinian refugee families who were given houses in Sheikh Jarrah, then under Jordanian control.
Under an agreement at the time between the families, Jordan and the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, they gave up their right to a lifetime of refugee aid in return for paying a token rent for three years before the properties would transfer to their ownership. That transfer never happened.
In 1967 Israel captured and occupied East Jerusalem and later annexed it - a move never recognised by the rest of the international community. The homes were placed under the control of the Israeli Custodian for Absentee Property.
Then in 1972 two Jewish groups claimed ownership of the properties and began demanding rent. They said they had proof that the land was once owned by Jews in the late 19th century, when a Jewish community was established close to the nearby tomb of Simon the Righteous.
Later a lawyer for the Palestinian families secured an agreement from the court that turned the Palestinians into "protected tenants", under which they were to pay rent to the Jewish groups. The families said they never approved such an agreement and most decided not to pay. "If I had paid rent it would have meant that the Jewish side was the owner," said Ghawi.
In recent years the legal cases against them have gathered pace. Last November, after a court ruling, police evicted one of the families: Mohammad and Fawzieh al-Kurd. Then in May the court ordered the Hanouns and Ghawis to leave their homes as well, finding in favour of the Jewish groups: the Sephardic Community Committee and Nahalat Shimon International.
However, because East Jerusalem is occupied, Israel is under legal obligation not to change the status of its residents and not to settle its population on occupied land.
In addition, while in these cases the Israeli legal system was used to support Jewish property claims dating back before 1948 it is never used to support similar Palestinian property claims, otherwise hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants could stake claims to houses and land they once owned in places like west Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa before the creation of Israel.
"The state of Israel needs to reconsider the future consequences of this process, which allows Jews to claim ownership of property that belonged to them before 1948, but prevents the same claims from being realised by Palestinian residents," said Ir Amim, an Israeli organisation that works for a more equitable Jerusalem. "A general opening of ownership cases - Jews and Palestinians - from before 1948 could place the state of Israel in an impossible predicament in Jerusalem."
Or as Ghawi saw it: "It is only a law for the Jewish people … My father has 18 dunams [18,000 sq m] of land near Rishon Lezion [inside Israel]. We've asked for it back, but the Israeli government won't even register our case."
These are unlikely to be the last evictions. Put together they form a pattern of a growing Israeli settler presence stretching deeper into Arab east Jerusalem. Plans already submitted by settler groups show they want to build several hundred new homes in this area. Eventually, if successful, it would form a ring of Jewish settlements around the Old City and would link to a major settlement deep in the West Bank.
"Our strategic plan for the city is one: a belt of Jewish continuity from east to west," Benny Elon, Israel's then tourism minister, said during a tour of Sheikh Jarrah in 2002. It would greatly weigh in Israel's favour any future negotiations over the final borders of the Israeli state.
Mohammad Sabagh, 60, and his four brothers are another of the refugee families of Sheikh Jarrah. They have a court hearing over their case in October and fear eviction. "It's clearly a political case," he said. "They want to build a wall of settlers and eventually no Arabs will be allowed through." |
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Local family's relatives evicted in Jerusalem heist
By: Khalil AlHajal
A Troy man whose three brothers are literally living on a street in East Jerusalem with their wives and children after being evicted from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers is appealing for support from activists and elected officials in protesting his family's displace
On August 2, Israeli police forcibly evicted two large Palestinian families from their houses in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Sufian Hannon, 61, of Troy, said his relatives were dragged out of their home at 5:10 a.m. that Sunday by uniformed officers.
A video of the incident taken with a mobile phone by Hannon's niece shows the frantic scene as horns blare, windows break and the family is thrown out.
Hannon said Israeli authorities confiscated the phone, but not before his niece, Noreen Hannoun, 24, an American citizen, posted the video on Facebook.
Hannon said several of the evicted family members are American citizens.
"It makes me very angry," said Hannon. "My family lives on the street - no houses, no couches, no restrooms."
He said some of his nieces and nephews suffered dislocated joints after being physically pulled out of their home.
Hannon's extended family, three nuclear families living in separate apartments, were removed from one home. The Ghawi family, six nuclear families, were removed from a second home.
Settler and real estate groups claim the land was bought by a Jewish organization more than a century ago, and an Israeli court has ruled in their favor, issuing eviction orders for two of the nine families in the homes earlier this year.
Hannon said the families were granted the property by UNRWA and the Jordanian government in 1956 as refugees after being displaced from their homes in West Jerusalem and Haifa when Israel was established.
A lawyer for the evicted families has secured documents from Turkish government archives dating back to the Ottoman Empire showing that the land was bought by a Palestinian family early in the 20th century.
Hannon said there is no trace of a record confirming the settlers' claim of a Jewish purchase of the land.
"There wasn't any deed for them in the Ottoman deeds," he said. "They forged the document."
The Israeli courts refused to admit the documents and upheld the eviction orders.
Hannon said Israeli and international human rights activists had been staying in the homes with the families to protest the anticipated displacement since the first eviction order in March.
"They chained themselves to the windows, the bars. These are Jewish people and international peace people," he said.
Many were arrested the day of the eviction. More protesters, including Ofra Ben-Artzi, a sister-in-law of Israeli Prime Binyamin Netanyahu, were arrested in later demonstrations and visits to the area.
Violence broke out in the neighborhood on August 9 when members of the Israeli Knesset Ya'acov Katz and Uri Ariel visited a Jewish family that moved into the home of the Gawhi family, sparking clashes between protesters and police.
Hannon, an accounting director for local social services organization the Arab American and Chaldean Council, has written to U.S. Senators and to the White House requesting intervention.
His brother, Maher Hannoun, who was born in the disputed home and now lives under a nearby olive tree, submitted a letter addressed to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem on Monday.
"We are very grateful to you for the statements you have made and the action you and your representatives have taken since our eviction a week ago," Hannoun said in the letter. "However, a week on, we continue to suffer, particularly the women and children."
Clinton on August 3 called the evictions "deeply regrettable." She said the move was "not in keeping with Israeli obligations and I urge the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions."
The evictions also garnered condemnation from the European Union and the United Nations.
"Despite condemnation from the international community about the evictions of my neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, the Israeli government continues to pursue the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem," said Hannoun in a statement. "My family were refugees from 1948 and now we have become refugees again. We were forced out of our homes to make way for settlers, an act that is contrary to international law. The legal case that residents presented in court included an Ottoman-era document which discounts the settler's claim of ownership of Sheikh Jarrah's land and homes. But the unjust policies of Israel to Judaize East Jerusalem render our legal proof of ownership irrelevant."
Hannoun has also developed an extensive website on the crisis, www.StandUpForJerusalem.org, with a collection of videos and news articles on the families' plight..
The Hannoun and Ghawi homes were not the first in Sheikh Jarrah houses to be taken over. Another family was evicted in 2008. More than 20 other Sheikh Jarrah homes are also facing efforts by the Nahalat Shimon International settler group to claim ownership.
Nahalat Shimon International has not commented and Israeli government offices have placed responsibility for the incident solely onto the court decisions.
"They will evict the other houses," said Sufian Hannon, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. "It's coming. We know that... I cannot believe how the human rights are being violated. We became refugees again in 2009."
He said he hopes putting pressure on elected officials to speak up and a swelling of support from local and international human rights groups, coupled with the official U.S. stance against illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, will help his family find a way to return to their homes.
"We hope that we can make a difference... We have to do anything we can," he said. "We want somebody to take action - real action... We have hope that the president will fulfill his promise." |
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Evicted Jerusalem family refuses to give up
By: Jody McIntyre
At 5:15am on Sunday, 2 August, I woke up to the sound of the Hanoun family's front room windows being smashed in. I had just laid down to rest only 20 minutes earlier.
The Hanoun family is one of 27 families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem facing eviction from their homes as part of a plan to implant a new Jewish settlement in the area. They are refugees from 1948, after being displaced from their home in Haifa during the Nakba, or catastrophe. The family includes 18 members, six of whom are children. They have lived in Sheikh Jarrah since 1956 when the Jordanian government and the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) gave them their houses as part of a project to house Palestinians forced to flee their homes.
We knew that the threat of eviction was imminent ever since the first order of this year was served on 19 February. The family had already been kicked out of their home once, in 2002, but it was still hard to imagine that the day would ever come.
By the time I'd got to my feet, scores of soldiers were rushing into the house and had surrounded me. Due to my disability -- I have cerebral palsy -- I cannot walk at a fast pace, which they used as an excuse to increase their level of aggression, kicking me as I fell to the ground and pushing me out the front door. As I tumbled down the stairs outside, I pointed at my wheelchair:
"That's my wheelchair," I said. "I need it because I can't walk."
"No! No!" the armed Israeli forces replied, continuing to shove me away.
Just outside the house, the police gathered everyone at a nearby wall. Within a matter of seconds they had confiscated everyone's camera and mobile phone, meaning that no footage could be taken and no media could be called. Media would have been able to reach the house anyway as a team of 500 police officers had closed off the entire area. The few journalists that did finally manage to enter the area by climbing through neighboring gardens were manhandled and harassed by Israeli forces.
The police promptly proceeded to arrest all of the international activists present who had been staying with the families in Sheikh Jarrah to show their support. As they forced the internationals away from the house, a police barrier was hastily set up, imprisoning them on the road facing the house. I was the only international left with the family. All around me I could see tears falling from eyes, and faces falling into hands. Children distraught. A family broken.
"For the second time, I have been kicked out of my home," sobbed Jana Hanoun, 16. "How can I ever forget?"
As one of the grandmothers stood cursing the gathered soldiers for their crimes, one of them took offense and attempted to strike her in the face. Her son tore down part of the barrier, launching himself at the soldiers until he was brutally beaten and crushed to the ground. Other Palestinians were also injured as they desperately tried to prevent his arrest.
It was only a couple of hours before a van of Jewish settlers drove up and began moving in to the Hanoun family's house. I watched as soldiers ushered the settlers through to the house they had just stolen. A distraught Jana had to be held back from scaling the fence, for fear that she would be the next to be beaten.
This is occupation. This is apartheid.
By 5pm, the police finally took down the fence and reopened the roads outside the house. We all immediately crossed the road, put our banners back up and sat on the steps outside the Hanoun home. Soldiers forced us across the road once more and erected a new fence.
In the evening, individuals from across the country gathered outside the house to protest, and we chanted as loud as our voices would allow. The Israeli police responded to the peaceful protest by brutally beating participants -- punching people in the head and throwing a woman with a baby in her arms to the ground. Thirteen more arrests were made.
I had been staying with the Hanoun family for weeks before the eviction took place, and vowed to continue to do so. I felt a portion of their pain that morning -- I was also kicked and dragged from the house in which I was living. My belongings were also left behind as I sat shoeless on the street.
We slept the night on the pavement opposite the home.
The next day I was struck by the beaming smile still on the face of Sherri-Ann, a 20-year-old member of the Hanoun family and psychology student. She had an exam to take only a few days later.
"They want Arabs to be stupid, so that when we shout, no one will hear us," she told me. "But I will continue to study and achieve good marks. I will never give up." I watched with admiration as Sherri-Ann sat under the olive tree opposite her home, where she had lived her whole life, and told the story of the eviction to interested visitors.
It's difficult to keep hope as we spend the days sitting on the pavement in the blazing heat, watching as the settlers walk in and out of the Hanoun family's front door, laughing and gloating with the Israeli police on 24-hour duty. But the family is the strongest I have ever met, and Maher Hanoun, the 51-year-old head of the family, remains defiant.
"We have been made refugees again," he told reporters. "This is a slow genocide they are conducting against the Palestinians of East Jerusalem."
He added that "For the last 37 years we were fighting to keep our homes, and now begins the fight to get them back."
Jody McIntyre is a journalist from the UK. He writes a blog for Ctrl.Alt.Shift, entitled "Life on Wheels," which can be found at www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk. He can be reached at jody.mcintyre A T gmail D O T com. |
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Hannouns unceremoniously thrown out of their homes in pre-dawn raid
By: Dan-Chyi Chua
Despite eviction, Sheikh Jarrah family continues to believe in justice and fight to get their home back
On August 2, 2009, during the wee hours of Sunday morning, more than 500 armed policemen turned up under the cover of darkness in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
The Hannouns were asleep in the house with international and Israeli volunteers who were staying with them to protect and to express solidarity with them. Their son Rami and a volunteer were standing guard, when they saw the police approaching. They closed the door and woke the family up.
The policemen broke through the front gate and entered the narrow space before the door. They shattered a window and injured the Hannoun's second daughter Jana. When they realised they could not get in through that window, they went on to smash all the windows in the kitchen.
The policemen climbed into the house, opened the door and let more of them in. The Hannouns' youngest daughter, Diala, was woken up, roughly taken outside.
"I don't know, Mama, they pushed me around like a ball, and then I was outside the house", the 13-year-old said. To this day, she is still too shaken to remember what happened.
The policemen, after taking Diala out, proceeded onto manhandle the rest of the family. They barged into the main bedroom and tried to separate Maher and his wife Nadia, leaving Jana to scream for them not to take her parents or to hit them. Her brother Rami's arm was injured in the scruffle.
More video evidence of the eviction is available here. (watch videos)
Within minutes, the entire Hannoun family was thrown out into the street outside, without even time to grab their shoes in the early morning Jerusalem chill. Their mobile phones and cameras were all confiscated. The police kept them behind an erected barrier and invaded the other two homes next to the Hannouns, which belonged to Maher's brothers Majid and Salim. Unable to break down the old door leading to Majid's house, the police threatened to shoot, forcing Majid's daughter Sharihan to open up.
Sharihan and her mother were made to leave the house. The police would not spare them any time at all to put on the hijab, which is an important piece of religious clothing for the ladies of the family. She sits now with her arm in a cast, after being hurt by the police.
The rest of the police then intruded into the third house belonging to Salim, whose 68-year-old sister was recuperating from an eye operation, and was due to remove her stitches the next day. Unable to see properly, she was nonetheless shoved out of the house like the others. The police made her sit on the sidewalk in shock, tried to take her away in an ambulance but the old lady was afraid and refused to be separated from her family.
In the chaos, the policemen grabbed the furniture in the house, drove them to a nearby police station, and demanded that Maher collect them from there within 20 minutes. Their possessions are now lying on open land.
Illegal take-over by Jewish settlers
It took Jewish settlers just one hour to arrive on the scene, scandalously taking the opportunity to take over these homes. They are still shamefully squatting on these illegally-stolen properties today.
As for the Hannouns, they now sit, stay and sleep in the small street corner, less than 50 meters from what used to be their home. Overnight they were made homeless, and are now sleeping on mattresses and blankets, with nowhere to go, and little to protect them from the settlers that invaded their homes and the constant police presence that keeps watch on them and protects the settlers.
The international outcry against the forced eviction of these families has been unanimous. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Serry, the British, the European Union Presidency currently held by Sweden and the United Nations have all strongly condemned the actions of the State of Israel. (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1105309.html)
Israel served the Hannouns an eviction order, claiming that they have no right to stay in a home that Maher Hannoun, now 51 years old, was born in. The Hannouns will continue to fight for justice to be restored to them. The Hannouns' lawyer has also asked the Israeli court to return the families of Salim and Majid to their homes, since no eviction order had been served to them at all.
A decision is still pending.
What happens now?
Can Israel be allowed to act without impunity against Palestinian families, in blatant contravention of international law, disgracefully robbing them of their family homes in an illegal land grab to secure more property for the Jews, while denying the Arabs any right to live in areas they have lived in for generations?
Those who believe in justice must speak up and hold Israel to task. The international community cannot stand by and watch as the State of Israel present itself as democracy, while denying people basic human rights. Israelis too cannot do nothing as extremist politicians act in their name to perpetuate cruelty and brutality onto those who are no different from themselves.
For decades, Palestinians have been systematically denied of their basic right of return to their homes, reduced to living in tents and refugee camps. Maher does not want this historical conundrum revisited onto him. The solution lies not in the tents that have been offered to him by various international organizatjm ions, leaving him permanently displaced like other Palestinian refugees. It lies in giving him back his home of 53 years which lies barely 50 meters away.
The Hannouns are homeless in the streets, but they have faith those who know their situation will call for justice to be restored to them.
They are counting on you. |
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Untermenschen
By: qunfuz
 This is Jana Hannoun. I met her after a Palestine Literature Festival event at the British Council in occupied east Jerusalem. We were at the British Council because our original venue, the Palestine National Theatre, had been closed down by the Israeli occupiers. The British Council is just down the road from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where Jana lived, and which Israel wants to Judaize.
At five o clock in the morning on August 2nd, the Hannoun and al-Ghawe families were physically thrown out of their homes by Zionist troops. 53 people, including 19 children, were made homeless, and their toys and clothes were strewn in the street. They were made homeless because they are members of the wrong ethnic group - because they are Arabs, the natives of Palestine, and not invading Jews. Their homes were immediately occupied by foreign settlers.
This, of course, is fascism. Because of a myth of national origin (and it is a myth - the vast majority of Jews originate from eastern Europe and north Africa, not from Palestine, not even two thousand years ago), the Canaanite-Arab Palestinians are designated untermenschen to be driven out. The Sheikh Jarrah families have experienced this before, as they are refugees from Haifa and west Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed by Zionist terrorist militias in 1948. The UN built homes for them in east Jerusalem after 1948, and that half of the city fell too in 1967. In this report, Jana is interviewed. More videos of the theft can be viewed here.
Shaikh Jarrah's al-Kurd family were forcibly removed from their home in November 2008. In all, 28 family homes in the area are threatened with racist expropriation. Homes in the Silwan area, meanwhile, are being demolished, and settlers are building a network of tunnels under other buildings. In these so-called archeological sites, skeletons and other remains from the Islamic period have been removed without informing Palestinian authorities, and have now 'disappeared.' (I once knew a Spanish archeologist who had worked all over the Middle East. Israel, he told me, is the only country where a foreign archeologist must be accompanied by security officials.) Palestinians in east Jerusalem frequently have their identity cards confiscated and so find themselves forced to leave the city. Others leave because conditions are so appalling. Very little public money is spent on Arab areas, and permission to build is almost never granted. Already there are 200,000 Jewish settlers living on top of 250,000 Palestinians in the occupied half of town. To restate, west Jerusalem, which the West and its Muslim clients consider to be Israel proper, was ethnically cleansed in 1948. For Israel there is no distinction: it has annexed east Jerusalem and considers the entire city (in typically fascist language) to be its 'eternal undivided capital'.
The UN condemned the expropriations in Sheikh Jarrah in reasonably strong terms. So too did the British Consulate in Jerusalem, saying: "These actions are incompatible with the Israeli professed desire for peace." Hillary Clinton managed to say the words "deeply regrettable." And I suppose we should be grateful. Under the Bush administration nothing would have been said, or perhaps the crime would have been celebrated.
But it isn't nearly enough. Obama and Mitchell have spent eight months asking for a settlement freeze. American and Israeli officials quibble over the definition of 'natural growth' in the settlements. The American administration has assured its ally that no economic pressure will be brought to bear, and restated its absolute committment to the Zionist state's defence. The Arab regimes, which in 2002 offered a warm peace in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines, have been told to further 'normalise' relations with Israel before Israel takes a step towards justice.
People who think the talk of settlement 'freeze' or 'natural growth' offers any hope should visit Palestine. They'll see that nothing of Palestine is left, that every hilltop is occupied, every Palestinian village surrounded. If America really wants a viable two-state solution it must demand not a freeze but a dismantling of all settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. When Israel refuses, America must cease all funding and arming of the Zionist project, criminalise private fund raising for Israel, and impose sanctions on Israeli goods and businesses. It must refuse to defend Israel from its potential enemies until Israel withdraws from the occupied territories. Obviously, this isn't going to happen.
Some say that Obama is doing all he can, which is to make gentle demands he knows will be refused and so demonstrate to the American people that Israel is not the ally they think it is, preparing the ground for a more serious breach with Zionism in the coming decades. But by then the two-state solution will be dead in the water. In fact, it already is, drowned back in the Oslo years.
The other solution is the one state solution, the South African solution. The Palestinians are a generous people. They know that two or three generations of Jews have been born in Palestine, that there is now a specifically Israeli, Hebrew-speaking culture. Many Palestinians even understand the desire for a Jewish safe haven. George Habash said that he aimed to return to his home, and that if he found a Jewish family living there he would build a second storey for himself. He didn't say he'd kill the Jewish family. When I asked the PA's chief of staff Rafik Husseini what he thought of the one-state solution, he said, "If they would live with us as equals, if they would accept it, yes, of course I agree with the one state solution. But they wont accept it."
This is true. So brainwashed are Israeli Jews by their own brand of fascism, so victimised by history, less then five per cent would be happy to live in a democratic state, as equals with the natives of the land.
Perhaps in ten or twenty years massive international disapproval and isolation of Israel will rob Zionism of its financial and military strengths, and Israeli Jews will change their minds. Perhaps this process is beginning now with the boycott movement. Perhaps mainstream Western media will stop pretending that Israeli fascism is liberal democracy, and perhaps Western tourists will stop taking Holy Land holidays in ethnically-cleansed Jerusalem. Otherwise, it's down to the Arabs and Muslims. The path to liberation will be a bloody path of necessary revolution and war.
Please use Jana's photograph and story. She looks like a human being, does she not? Not like a terrorist or a representative of the 'Arab mind.' Take her picture to your local MP's office, or send it to your country's embassy in Israel and demand that they do something. Take it to your local supermarket manager and explain the link between this girl's homelessness and the presence of Israeli fruit on the supermarket shelves. Don't leave Jana in the street.
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Editorial / Israel must allow evicted Arab families to return home
By: Haaretz Editorial
The eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in order to replace them with Jewish families, predictably sparked harsh condemnations. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged the government to refrain from such actions, which she described as "provocative."
Sweden, which holds the European Union's rotating presidency, asserted that the evictions were illegal, while UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry said they were violations of both the Geneva Conventions and Israel's obligations under the road map peace plan.
The sight of the evicted Palestinian families, who had lived in these houses for decades, paints Israel in the world's eyes as a country that maintains a cruel regime of occupation, oppresses the weak and strives to create political facts in the disputed city under the guise of the "rule of law."
But for all its importance, this international criticism is not what makes the eviction of these families completely unacceptable. A democratic state that strives for peace and justice simply has no right to uproot families who became refugees in 1948. They left homes in West Jerusalem behind them, and were subsequently granted modest accommodations by the Jordanian government. The claim that the houses in Sheikh Jarrah were purchased by Jews in the early 1900s is a double-edged sword that opens a political and legal Pandora's box.
No thinking person will be persuaded that Jews have a sweeping right to return to their homes in East Jerusalem as long as Israeli law not only bars Palestinians from returning to their homes in West Jerusalem, but even evicts them from the houses where they have lived for the last 60 years. The Israel Lands Administration's regulations do not even allow Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to buy land and houses in many parts of the city.
The least that can be expected of a state that legalized the expropriation of thousands of dunams in East Jerusalem to build 50,000 apartments for its citizens is to once and for all deprive extremists of the right to turn Jerusalem into an obstacle to peace and a stumbling block to reconciliation between the two peoples that inhabit this city.
The government must immediately return the Palestinian residents to their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and cancel the eviction orders that have been issued against additional houses. And the neighborhood's fate must be determined via diplomatic negotiations. |
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Rattling the Cage: Sheikh Jarrah really says it all
By: LARRY DERFNER - Jerusalem Post
If the Obama administration goes all the way in its demand for a total settlement freeze, if it stands firm against Israeli emotional blackmail, we may have this week's debacle in Sheikh Jarrah to thank.
The eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in Arab east Jerusalem where they'd lived for over 50 years, and the takeover of the houses by Israeli zealots intent on "re-Judaizing" the neighborhood, revealed our settlement policy in all its glory. It reminded everyone that the issue isn't houses and zoning, it's justice and decency - or, rather, injustice and indecency.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the evictions as "provocative" and a violation of Israeli commitments. In Washington, the State Department called in our ambassador to make the point in person. The Brits, the Swedes, the UN, everybody's up in arms over the spectacle of hundreds of Israeli cops going into an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem, tossing two Palestinian extended families into the street and protecting the Jewish nutters moving in.
This is what's known as a wake-up call. And it didn't come a moment too soon.
The news, at least around here, is that the Obama administration is getting ready to "blink" in its dispute with the Netanyahu government over settlements. The word is: We showed 'em. They can't tell us to stop "normal life" for Jewish families. They can't tell Jewish mothers to stop having babies. They can't tell us that a Jew can live anywhere he wants in Washington, Paris or London, but not in Jerusalem, the eternal, undivided, indivisible, eternal capital of the Jewish people. AIPAC and the rest of the Israel lobby are finally standing up on their hind legs and telling Obama to lay off. Those self-hating Jews in the White House, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod and the rest, are withering under our assault.
Obama's losing altitude over the health care thing. His foreign policy is going nowhere. He's vulnerable. He doesn't want to take on Israel and the lobby now. He'll blink. And we'll build. What was, will be.
I was worried that this consensus wisdom was right, that Obama was getting ready to fold, and I'm still worried. It's not easy to stop the settlement enterprise, especially in Jerusalem, when all of official Israel, along with our friends in Washington, are wailing and gnashing their teeth.
The Netanyahu government, the settlers and their supporters may still prevail. But Sheikh Jarrah hurt them. Those scenes showed what lies underneath all the kitschy slogans about a Jew's right to live anywhere in Jerusalem and a Jewish mother's right to have a baby. It demonstrated the true principle that's animated our settlement policy in Palestinian-populated land since 1967: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, too.
The government is defending the eviction of the two Palestinian families by saying the houses in Sheikh Jarrah, according even to Israeli courts, were owned by Jews before 1948.
That's rich. The two evicted families, the Hanouns and the Ghawis, were given those houses by the UN a few years after they, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians, fled their homes in west Jerusalem during the 1948 war. Since then, west Jerusalem has been all-Jewish.
If Israeli justice in 2009 means restoring pre-1948 Jewish property rights in the Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, what about pre-1948 Palestinian property rights in the Jewish west Jerusalem neighborhood of Baka? Some of those old houses in Baka look pretty "Oriental" to me.
If we're going to evict the Hanouns and Ghawis to "re-Judaize" one side of the Green Line, are we going to evict the Cohens and Levys to "re-Arabize" the other side?
Stay tuned.
Not far away in Sheikh Jarrah is the old hotel that Irving Moskowitz, a great American Jew (he made his fortune running bingo parlors, then moved to Florida) wants to turn into a luxury apartment building for observant Jewish tenants. The government's behind him.
What? A Jewish, democratic state is going to bar Jews from living in eternal Jerusalem? Do you know who that hotel was built for? The mufti! Look at these pictures of the mufti of Jerusalem sitting with Hitler. Hitler! Does that give us the right to move Jews into the neighborhood, or what?
I would like to see Israel permit a rich, devout, nationalistic Palestinian Muslim living in America to come build a luxury apartment building for religious Muslims in, say, Rehavia. Or any other Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.
Or anyplace else in this country.
When that happens, Israel will have a case for building Beit Moskowitz in Sheikh Jarrah. Until then, it's just another instance of us planting our flag on the Palestinian's turf, of rubbing their noses in it.
The Americans raked us over the coals for that one a couple of weeks ago. Now there are the two Palestinian families - 53 people in all - being turned out of their homes by Israeli police, who are now guarding the proud Jews settling into their new second home.
If Obama and Co. were getting ready to blink, this should snap their eyes wide open to what's at stake in the battle over the settlements. They'd better keep their eyes wide open until the battle's over - until all settlement is frozen and the land, ultimately, is redivided - or the injustice and indecency may never end. |
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Netanyahu Sister-in-Law Arrested at Sheikh Jarrah
By: Rose Foran - The Media Line
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's sister-in-law describes her arrest during East Jerusalem evictions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's sister-in-law has been arrested during the eviction of two Palestinian families from disputed homes in East Jerusalem.
Ofra Ben-Artzi was placed in police custody on Sunday after she tried to visit Palestinian families being evicted from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Ben-Artzi, the 58-year-old co-editor of Occupation Magazine, is a sister-in-law of Sarah Netanyahu, the prime minister's wife. Her son was sent to military jail a few years ago after refusing to serve in the Israeli army on conscientious grounds.
"When I saw the news of the evictions, I was at home and just got the message from reading Ha'aretz newspaper that they had just happened a few hours ago," Ofra Ben-Artzi told The Media Line. "So I decided to go and see what happened to my friends."
"At that time I did it on a personal level, because I know the families personally. I know Umm Kamel, who has been evicted before, and has been staying in a tent since November," Ben-Artzi said.
"Through visiting occasionally and participating in various protests about her eviction, I also came to know Mr. Gawi who was evicted on Sunday," she added.
Two Arab families were evicted from Sheikh Jarrah on Sunday, prompting outrage from the international community. Jewish families who had claimed ownership of the property were moved into the two homes following the eviction.
The Jewish families have lobbied that the land was owned by Jews dating back to the 19th century, and were only abandoned amid attacks by Arabs in the 1920s and 30s. Their claims were confirmed by an Israeli court after several years of legal discussions.
"My vice is that I'm optimistic," Ben-Artzi said. "I was sure that the Israeli government would not evict these two families vis-ŕ-vis the international view and criticism. When it happened I was really shocked."
When Ben-Artzi approached the main road leading to Sheikh Jarrah, she believed she would not have any problem entering the neighborhood, even though the road was closed to vehicles.
"Ultra-Orthodox Jews cross the highway and walk to this tomb on a 24/7 basis - around the clock, in large numbers," she said.
Sheikh Jarrah is home to a tomb frequented by religious Jews, which is believed to be the final resting place of Shimon HaTzadik (Simon the Righteous), a fourth century BCE high priest.
Ben-Artzi said that because her appearance was not outwardly one of an Orthodox Jew or settler, she was immediately pegged as a dissident.
"I started walking, and immediately a policewoman said: ‘Hey lady, where are you going?'"
She said she replied: "‘I'm just going to visit my friends, they have a problem and I wanted to see what happened to them.'"
The policewoman refused to let her enter, despite Ben-Artzi's protests. When she asked the policewoman for some kind of documentation forbidding her entry, the officer failed to produce anything.
"All of a sudden so many policemen came and blocked my way, almost stepping on me," Ben-Artzi said. "These were their tactics so I could not move, and if I were to make any movement, then I would be attacking them. I was blamed for attacking a policeman," said Ben-Artzi.
"And I was alone - this is something that I want to stress - I'm a 58-year-old woman who was alone on this road, and all of these policemen came to block this ‘dangerous person'," she said. "I told them, ‘This is my city. This is an open road. Before I saw religious people go on this road, and I want to go too.'"
After being detained on the side of the road for nearly half an hour by the police, Ben-Artzi recalled, reinforcements were brought in.
"They were very careful," she said. "They brought more policemen - Special Forces I think - because they were dressed in black and wore black shoes."
"They all surrounded me so cameras couldn't take pictures, and no one could see while they were taking me - grabbing me - into the police car," she said.
Ben-Artzi said she was trying to make sense of her arrest under seemingly benign circumstances.
"My feeling is that the fight of the Israeli government and security forces against dissidents is such that they are on such high alert, and with me they lost their senses," she said.
As for her connection to the Netanyahu family, Ben-Artzi called it "irrelevant."
"Unfortunately my cause and the people on the Israeli-Jewish side who share my beliefs, are a very small majority. Had I not been a relative of the Prime Minister, it would have been someone else, but the story would not been published," she said.
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Israelis Accused Of Settlement By Stealth
By: Dominic Waghorn
The Israeli Government is being accused of a plot to transform East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements and drive out Palestinians by stealth.Ir Amim, a Jerusalem based NGO specialising in Israeli Palestinian issues, claims Israeli authorities in collusion with radical Jewish settlers are cementing their hold on occupied East Jerusalem..
"The policy of the government of Israel is to establish the supremacy if not the hegemony of an exclusionary Jewish narrative in Jerusalem," Ir Amim's Daniel Seidemann told Sky News.
The British government also told us it is concerned by actions in East Jerusalem that threaten to "not only undermine the peace process but undermine the trust that will be needed to renew that process towards a two state solution".
These are two examples where Israel is alleged to be altering facts on the ground and changing the status of occupied East Jerusalem against international law.
The plight of the Hannoun family
Maher Hannoun's home in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem has been in his family for more than 50 years. Last week an Israeli court ordered his family to leave, to make way for Jewish settlers.
The Jewish settlement company Nahalat Shimon claims the land was bought by Jews more than a century ago and says the Hannouns have not paid rent.
The Hannouns say they were given the property by the Jordanian Government in the 1940s and the settler's claims are based on forged papers.
"Jerusalem was given to the Jewish people by God three thousand years ago", a spokesman for the settlers told Sky News. He confirmed plans to evict more than twenty Palestinian families and move in 300 Jewish families instead.
Maher says he has been offered a lot of money to leave but has no intention of giving in to the settlers.
"For us it's not about money," he said. "Nobody can sell his identity, his dreams his memory. I will fight to remain where I was born, where my kids were born."
The European Union and US Government have both protested to the Israeli Foreign Ministry about the planned evictions. The Israeli Government says it is a matter for the courts, despite the political implications of the case.
The Cliff Hotel
Ali Ayad and his wife Signe Breivik, who is Norwegian, met in his family's hotel in Abu Dis and married there. He took over running the Cliff Hotel and they lived there with their family, until the Israelis seized it.
In 2003 when they moved out to renovate the place, the Israeli military moved in and refused to let the couple return. The Israelis have built the infamous security barrier right through the property.
They are using an absentee property law to take possession, even though Israel's attorney general has said the law should not be applied in Jerusalem.
Making matters worse are Israeli plans to build a major settlement in and around the hotel. Some jewish families have already moved in nearby.
Ali is barred from Jerusalem because he has only West Bank ID papers and has been branded a security risk. Meeting the affable dispossess Palestinian it is hard to imagine someone less threatening.
He is not even allowed to attend court hearings determining the fate of his property, but remains calm and unbowed in his resolve to fight the Israelis taking his land.
"This is not an issue that I have a stubborn head. This is simple reason. It's my own property. I did not sell it. My family did not sell it. We have no intention to give it up," he said.
Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband has intervened several times in the case of the Cliff Hotel but Israeli authorities appear to have no intention of handing it back. |
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There was an old woman who lived in a tent
By: DAN-CHYI CHUA
In East Jerusalem, Jewish settlers have kicked an old Arab woman out of her home. She could soon be joined by members of27 other Arab families being evicted to make way for other settler homes.
These are the kind of settlements that will test the Obama administration's sway over the Israeli government.
Mrs al-Kurds is 64. She once had a house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. One day, Jewish settlers moved into one half of her home, and she went to court to try to evict them. The order was given, but the Housing Committee refused to evict the settlers. Instead last November, the Israeli Army arrived in the early hours of the morning and forcibly removed Mrs al-Kurds and her husband from their home.
Mr al-Kurds died two weeks later from a heart attack and Mrs al-Kurds moved into a tent built on land near her home which belonged to a friend of the family. The tent was demolished six times by the Israeli police, and rebuilt six times. It now stands with permission from the Israeli authorities.
The tent has become more of a protest against the Israeli-Arabs living in this neighbourhood. Mrs al-Kurds does not sleep in the tent anymore. She spends the night instead with a family, but during the day she is there at the tent. She has become famous among those who have heard the story of Um Kamel, the name she is better known by in the community, but Mrs al-Kurds' story is just one of the many in this enclave of Israeli-Arab homes of Sheikh Jarrar.
51-year old Maher Hannoun lives in a house across from the Um Kamel tent. The simple one-storey house has a fence around it, from behind which he sat and told me his story, just one of 27 other similar ones.
The family's house had been built by the Jordanian government back in the 1950s, when it still controlled East Jerusalem, to house Palestinian refugees displaced by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The families would pay a token sum of rent, and after three years, ownership was to be transferred to them.
In 1967, East Jerusalem came under Israeli control. The Sephardic Community Committee and the Ashkenazi Community Committee claimed the area which is believed to hold the tomb of an ancient Jewish priest Shimon Hatzaddik. They asked the Israeli-Arab home owners to pay them rent, which the homes refused. The rent money, according to Hannoun, was collected and is being held by the court.
In 1972, the two committees transferred ownership to a settler organisation called Nahalat Shimon. The organisation tried to pay the Arab home owners to leave the area, but they refused.
"I was born here, this is my family home," explained Hannoun.
According to Salah Abu Hussein, the lawyer representing the Arab families, the land belongs to Hijaze, a Palestinian from Jerusalem. Nahalat Shimon then produced a set of documents from the Ottoman-era to back the Jewish claim of ownership.
Earlier this year, with the war in Gaza, a worsening of relations between Israel and Turkey, a close traditional political and military ally, turned the tide in favour of the Arab families.
According to an interview with The National,
"We have noticed a dramatic change in the atmosphere now when we approach Turkish officials,"ť said Hatem Abu Ahmad, one of Mrs al-Kurd's lawyers. Before they did not dare upset Israel and put us off with excuses about why they could not help."
He said the families' lawyers were finally invited to the archives in Ankara in January, after they submitted requests over several months to the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem and the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Officials in Turkey traced the documents the lawyers requested and provided affidavits that the settlers’ land claims were forged. The search of the Ottoman archives, Mr Abu Ahmad said, had failed to locate any title deeds belonging to a Jewish group for the land in Sheikh Jarrah.
Unfortunately the Turkish change of heart came too late and the new evidence was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court. Hannoun now faces a deadline of July 19 to evacuate from his family home.In May, the Israeli court ruled that if he did not, he would have to pay 50,000 shekels (almost US$12,000 ), another 5,000 shekels for court expenses and a backdated fine of 500 shekels a day for not evacuating, that would amount to another 150,000 shekels.
Hannoun is resolute in not moving from his home. He has international activists staying with him to provide support and solidarity, and Hannoun has been tirelessly talking to visitors and media who will hear his case. Having lost in the legal system for his right to remain, he is hoping media pressure will prevent the Israeli authorities from evicting out of his home.
In most other countries, eviction of residents arising from government takeover of property might be seen as a tool of urban development and would not have raised a ruckus. The evicted would be compensated. In this case, the Nahalat Shimon have offered the Arab houseowners almost a blank cheque for compensation, but the situation is a lot more complicated.
As Hannoun put it, “They don't understand the connect between us and this land. They thought that with money, they can buy our memories or identities.”
At the crux of all this is the issue of what constitutes Israeli territory in Jerusalem. The Jewish takeover of Sheikh Jarra and subsequent building of settler homes on demolished Arab homes means that the northern Arab neighbourhoods will be cut off from the Old City of Jerusalem. What this will impact then is the territories that may be negotiated as Palestinian and Israeli territory in any peace talks regarding the disputed city, which both sides are claiming as capital for their respective states.
“We feel sad because we know that after we leave, they will move in the settlers,” said Hannoun. “If I do it (take the compensation), I will never respect myself and my sons will never respect me.”
A similar situation is taking place in Silwan, another Arab neighbourhood just outside the eastern wallsof the Old City. Speaking specifically about it, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had called situations like these demolition of the Silwan housesfor an archaeological park “unhelpful”. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama also called for a freeze on settlements and renewed that call in his much-anticipated speech in Cairo yesterday.
The al-Kurds' eviction from their homes last November took place before the election of Obama, despitepressure from the US. Now that he is in the Oval Office, many will be watching it to see how much influence, the new American president has over the Israeli government with his tough rhetoric.
This is the last in a series of three stories looks at the issue of land in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a special focus on the city of Jerusalem. Next, we visit the city of Hebron, where Israelis and Palestinians are living in an area too close for comfort.
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Only Obama can stop the Israelis stealing our homes
By: Ben Lynfield
ON THE front line of the Palestinian battle to stop Israelis taking over swaths of East Jerusalem, Maher Hanoun is praying Barack Obama is as good as his word when he says "settlement must stop".
"We need him to do exactly what he said â€" to stop settlement and to push the Israeli government to stop evicting us," said Mr Hanoun, 52 a short, bespectacled man who closely followed Mr Obama's meeting in Washington with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week.
The leaders met a day after his long legal battle against settlers ended with an Israeli court dismissing his ownership claims to the building he has lived in all his life and which houses his extended family of 17.
The decision, which paves the way for the expulsion of a second extended family, is a major boost for settlers. Their goal, of transforming the heart of East Jerusalem territory earmarked as the capital of a future Palestinian state into a Jewish-dominated area, poses a major challenge to Mr Obama's pledge to press for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Danny Seidemann, a lawyer who heads the Israeli Ir Amim group, said: "The Israeli government is acting in co-operation with and often in collusion with settler organisations against the rest of the world."
He described the Hanouns as "victims of law and a legal system used to advance Israeli interests at the detriment of Palestinian rights".
The US has protested over the planned expulsions. But an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman called the international community's interventions on behalf of the Hanouns "offensive", saying: "The government cannot tell the court what to do. There is separation of powers."
Settlers have submitted to the Jerusalem municipality a plan for construction of a new settlement of 250 units on the land where the Hanouns and an estimated 500 other Palestinians live. The settlers claim an ancient Jewish sage, Simon the Just, is buried nearby.
"International pressure is the only thing that can save us and, as a person living in East Jerusalem, I can say we are placing big hopes on Obama," Mr Hanoun said.
The US's record of acquiescing in Israeli settlement construction, especially in East Jerusalem, provides little basis for such hopes. But Mr Hanoun says there have been signs of a possible change. Unlike George Bush, who left Middle East peacemaking to the end of his presidency, Mr Obama took it up immediately by sending special envoy George Mitchell and secretary of state Hillary Clinton to the region, he says. The latter spoke out against planned home demolitions and evictions in East Jerusalem during her March visit.
However, the militant Hamas movement does not share the optimism. "Obama's declarations amount to hopes that have no substance and one cannot rely on them. Their objective is to sew confusion," said spokesman Fawzi Barhoum
As they hope for the best, the Hanouns are preparing for the worst. They have moved their furniture out of the house so it won't be seized during the eviction. And they are hosting a resolute young Scot, Liam O'Hare, 19, from Glasgow, to be a witness when Israeli police come knocking. The volunteer with the Palestinian-run International Solidarity movement said: "We will try to document what happens because police will close off the street to keep people out. We will also try to protect the families if police are violent."
Of the Hanouns, he said: "They are very despondent, but they still cling to hope. It's still their house."
Tough task for President
US PRESIDENT Barack Obama will need to apply heavy pressure on Israel's new leader to salvage the goal of an independent state for the Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanyahu showed no sign of lessening his opposition to Palestinian independence, even when Mr Obama, standing just inches away at their White House summit this week, insisted there is no other way to end the decades-old conflict.
A major crisis with Israel's most important ally would not go down well with the Israeli public, but it's not clear how hard Mr Obama is willing to push Mr Netanyahu.
Next week, Mr Obama hosts both the Palestinian and Egyptian presidents before travelling to Egypt in early June. The Arab leaders are expected to implore Mr Obama to pressure Mr Netanyahu, whose rejection of Palestinian statehood goes against years of international peace efforts
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Letter to President Obama
By: Maher Hannoun
 President Obama,
I am a Palestinian resident of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, facing imminent eviction from my home. The Israeli Government plans to demolish my families' house and build a settlement in place of our houses. We are refugees from 1948 and are here legally as we were given our houses in 1956 by the Jordanian Government and UNRWA.
We have been encouraged by your support for the rights of Palestinian people and we were especially happy to hear your speech in Cairo where you ask Israel to stop all settlements, including East Jerusalem, and have two states for two peoples.
This speech gave us hope that we can stay at our houses and enjoy a peaceful, happy life.
Like you once had, we now have the audacity to hope. After 37 years of suffering for the right to stay at our home, we now have a candle at the end of the tunnel. You are our candle, you are our hope. We believe in your vision and your honesty, and we ask you to support us in our time of need. Our future depends on your support.
Maher Hannoun,
Sheikh Jarrah. |
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Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem, Israeli Style
By: Paul Findley
Israeli authorities are carrying out a process in East Jerusalem that accurately be described as ethnic cleansing. It is plainly geared to uproot Palestinians from an area that historically has been known as Arab East Jerusalem and convert it into an integral, permanent part of the capital of the Jewish state.
The scandalous process is recognized and deplored by the major news media in Britain and elsewhere and even by some newspapers in Israel, but it is predictably ignored in the United States. Still worse, Washington provides the financial, political and military support without which the cleansing could not go forward.
B'Tselem, a private organization of Israelis concerned about human rights, calls it "a policy of quiet deportation." In its report, subtitled Revocation of Residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians, the group notes that "perhaps thousands of people have been forced to leave" and warns that the worst is still to come.
The squeeze is not new; it has been underway for years, first under Labor Party leadership, intensified by the Likud Party when Menachem Begin became prime minister, and hardened recently in two major steps, first by the government of Labor's Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, then by their Likud successor, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The first stage was a slow, little-noticed process of attrition, during which Jewish settlements that now ring East Jerusalem were built. The next was tightening the noose against Palestinians through two measures: control of entry into the city and restriction of construction permits.
For years, Israel has virtually prohibited Palestinians from remodeling old housing or constructing new. Only a handful of building permits-about 150 a year- are divided among the 155,000 Palestinians who until recently constituted the majority population. More than 20,000 families are virtually homeless.
At the same time, Palestinians who leave east Jerusalem for any reason can expect harassment when they attempt to return. Some of them, even those who have lived in Jerusalem all their lives, are denied re-entry.
Those who left for holidays sometimes find it impossible to return. Families are divided, some members are able to stay in East Jerusalem and others kept out.
Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem are exempt from municipal taxes for five years and then benefit from a reduced rate. Because of this bias, Palestinians living there pay taxes that are five times higher than many settlers.
The effect of these demographic pincers is rising anger, despair, and violence-or, as Israeli officials always characterize it, "terrorism."
The real terrorism is inflicted on the Palestinians, who live in constant fear of bulldozers leveling their homes without anything remotely resembling due process, eviction on the pretext that home repairs were made without proper permits, or confiscation for road construction or other public purposes.
And the latest form of terrorism is the voiding of Palestinian identity cards. Before Shimon Peres left the office of prime minister, he had already begun the use of identity cards-or lack thereof-as the main instrument of deportation from East Jerusalem. Under Netanyahu, the instrument has become razor sharp. It now threatens to sever much of the remaining population of Palestinians from their homelands.
The Israeli Interior Ministry says that all identity cards must be renewed by August of this year, a deadline that will give officials almost unlimited opportunity to refuse renewal and force Palestinians on short notice to move elsewhere in the West Bank.
Patrick Cookburn of the Independent, a respected London newspaper, writes, "In two months' time, in a move likely to have more effect on the fate of Jerusalem than the building of a Jewish settlement at Jabal Abu Ghneim, Israel will start a meticulous examination of the right of every Palestinian resident to remain in the city. Those who are not issued the coveted Jerusalem identity card will have 15 days to leave."
The independent recites grim experiences that are likely to be replicated thousands of times in the next few weeks. For example: "Olga Matri Hana Yoaqim, 63, who has seven children, was born in Bethlehem but has lived in [Jerusalem] with her husband since 1952. 'In September 1995 I went to replace my identity card at the Interior Ministry office in East Jerusalem,' she aid. The clerk cut up her card and told her to come back in two weeks. When Mrs. Yoaqim returned, the clerk told her, 'You don't have an identity card. Co to the West Bank.'
"Her husband went back to the ministry 20 times but was refused. Mrs. Yoaqim said, 'I suffer from diabetes and have kidney problems. When I go to a clinic or hospital, they want to see my identity card. Because I have none, I can't receive treatment.'"
Even Palestinians who have moved from the Old City to adjoining suburbs are in deep trouble. B'Tselem reports, "Some 18 months ago, the Interior Ministry began to revoke the residency status of persons who moved outside the municipal borders of Jerusalem."
Palestinian residency problems began the moment Israeli forces took control of East Jerusalem in the June 1967 war. Over 50,000 Palestinians have been denied permanent residency rights because they were away from home in June 1967, for whatever reason, or moved, even temporarily, to a different location.
Young people often find their residency rights blocked when they attempt to return from attending schools overseas. Only Palestinians bearing proof that they, or their parents, have resided in East Jerusalem since 1967 can move freely to and from the city, and now even that right is in jeopardy. The Palestinians may enter East Jerusalem only if they receive special permits from Israeli authorities.
This policy sharply restricts religious practice, as a practical matter blocking most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza from visiting holy places in Jerusalem.
It stands as a cynical reversal of Israel's long-proclaimed guarantee that all people will have free access to religious places in Jerusalem. A civil rights attorney, Eliahu Abrams, put it bluntly: " It is a true crisis in human rights. Israel is forcibly getting rid of Palestinians not by pulling them out by the hair, but by quiet, slow, sophisticated deportation."
He says the "essence of the new policy is to demand that all Palestinians who cannot give documentary proof that they have always lived in Jerusalem must leave. According to The Independent, Israeli officials sometimes demand as many as 12 different documents before a Palestinian can secure a new identity card. |
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Israeli Ethnic Cleansing Undiminished in Jerusalem
By: Katherine M. Metres
According to Israeli authorities, Muhammed Arikat is a visitor in his own country. He is a Palestinian from the village of Abu Dis, part of which is considered by Israel to be in Jerusalem and the other part in the West Bank. Apart from the years he spent working in Kuwait (where Palestinians cannot become citizens), he has lived all his life in Abu Dis.
The Israeli Ministry of the Interior has refused family reunification petitions from Mr. Arikat's wife, Rada, who is registered as a Permanent Resident of Jerusalem. Arikat can now stay with his family only on a one-to-two-month visitor's permit. He is unable to work because of his "visitor" status, and he fears deportation if the authorities refuse to renew his permit.
Furthermore, two of their children have been unable to obtain the identity cards Palestinians must carry with them everywhere in their historic homeland. Their unregistered son may be deported at any time.1
The Arikats' story is by no means unique. One year after the signing of the Oslo accord, the Israelis are still up to their old tricks, trying to create in Palestine that place depicted in long-discredited Zionist propaganda: "a land without people for a people without land." They have exploited the delay in negotiating on Jerusalem to further disenfranchise Palestinian Jerusalemites and their West Bank families, by refusing family reunification requests and canceling residency rights.
The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 did not assign Jerusalem to either the Israeli or Palestinian states-to-be. Instead, it designated the city as a "corpus separatum," to be governed by an international authority, since the Old City (located in East Jerusalem) contains shrines holy to all three monotheistic faiths.
In the 1948 fighting, however, the Israelis occupied West Jerusalem and Jordanian forces occupied the eastern part of the city.
In the June 1967 war, Israeli forces accomplished a long-time goal by seizing the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and the rest of Jerusalem. Shortly after the war, the Israeli government declared Jerusalem the unified capital of Israel and a permanent part of the state. Israel closed down the Palestinian High Court on the east side, and moved some Israeli governmental institutions from West to East Jerusalem, including (ironically) the Ministry of Justice.
In addition, the Israeli government redrew the boundaries of the Jerusalem municipality to include as much undeveloped West Bank land as possible, thus providing sites for construction of housing for enough Jews to offset the Arab population of East Jerusalem. However, some Arab villages which had belonged to Jerusalem according to the Jordanian authorities who governed East Jerusalem from 1949-1967 found themselves excluded.
Israeli actions are aimed at reducing the number of Palestinians entitled to live in Jerusalem.
In this way, the Israelis hoped to "Judaize" Jerusalem, crushing any Palestinian hope of regaining control even of East Jerusalem to make it the capital of a Palestinian state. Although the international community, including the U.S. government, has refused to accept Israeli annexation, regarding East Jerusalem as occupied territory just like the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, every Israeli prime minister since 1967 has reiterated Israel's intention to keep Jerusalem the undivided capital of the Jewish state. The current Zionist plan is to isolate the Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem, surrounding them with Jewish neighborhoods and cutting them off from direct access to the West Bank areas that will be returned to Palestinian control under the autonomy agreement.
Whatever the ultimate fate of the West Bank, Israel's goal is to prevent the Palestinians from retaining any political power either on the national or even the municipal level in Jerusalem. In July 1994, for example, the Israeli government introduced a new law to forbid the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority from "conducting any political activities, or creating any political or government institutions in East Jerusalem."2 This bill makes a mockery of Israel's recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Oslo.
As in the other areas under Israeli occupation, the Israeli policy toward Palestinian residency and family reunification is cloaked in a guise of legality. Underneath the legalese, however, it is clear that Israeli Interior Ministry actions are aimed at reducing the number of Palestinians entitled to live in Jerusalem and to have access to such services as public schooling and national health insurance.
By entangling Palestinians in a bureaucratic web, and by denying their right to live in their place of origin or with their families, the Israeli occupation authority is conducting a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" to erase East Jerusalem's Palestinian character and create an Israeli rather than an Arab majority.
Uncounted Equals Non-Existent
When they first annexed East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities conducted a census. Palestinians who were not present in Jerusalem at the time of the 1967 census (because of study or commercial or family business abroad or wartime flight) were deprived of their residency status. In this way, some 8,000 Jerusalemites lost their right to live in their city.3
The remaining 66,000 Jerusalem residents were issued ID cards as "Permanent Residents of the State of Israel." These were not honored, however, if the Arab residents established their "center of life" elsewhere. This was the case, for example, for Jerusalemites driven by high rents in the city to seek less expensive West Bank housing. Even retention of their "permanent resident" status did not give Jerusalemites the rights of citizens. It only permitted them and their children to stay in Jerusalem, so long as the fathers succeeded in registering their children on their Jerusalem ID cards.
The Jerusalem ID is required to enter the city without special permission papers, to buy a house, to get a job and to receive taxpayer benefits like health insurance, social security, and public schooling.
However, the Israelis have abused the "center of life" criteria continually to deny Jerusalem residents re-entry rights. Ziad Latif (not his real name) is one of these. In 1983, he left his Jerusalem home to study in the United States. In order to receive exit papers from the authorities, he was required to leave his Jerusalem ID card at the Interior Ministry. Four years later, after he had completed his studies, Mr. Latif was informed by Israeli authorities that he had lost his right to live in Jerusalem. Since 1987, he has been prohibited from entering Israeli-controlled territory, even for a temporary visit.
Mr. Latif is one of more than 50,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites who have been denied Permanent Residency in their home city, which now has a total population of 150,000. These Jerusalemites lost their rights when their villages were drawn out of Jerusalem's borders, when they were absent from home in 1967, or when they moved to another location, even temporarily. The only way for these or other "Non-Resident" Palestinians to live in Jerusalem legally is to obtain permission for family reunification with a "Permanent Resident" spouse, parent, child, or sibling.
The Israeli government's policy on family reunification is a bureaucratic nightmare. It is designed to pacify gullible human rights critics while frustrating Palestinians. The procedure is as follows: The closest Jerusalem resident relative of the person desiring family reunification must apply to the Interior Ministry on his or her behalf. The application fee of 350 shekels ($115) is non-refundable and must be paid again with each new attempt. Then the applicant must wait months or even years for an official response.
Until this year, the Interior Ministry's criteria for granting family reunification had never been publicly stated. However, it was known that Interior rejected all petitions from Resident wives applying for their Non-Resident husbands, and all applications presented by or on behalf of former political prisoners. Oftentimes people were forced to pay the equivalent of $2,000 or $3,000 to a "mediator," meaning a Palestinian collaborator with the Israeli authorities, in order to buy a reunification from the Ministry. Nor was marriage by itself considered a reason to allow the applicant to join a spouse in Jerusalem.
Last April, however, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel successfully challenged these policies. Assenting to an Association argument that the policy was biased against women applying for family reunification, the court ruled in favor of an East Jerusalem woman appealing the deportation of her British husband. Forced to issue public, revised guidelines on the policy for the first time ever, the Interior Ministry stated that women now could apply for their Non-Resident husbands.
However, the Ministry stipulated that former political prisoners still would be denied reunification. Since a majority of young West Bank men have been incarcerated at some point during the intifada, a huge section of the population remains ineligible.
Refusing to let persons with "security records" live in Jerusalem puts Israel in violation not only of international law but also of minimum standards of fairness. First, the Israelis as an occupying power in East Jerusalem are prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention from altering the normal life of the civilians in such matters as residency with their families. Second, the security record of the relative submitting the application should never be considered as relevant, since the request is on behalf of a different person. Third, few persons with a security record have ever had an opportunity to defend themselves in a court of law since they were held without trial in "administrative detention." And finally, prisoners who actually received legal process have served their sentences. They should not be doubly punished, nor should their families.
Double Jeopardy and Group Punishment
The family of Mahmoud Salamat knows about double jeopardy and group punishment. He is a Permanent Resident of Jerusalem who was arrested in 1968 and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for membership in an illegal organization. (All PLO factions were outlawed.) After serving 17 years and being released, he married and applied for family reunification for his wife, Rabiha, a refugee living in Deheisheh Camp in the West Bank.
Twice the Salamats were refused family reunification as punishment for his past political activities. In addition, they were denied the monthly children's allowance that all residents of Jerusalem and Israel are entitled to receive. Mr. Salamat was told-contrary to fact-that he and his children are not Permanent Residents.
The registration of children on Jerusalem ID cards proves problematic for many Palestinians. According to Israeli law, the children's father must register them as Residents on his ID card. Children of Jerusalem mothers cannot be registered there, and children of men without ID cards (for example, refugees living in Jordan) can't be registered anywhere under Israeli control. The problem is that children who are not registered cannot receive the public education and health care paid for by their parents' tax dollars. Furthermore, when they reach 16, unregistered children will not be able to obtain the ID cards they must produce whenever asked by a soldier.
Sometimes Jerusalemites are able to resolve these bureaucratic nightmares by collecting the required documentation and returning ad nauseum to the line stretching outside the Ministry of the Interior. But Palestinians believe that Israel keeps them so busy trying to meet their basic needs and claim their human rights, such as living with their families and taking care of their children, that they will not have time to earn a decent living or organize politically. Instead of spending their time on normal pursuits, Palestinians living under occupation are forced to run back and forth to the Interior Ministry, emptying their wallets each time.
Not only do these policies contravene the internationally recognized right to family reunification, they also create separate legal regimes applying to Jerusalem Palestinians and to West Bank and Gaza Strip residents. Like the physical closure of Jerusalem to West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, these differences seem contrived to divide the Palestinians under occupation among themselves.
Since late 1992, for example, there have been some improvements in family reunification policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but not in Jerusalem. Now spousal reunification in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is automatic for persons who entered between 1990 and August 1993, and the criteria and quota numbers to be accepted are public information. This limited success can be attributed to efforts of human rights groups as well as to the international scrutiny of Israeli policies during the negotiations.
Changes for the Worse
For Palestinian Jerusalemites, however, the policy changes have been for the worse. Now, in order to receive family reunification, the Interior Ministry has stated that Jerusalemite wives must provide documentary evidence of current residence in Jerusalem, instead of just being "Permanent Residents" of Jerusalem since 1967. (In the Interior Ministry's vocabulary, "Permanent" seems to be a relative term.) In tandem with the delay in negotiating on Jerusalem, this policy provides the Interior Ministry very effective legal cover, which human rights lawyers believe to be unchallengeable in the High Court. If this policy is implemented, however, Jerusalem residency rights will be taken from tens of thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites who currently live outside the city.
These policies on Palestinian Residency go hand in hand with Israel's intention to finish settlement projects in East Jerusalem, in contravention of the U.S. loan guarantees agreement. That agreement, concluded by President George Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, stipulated that there would be no further settlement in the occupied territories. However, since the Israeli government does not consider East Jerusalem to be occupied territory, the loan guarantees have been used to speed up settlement construction there. Thus, in 1993 the Israelis attained a long-sought goal: By encouraging the influx of settlers and by evicting "illegal" Palestinian residents like Muhammed Arikat, they achieved a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem.
Not only has the U.S.-Israeli agreement been grossly violated, but the spirit of the Oslo Declaration of Principles has also been betrayed. During the negotiations, the pace of Jewish settlement in "Greater Jerusalem" actually quickened, and the Israelis are continuing to push the boundaries of the Jerusalem district into the West Bank.
Plans exist, for example, to integrate into the Jerusalem municipality settlements on the roads to the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Jericho. The government's method is to confiscate Palestinian land for "security purposes" or "public purposes" and later turn it into Israeli settlements. This process bolsters the aggressiveness of right-wing Israeli settlers and diminishes what's left of the Palestinian territories.
Exploiting the Palestinian concession to go ahead with implementation of the accords without first settling the status of Jerusalem, the Israelis behave as if they no longer need to conform to international standards for treatment of a civilian population under occupation. This supposition was revealed in a May 6, 1994 letter from the Israeli Embassy in the United States to the American Friends Service Committee Family Reunification Project in Chicago.
The letter declared, "As Jerusalem is not part of the territories [sic], the family reunification policy mentioned above is not applicable to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. According to the guidelines established by the Declaration of Principles signed by the PLO and Israel on Sept. 13, 1993, any issues involving Jerusalem will be discussed during final status negotiations." The Israeli government is using the delay in negotiating on Jerusalem to justify its refusal to discuss any human rights issue, including family reunification policy, publicly or in the courts.
Meanwhile the Israelis are consolidating their administration of Palestinian Jerusalem so that in the final status negotiation it will appear adequate to international human rights standards.
If the Palestinians wait to discuss Jerusalem as part of the final status negotiations three years hence, the Israelis will be free to pursue their objective of cleansing East Jerusalem of its Arab character and population.
1 All case examples in Nathan Krystall, Urgent Issues of Palestinian Residency in Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Alternative Information Center, 1994).
2 "Israeli bill to forbid PLO activities in East Jerusalem," (translated from Al Quds), The Jerusalem Times, July 22, 1994, p.1.
3 Sample study by Dr. Bernard Sabela, Emigration from Jerusalem (Bethlehem University, 1993).
Katherine M. Metres, a recent honors graduate of the University of Michigan, is working with the Jerusalem office of America-Mideast Education and Training Services, Inc. (AMIDEAST) on Public Law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This article was written with the cooperation of Ingrid Gassner-Jaradat, coordinator of the Project for Palestinian Residency and Family Reunification of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem. |
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Hanun Family Saga
By: Jeff Pickert
"We are like the roots of a tree. The Israelis may cut us in places, but we will never die. We will not be transplanted from Jerusalem. I will not leave this house," Maher Hanun tells a crowded room of Palestinian community members supported by Israeli and international solidarity activists. Hanun is one of 51 residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem living in two housing units that are facing imminent eviction by Israeli authorities.
The mood is tense as more than 25 individuals pack into a small room in Hanun's house to plan how to fight the house evictions. Palestinian residents, organized under the Sheikh Jarrah Committee, have invited solidarity activists to come and support their struggle. Internationals from more than 10 countries and Israelis sit in chairs and on the floor as Hanun tells them his story. After his speech, they divide themselves into groups to cover the two threatened housing units. Both the families and the activists gathered in support are determined to stay inside the houses as long as possible when the police arrive to carry out the evictions.
The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. The houses were given to the families, both made refugees in 1948 after Palestinians living in what became the state of Israel were expelled and dispossessed during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Now these families are threatened with another Nakba. Israeli settlers that have moved into Sheikh Jarrah have falsified documents claiming ownership of the land. The Hanun and al-Ghawe families have presented their legitimate documents and an Israeli judge has not yet ruled on the legality of these papers. Yet the eviction orders are still proceeding, even though no official decision has been reached as to whom the Israeli courts recognize as the true owners.
Both the Hanun and al-Ghawe families were forcibly evicted once before in 2002, after which they lived in tents for four months within sight of their former homes. This traumatic experience stands out as a vivid memory even for the children of the families. As they brace themselves to be evicted for the second time, the distress and apprehension in both households is clearly noticeable. Family members have spent many sleepless nights waiting for the police, never knowing exactly which night they will come. Women in the al-Ghawe residence often recount how their small children were thrown from a second floor window by police when they were evicted the last time.
In addition to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, 25 other households are also threatened with eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, though official orders have not yet been issued by Israeli courts. In November 2008, the al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the middle of the night despite widespread public support and diplomatic pressure from American and European diplomats on the Israelis to halt the eviction order. The al-Kurd family has erected a protest tent in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah from where they continue to demand the right to return to their homes. The Israeli police have destroyed the tent five times on the grounds that it is an "illegal structure" even though it is built on private Palestinian property.
Now, with the threat of removal again hanging over their heads, community members of Sheikh Jarrah are organizing. "Stop ethnic cleansing" is their main message to the Israeli authorities and the broader international community. These words can be seen on posters hung in the windows of neighborhood shops, on large banners over the entrances to the al-Ghawe and Hanun residences, as well as the T-shirts that organizers have distributed in the community.
This past week has seen a buzz of activity in the neighborhood. The Sheikh Jarrah Committee, supported by the Coalition for Jerusalem, the International Solidarity Movement, and other human rights organizations, have utilized a myriad of tactics to fight the eviction orders. Throughout the week, dignitaries from foreign nations, journalists, consular representatives from numerous European countries, and even Knesset members have all visited the homes and the protest tent to express their support for the residents of Sheikh Jarrah. The committee has held press conferences, demonstrations outside of court hearings and drafted statements condemning the orders.
The community also attempted to host an event as part of the Jerusalem Capital of Arab Culture festival at the protest tent on 23 March.. Israeli authorities have banned the festival in occupied East Jerusalem, yet organizers have continued to defy the ban in order to celebrate Jerusalem's rich Palestinian heritage. Sheikh Jarrah residents also gathered to protest the impending house evictions in addition to the increased repression of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. Police violently prevented Sheikh Jarrah residents from praying in front of the tent in conjunction with the festival. Participants were badly beaten and eight people were arrested. The following week, another resident was arrested by police inside the tent for refusing to take down a Palestinian flag hanging inside.
The Sheikh Jarrah Committee members view their struggle against eviction as part of a larger struggle against Palestinian dispossession from East Jerusalem. The nearby neighborhoods of Silwan, Beit Hanina and Shufat refugee camp are also facing large-scale house demolitions and evictions. In the al-Bustaan neighborhood of Silwan alone, 88 houses are slated for demolition. Al-Bustaan residents have erected a protest tent similar to the one in Sheikh Jarrah, and this model of resistance seems to be spreading.
For now, the families and supporting activists wait for the police to come each night. They take shifts to make sure someone is up in each house to alarm the community when the Israeli authorities arrive. Some of the family members have removed all of their furniture in anticipation of the coming raids, but they continue to sleep on mats in the floor. The message is clear: they will not go quietly in the face of this injustice.
All images by Jeff Pickert.
Jeff Pickert is an American who has been working in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem for the past four months.
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Turkish documents prove Arabs own E. Jerusalem building
By: Nir Hasson
A document recently uncovered in Ottoman archives inAnkara confirms that Palestinians are the owners of disputed land andhouses in East Jerusalem.
If an Israeli court accepts the document's validity, Palestinian families' could be saved from eviction from their homes.
Turkish officials recently helped to trace the document which couldend a 30-year-old dispute over the ownership of around 30 buildings inthe Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
The Palestinians' attorneys said they were granted access to thearchives following the recent souring of the relations between Israeland Turkey.
"Until half a year ago the Turks didn't want to spoil theirrelations with Israel and were unhelpful," attorney Hatam Abu Ahmedsaid. "They would put us off with all kinds of excuses. Today theirattitude has changed. We felt this change especially after the Gazaoperation. Now senior Turkish officials are helping us."
In January, attorney Salah Abu Hussein traveled to Turkey and withthe help of local officials found a document proving that the Jewsdemanding the Palestinians' eviction are not the compound's rightfulowners.
The present residents had lived in West Jerusalem before the War ofIndependence and after becoming refugees were moved to Sheikh Jarrah.In the '70s the Sephardic Leadership in Jerusalem claimed they hadpurchased the land before the war and produced Turkish documents tothat effect.
The courts eventually recognized the Sephardic Leadership's ownership but granted the Palestinians protected tenants' status.
However, the Sephardic Leadership and a group of settlers who movedinto the nearby compound have been demanding the Palestinians'eviction, claiming they violated their rental terms.
Over the years, several Palestinian families were evicted and otherfamilies moved into their houses. The last eviction took place inNovember 2008 when the al-Kurd family was evicted from its home andmoved into a protest tent near its sealed house. Shortly afterward thefather, Mohamed al-Kurd died of an illness.
Throughout the years, the Palestinians claimed that the Jews'ownership documents were forged, but due to the Turks' lack ofcooperation they could not prove this and the courts rejected theirsuits.
Now the attorneys say the Ottoman document proves that theSephardic Leadership never purchased the compound but only rented it.Another Ottoman document confirms that the document presented by theJewish party is not authentic.
"There is no trace of the Jewish document in the archive," said Abu Hussein.
The attorneys Wednesday asked the court to withhold evictionprocedures against two Palestinian families, on the basis of theTurkish document.
The about face in Turkish policy could have far-reaching implications regarding lands in Israel.
"Now it will be possible to issue ownership deeds. The Turks are very well organized and helpful," Abu Ahmed said.
Attorney Ilan Shemer, who represents the Sephardic Leadership,dismissed the Palestinian attorneys' claims regarding Palestinianownership of the land.
"It's usually the other side that uses false documents. Thedocument we have is the only authentic ownership deed. Since thehearings began, 50 to 60 judges have heard the case and they all ruledthat their claims are false."
Consul meets on house razings
United States Consul General in Jerusalem Jacob Walles metJerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat last Thursday to explain American policytoward house demolitions in Jerusalem.
City officials said Walles said the new administration was less tolerant toward the continued demolitions.
Barkat told Walles the demolition orders were for illegally builtstructures and that the demolitions were not in the mayor's control. |
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 As refugees and people living under occupation, we are asking people to help us with our struggle for our rights. It is unbelievable that in the 21st century, Israel's authorities can get away with demolishing the homes of Palestinians in order to build settlements or national parks. The price we and our neighbours have to pay is too high, we are faced with two impossible choices - either we throw our kids out on the street or we go to prison. If we lose our homes, there is nowhere else for us to go, the only option we have is to live in tents.
International solidarity gives us more power and strength to continue in our struggle and stay in our homes. We need support from people around the world to let everybody know about our story and pressure their governments to help stop this racist policy of house evictions and demolitions.  By: Maher Hannoun, resident from Sheikh Jarrah facing imminent eviction and imprisonment
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