International Solidarity Movement

By Michael Bahl

To view original article, published by Haaretz on the 9th November, click here

In a pre-dawn operation in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, scores of police officers and IDF troops Sunday evicted an elderly Palestinian couple from their home, despite protests by the United States, other countries, and human rights groups.

Security forces also detained several activists of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement who had been sleeping on the family’s property, and expelled them to the adjacent West Bank, without pressing charges.

A Jerusalem court in July ruled that the east Jerusalem housing provided to Mohammed al-Kurd and his wife Fawzieh in 1956 by the Jordanian government and a UN refugee agency was built on land to which their title was in doubt and they must vacate the property.

The case came to international attention when U.S. diplomats lodged an official protest with Israel for harming Palestinians and for anti-Palestinian actions taken by settlers, citing as one example the eviction of the al-Kurd family from their home in the Shimon Hatzadik complex in Sheikh Jarrah.

For months, a group of settlers has also lived in a portion of the house, maintaining that an Ottoman-era bill of sale grants ownership of the Shimon Hatzadik property to the Committee for the Sephardic Group. The Jerusalem District Court issued a ruling in favor of the Sephardic Group,which transferred the property to a settler organization called “Shimon’s Estate.”

The settler group, in turn, sought to evict the al-Kurd family, refugees from West Jerusalem, who have lived in the house since the early 1950s.
At 4:45 on Sunday morning, some 20 IDF vehicles and seven police minibuses sealed off much of the neighborhood, prior to the eviction, witnesses said.

The al-Kurds were then taken from the apartment, which they have been sharing with Israeli settlers since 1999, when Israeli courts evicted their son Raed from an added wing of the property. The couple has been fighting for their property through the courts ever since, but in July 2008 they were ordered to vacate the premises at once.

Israel Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said that following the court order naming a Jewish family as the legal owner of the house, “The Arab family was evicted. Two people were, in fact removed from the house,” he told Haaretz, referring to the al-Kurds.

“There were also seven tourists, left-wing activists, who were removed.” ISM members said that there were eight activists taken from the house, nationals of Denmark, Sweden, the United States, England and Canada.

Danish ISM activist Anders Pilmark, 20, said that 40 to 50 IDF soldiers and police woke them up at 4:45 A.M. and immediately started to clear out the al-Kurd’s apartment. The activists were detained on suspicion of trespassing, but were later escorted to the West Bank’s Qalandiya checkpoint with no charges pressed.

The couple’s neighbor’s gathered Sunday morning outside the closed perimeter set up by the IDF. They have been following the case closely, and believe that the court decision and forced eviction of the family paves the way for the takeover of 27 multi-storey houses in the neighbourhood, threatening to make 500 Palestinians homeless.

“This is only the first. Just you wait and see,” one of the neighbors said.

Rafiq Husseini, an aide to Palestiniann President Mahmoud Abbas, has been quoted as warning that the takeover of the Kurds’ home was part of a wider drive to change the geography of Jerusalem by forcing out Palestinians and replacing them with Israeli settlers. “Such a development would deal a death blow to already-strained peace negotiations,” he wrote in a letter to foreign consulates in Jerusalem

To view original article, published by AFP on the 9th November, click here

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli police evicted a Palestinian family from their east Jerusalem home at dawn on Sunday in the wake of a prolonged court battle with Jewish settlers and just two days before municipal elections.

Armed security forces surrounded the al-Kurd family’s house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of mostly Arab east Jerusalem during and after the operation.

“They arrived at 3:30 in the morning. They broke into the house by smashing the door and forcefully threw us out, inhumanely,” Fawzia al-Kurd told AFP.

Foreign diplomats, many of whom live in Sheikh Jarrah, had expressed support for the Palestinian family in recent months, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was in Israel last week had protested against moves to expel them.

Foreign pro-Palestinian activists had camped out at the house for weeks in solidarity with the family, and police said seven of them were held for questioning on Sunday.

“They want to expel Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah. It is an escalation before the municipal elections,” said Hatem Abdelkader, an aide of Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad.

Much to the anger of Palestinian residents, police prevented access to the area around the house to all but the Jewish faithful heading to the site they believe is the tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, a venerated high priest who lived in Jerusalem about 2,300 years ago.

The Kurd family has lived for 52 years in the house which has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance against the steady pressure of Jewish settlers seeking to take yet more terrain in east Jerusalem.

A senior aide of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas warned that the incident impeded the Middle East peace process, as Abbas and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni attended a meeting of the international Quartet mediators in Egypt.

“It is damaging peace… Obviously the right-wing people are trying to demolish all prospects of peace between us,” Rafiq al-Husseini said at a press conference in Sheikh Jarrah.

The Quartet — comprised of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia — urged Israel during Sunday’s meeting to halt Jewish settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land.

On July 16, the Israeli High Court ruled in favour of Israeli settlers, who were already occupying a wing of the house and were demanding the expulsion of the al-Kurd family from the property.

Abdelkader insisted that the fact the expulsion went ahead even though the decision is being appealed “demonstrates the problem is no longer legal, but political.”

The saga started with the turbulent creation of the Jewish state in 1948, when the family fled Israel to east Jerusalem, which was then under Jordanian control.

Eight years later, they and 27 other families were given houses by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

But in 1967, Israel captured east Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, eventually annexing it in defiance of international law and proclaiming the city its “eternal and undivided capital.”

After the war, a Jewish organisation registered under its name the title to three hectares (nearly seven acres) of land on which the house sits. The al-Kurd family says the 19th century Ottoman document on which the title is based is a fake.

About 10 years ago, a settler association bought the disputed title, and 10 Jewish families moved into the neighbourhood.

The al-Kurd family’s eviction came just two days before Israel holds municipal polls. In Jerusalem, the two leading candidates for mayor, Meir Porush and Nir Barkat, both spoke out in favour of settlements in east Jerusalem.