Last week I went to the overwhelmingly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where the Ghawi, Hanoun, and al-Kurd families have been evicted from their homes of over 50 years in order to make way for Israeli settlers, and 25 more families are being threatened with imminent eviction. After being thrown into the street by Israeli police and watching Israeli settlers take over their homes, all three families set up tents in the street across from their former homes as a form of protest and to have a place to sleep. Some friends and I visited these families in order to hear their stories, sleep in the street with them in solidarity, and to help keep watch at night in case settlers attacked, as they have in the past.
The al-Kurd family, which was an elderly couple of a disabled man in a wheelchair and his wife, Umm Kamil, where the first to be evicted. According to their neighbors, Israeli police burst into their homes in the middle of the night and literally tossed the two out of their homes, all their possessions where hauled away in a police van, and settlers moved in almost immediately. After living in the tent for a couple weeks, the husband became ill and died a few days later in a hospital. Umm Kamil stayed in the tent for months, but recently moved in with relatives when police destroyed her tent. The Hanoun family was the next to go, and also all lived in tents, and also mostly have moved in with relatives after having had their tent destroyed. A few of the older men of the family still sit in front of the house every single day, and sometimes sleep on mattresses in the street. At the time I visited, the Ghawi family, a big family with lots of children and teenagers, was the only family that had a tent left. I heard from friends that the day after I left to return to the West Bank to teach my classes, the police came and destroyed their tent. They rebuilt it, and it was destroyed again and their possessions confiscated. The last I heard a truck driver from the neighborhood had placed a shipping container in the street and that they have been living in that. They say that if it comes to it, they will stay in front of their house with no shelter at all, that nobody has the right to kick them out of their own homes and to make them refugees a second time over, and that they will refuse to leave...
The settlers claim that they have a right to these peoples' homes because Jews lived there before the creation of Israel in 1948. In 1948, East Jerusalem, which was and still is predominantly Palestinian, came under the control of the Jordanians. Many of the Jews that lived there where driven out, including, according to the settlers, the Jews that owned the land in question. Before and during the 1948 war in which Israel was created, 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes in fear from what was to become Israel and became refugees. After the war ended, Israel refused to let any of these people return to their homes and instead confiscated their lands and property. These people lived in giant tent cities for years until the U.N. was able to give them adequate shelter. In 1956, the U.N. built several apartment complexes on the land in question, and gave homes to 28 of these refugee families, the same families that live there today (several of the people I talked to have memories of moving from refugee camps and into these homes as children or teenagers). In 1967, Israel captured East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank and Gaza, and unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem against international law and against the will of the inhabitants. In the 1980's an Israeli settler group produced a document claiming that they were the owners before 1948, and the Israeli court gave them legal ownership of the homes and the authority to charge rent. The families refused to pay rent on homes they believe they own, and starting around August of this year, evictions have begun being enforced. The remaining families are fighting in court to be able to stay in their homes, and the lawyer the family hired was able to get a document from the Turkish National Archives that states that the land was leased to Jews, not sold, which calls into significant doubt whether the settler groups claims and documents are even authentic (it wouldn't be the first time forgeries were used to claim Palestinian land and homes). The court says its too late for the families that have already been kicked out, but the rest are holding out a sliver of hope...
Even if the settlers claims are real and Jews did own the property in question before 1948, the blatant hypocrisy in this case is absolutely sickening. Why is it that Jews can reclaim land they lost during Israel's creation in 1948, but the millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants of refugees from what is now Israel, most of whom STILL live in the refugee camps to this day, aren't allowed to reclaim THEIR confiscated property and land? Why does a Jewish settler organization that MAY have owned a piece of land before 1948 have the right to push 28 Palestinian refugee families onto the street while those families don't have to right to reclaim or even receive compensation for land that was forcibly confiscated from them by the Israeli state? This is pure racism. I'm really not sure what else you can call it. One standard for Jews, and another for the Palestinians. Not to mention that a large land organization that prefers only to lease to people of a specific religious/ethnic identity is a troublesome concept at best. The Israeli far right openly calls for ethnic cleansing; it's stated goal is to forcibly transfer Palestinians into other countries or cantons in the West Bank (i.e. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman), or at the very least move in as many Jewish settlers as possible to surround Palestinian populations to ensure that certain areas, like predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, will stay under Israeli control, denying the inhabitants of those areas the right to self-determination, the right to rule themselves in their own state.
Its one thing to read about these kinds of things happening, and something else entirely to witness it and to hear it from the people that have experienced it. I was sitting drinking tea with the Hanoun family one night when one of the settlers came home and went inside. One of the old men I was talking to told me, "Can you imagine how I feel right now watching that woman walking into my home? That is the home I grew up in, where my children were born, where I raised my children. Now I have to watch the person who took it from me walk right in like she owns it, while I have no place of my own. And there is nothing I can do about it." One of the mornings I was at the Ghawi tent, the mother was dressing one of the little kids and sending him to school while he just started whining, "All I want to do is go home, why cant we just go home?" A brawl had broken out between the settlers and the families the day before I got there, and despite the fact that several people from both parties had been hospitalized, only Palestinians had been arrested. Talking to the youth of the family and their neighbors that gather there every night, you can feel how bitter and angry they are.
The only silver lining in all of this is that due to how many Israeli activists come to support them, many of the family members see that not all Israelis are like this, a realization that in many cases seems to be lacking in much of the West Bank. The settler groups and their supporters though don't want any kind of a just peace, they want to grab as much land as possible. And the rest of Israel, and the rest of the world, are so far letting them get away with it.
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