Tag: Ethnic Cleansing - Page 73 - International Solidarity Movement

American citizen to be deported following his arrest in Sheikh Jarrah

21 December 2009

Imprisoned American citizen and Minnesota resident Ryan Olander to be deported to the US after being arrested in Sheikh Jarrah, Occupied East Jerusalem, whilst visiting Palestinian family whose house has been taken over by Israeli settlers.

Ryan was visiting the al-Kurds in the tent the Palestinian family built in their own backyard, after the recent setter take-over of a section of their house. At 1.15pm, 6 Israeli police walked into the tent, where Ryan was talking to the family members and drinking tea, and took him for questioning at the Russian Compound police station in west Jerusalem.

From the Givon prison in Ramle where Mr. Olander is currently awaiting his deportation hearing he reported that:
“On Friday, 18 December, I was placed under arrest illegally. A police officer forcibly removed me from the al-Kurd private residence and proceeded to file a fallacious police report stating I participated in what they claimed was an illegal demonstration and refused to disperse when ordered. In fact, I was arrested before the demonstration even took place.
I have become a target of the police for standing in solidarity with the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah who struggle against the unjust and illegal evictions from the places they have called their homes for nearly 60 years. Now I face illegal deportation from Israel.”

His arrest happened just before a peaceful demonstration of around 300 people, held in solidarity with the evicted Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah, was violently dispersed by the Israeli police. Following a violent dispersal of a similar demonstration the previous week, the police blocked all entrances to Sheikh Jarrah in an attempt to prevent protesters from accessing the Palestinian neighbourhood and used unprecedented force against those who succeeded in reaching the al-Kurd and Gawi family houses, currently occupied by Israeli settlers. Twenty six Israeli protesters were arrested, three of them wearing clown costumes. Similarly to last week, the police used a section of the al-Kurd house, previously taken over by settlers, to detain the arrested demonstrators.

Ryan, along with other arrestees from Sheikh Jarrah reported ill-treatment by the police, who subjected them to several strip-searches, denied them food and water for prolonged periods of time and held them outside of the police station until late at night, with insufficient protection against the cold conditions. Unlike the 26 arrested Israeli citizens, who were brought in front of the judge, Ryan was released by the police before the beginning of the trial on Saturday, 19 December, only to be illegally re-arrested by immigration police right outside of the same police station that told him he was free to go.

The police have used the same tactics previously, when three foreign nationals, who were arrested at a peaceful demonstration Sheikh Jarrah on 11 December 2009, were released by the judge in a court hearing held at the Russian Compound the following day, only to be illegally arrested again and taken straight from the courtroom to a deportation facility. All three were released the following morning, over 40 hours after their initial arrest.

Background on Sheikh Jarrah

Approximately 475 Palestinian residents living in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located directly north of the Old City, face imminent eviction from their homes in the manner of the Hannoun and Gawi families, and the al-Kurd family before them. All 28 families are refugees from 1948, mostly from West Jerusalem and Haifa, whose houses in Sheikh Jarrah were built and given to them through a joint project between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956.

So far, settlers took over houses of four Palestinian families, displacing around 60 residents, including 20 children. At present, settlers occupy all these houses and the whole area is patrolled by armed private security 24 hours a day. The evicted Palestinian families, some of whom have been left without suitable alternative accommodation since August, continue to protest against the unlawful eviction from the sidewalk across the street from their homes, facing regular violent attacks from the settlers and harassment from the police.

The Gawi family, for example, had their only shelter, a small tent built near their house, destroyed by the police and all their belongings stolen five times. In addition, the al-Kurd family has been forced to live in an extremely difficult situation, sharing the entrance gate and the backyard of their house with extremist settlers, who occupied a part of the al-Kurd home in December 2009. The settlers subject the Palestinian family to regular violent attacks and harassment, making their life a living hell.

The ultimate goal of the settler organizations is to evict all Palestinians from the area and turn it into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. On 28 August 2008, Nahalat Shimon International filed a plan to build a series of five and six-story apartment blocks – Town Plan Scheme (TPS) 12705 – in the Jerusalem Local Planning Commission. If TPS 12705 comes to pass, the existing Palestinian houses in this key area would be demolished, about 500 Palestinians would be evicted, and 200 new settler units would be built for a new settlement: Shimon HaTzadik.

Implanting new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under many international laws, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The plight of the Gawi, al-Kurd and the Hannoun families is just a small part of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from East Jerusalem.

Legal background

The eviction orders, issued by Israeli courts, are a result of claims made in 1967 by the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesseth Yisrael Association (who since sold their claim to the area to Nahalat Shimon) – settler organizations whose aim is to take over the whole area using falsified deeds for the land dating back to 1875. In 1972, these two settler organizations applied to have the land registered in their names with the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Their claim to ownership was noted in the Land Registry; however, it was never made into an official registry of title. The first Palestinian property in the area was taken over at this time.

The case continued in the courts for another 37 years. Amongst other developments, the first lawyer of the Palestinian residents reached an agreement with the settler organizations in 1982 (without the knowledge or consent of the Palestinian families) in which he recognized the settlers’ ownership in return for granting the families the legal status of protected tenants. This affected 23 families and served as a basis for future court and eviction orders (including the al-Kurd family house take-over in December 2009), despite the immediate appeal filed by the families’ new lawyer. Furthermore, a Palestinian landowner, Suleiman Darwish Hijazi, has legally challenged the settlers’ claims. In 1994 he presented documents certifying his ownership of the land to the courts, including tax receipts from 1927. In addition, the new lawyer of the Palestinian residents located a document, proving the land in Sheikh Jarrah had never been under Jewish ownership. The Israeli courts rejected these documents.

The first eviction orders were issued in 1999 based on the (still disputed) agreement from 1982 and, as a result, two Palestinian families (Hannoun and Gawi) were evicted in February 2002. After the 2006 Israeli Supreme Court finding that the settler committees’ ownership of the lands was uncertain, and the Lands Settlement officer of the court requesting that the ILA remove their names from the Lands Registrar, the Palestinian families returned back to their homes. The courts, however, failed to recognize new evidence presented to them and continued to issue eviction orders based on decisions from 1982 and 1999 respectively. Further evictions followed in November 2008 (Kamel al-Kurd family) and August 2009 (Hannoun and Gawi families for the second time). An uninhabited section of a house belonging to the al-Kurd family was taken over by settlers on 1 December 2009.

Twenty seven activists arrested at protest against settler expansion in Sheikh Jarrah

18 December 2009

For immediate release:

A peaceful demonstration of around 300 people, held in solidarity with the evicted Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, was violently dispersed by the Israeli police.

Following a violent dispersal of a similar demonstration last week, the police was blocking the roads in Sheikh Jarrah from the early afternoon, in an attempt to prevent protesters from reaching the Palestinian neighbourhood. They set up barriers at the entrance to the area and, before the demonstration even started, arrested an American activist, who was sitting in the back yard of the al-Kurd house, talking to the family.

Later on, twenty six Israeli protesters were arrested, three of them wearing clown costumes. Similarly to last week, the police used a section of the al-Kurd house, currently occupied by settlers, to detain the arrested demonstrators.

Demonstrators reported harsh violence committed by the police during the arrests. Assaf Sharon, one of the protesters, said: “This event represents a legitimate and non-violent protest of Palestinian, international and Israeli activists, against the ongoing campaign of evicting Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, only for these to be taken over by extremist settlers. The police has been brutally dispersing these peaceful protests for the second week, while the Palestinian families live in constant fear of violent settler attacks.”

Last week, the police arrested 24 demonstrators, including 3 international activists. The arrestees reported ill-treatment by the police, who subjected them to several strip-searches, denied them food and water for prolonged periods of time and held them outside of the police station until late at night, with insufficient protection against the cold conditions. Israeli activists received a condition not allowing them to enter Sheikh Jarrah for 30 days from the judge, while the 3 foreign nationals were released only to be illegally arrested again and taken straight from the courtroom to a deportation facility. They were released early in the morning on Sunday, more than 40 hours after their initial arrest.

The actions of the police, followed by the court decisions, preventing activists from returning to the Palestinian neighbourhood for 30 days, shows their determination to discourage the growing protests against settler take-overs of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem.

Palestinian men praying outside of the al-Kurd house, occupied by settlers

The Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been suffering from violent attacks on the part of settlers who invaded their houses in recent months. Four Palestinian houses have been taken over since November 2008, displacing around 60 persons.

Background

Legal background

27 arrested, 3 wounded during Sheikh Jarrah protest

18 December 2009

Twenty-six Israeli protesters and one international solidarity activist were arrested and three Palestinian children wounded during a nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli settlement project in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah this Friday.

Over 300 people, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis, attended the weekly vigil. Last week 24 people were arrested during a similar protest that was also violently dispersed by Israeli Occupation Forces.

The apartheid state security forces blocked the roads leading into Sheikh Jarrah in an attempt to prevent protesters from entering the Palestinian neighborhood, but the demonstrators managed to reach the occupied al-Kurd house by splitting into smaller marches and descending on Sheikh Jarrah from the side streets, back alleyways, and rugged landscape behind the neighborhood.

When the march reformed, the demonstrators stood face-to-face against the police. The protesters sat-down, linked arms, and sang anti-occupation chants in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Police then moved in and began arresting the linked activists one by one. Most of the protesters suffered minor bumps and bruises while being dislodged from the human chain by the police snatch-squads.

One of the activists who joined the demonstration stated: “We are here today and every Friday to demand an end to the occupation of Sheikh Jarrah by the Israeli government and Jewish settlers. We call on the Israeli government to dismantle all settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. We are not using any violence. The only violence here today is the violence the police are using on us.”

Towards the end of the protest a group of nearly 100 settlers arrived to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and began throwing rocks at the house of a nearby Palestinian family. One 12 year old Palestinian boy was also chased into the street and beaten by settlers. Three Palestinian children were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Ethnic cleansing in Occupied East Jerusalem

From Pork to Palestine Blog

15 December 2009

I’ve spent the last few days on night duty in an occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah, accompanying two Palestinian families who have erected protest tents outside of their homes after they were forcibly evicted from them by the Israeli government and right-wing Jewish settlers.

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem was built by the UN and Jordanian government in 1956 to house 28 Palestinian refugee families from the 1948 war. But after the start of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, some Israeli settlers began claiming ownership of the land the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built on as their own.

“On December 1, 60 soldiers came to my house and smashed all of my furniture,” said Nabeel Al-Kurd, one of 28 families in the neighborhood who have either been evicted or are threatened with it.

“They pushed my mother and beat her. My mother is 85 years old. She was taken to the hospital. From then until now, everyday, everyday there is trouble – fighting and shouting.”

Nabeel Al-Kurd has set up a protest tent on the paved entrance that divides the front section of the house from the back section. Every night, he uses the furniture that was smashed by the Israeli police during his eviction to fuel a fire to keep his family and international accompaniers warm during the cold winter nights.

“We sit in this stand, right inside the gate, because we are afraid if we leave they will take more ground and we will lose the rest of our house,” he said.

The International Solidarity Movement maintains a 24 hour a day, seven day a week presence in the neighborhood because the families living there face daily harrassment and threats by the Israeli settlers. Israeli police and military forces also maintain a permanent vigil on the street.

The Al-Kurd family is only one of several families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood that have been forcibly evicted from their homes to allow Israeli settlers to gain a foothold in the pre-dominantly Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem.

On August 2, the Israeli Occupation Forces evicted two other Palestinian families, the Al-Gawi and Hannoun families, from their houses after they demolished the gates of the houses and forced the families to get out at gunpoint. Several of the family members were seriously wounded during the encounter.

Nasser Al-Gawi has also constructed a protest tent outside of his old house and maintains a permanent vigil across the street. Clashes between the Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims in the neighborhood are frequent and on-going. In the three days I have been in the neighborhood, I have witnessed almost constant harassment at all times of the day and night. The settlers hang Israeli flags from the Palestinian houses, swarm the neighborhood with dozens of young men, many of whom are armed, walk the streets with large, unmuzzled dogs, shout obscenities at the residents of the protest tents, and other deliberately provocative actions. Sometimes, the clashes turn violent. This morning, Israeli occupation forces tore down Nasser Al-Gawi’s protest tent (he later put up a new one and is still there as I write this).

Nasser, who has testified in front of the U.S. Congress about the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, calls Israeli policy in occupied East Jerusalem “the Judeazation of Al-Quds” (Arabic for Jerusalem).

“The name of the game is ethnic cleansing,” he told me while we sat in front of his campfire and shared tea around 1am yesterday morning.

“Israel wants the Palestinians out of East Jerusalem so they can claim the capital as their own.”

According to several International Solidarity Movement activists who have spent months providing protective accompaniment to the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, the aim of both the Israeli government and the settlers is to turn the whole area into a new Jewish settlement to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City from the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. Constructing new settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank is illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Late last night a young Palestinian man wearing a red and white kaffiyah, baggy pants, and a sideways New York Yankees hat stopped by to supplement the vigil during the late night evening hours.

“My name is Abraham,” he said smiling. “You know the prophet Abraham? Well I am not him.” He laughed.

Over the next few hours, Abraham told me that he had lived in Sheikh Jarrah for seven years, and was now a cook at a nearby restaurant. He dreams of becoming a successful rap superstar.

“I want to have a good life, a good job, and a beautiful wife,” he said. “But all around me are walls. Everytime I climb on top of one and jump over, there is another wall in front of me.”

No freeze on Palestinian suffering

Seth Freedman | The Guardian

14 December 2009

Within minutes of our arrival in Tuwani, in the south Hebron hills of the West Bank, an army Jeep rolled into the village and shattered the mid-morning tranquillity. “We’re turning this place into a closed military zone,” announced the stern-faced commander to anyone within earshot. Brandishing his rifle in one hand and a military document in the other, he proceeded to explain that “I decide who can be here and who can’t, and anyone who isn’t a resident has to leave immediately”.

That meant us – me, my friend and our three guides from the Villages Group – as well as the other activists who maintain a permanent presence in Tuwani assisting the locals in their struggle to survive. The timing of the closure was no accident: earlier in the morning NGO workers and locals had taken part in a solidarity march to highlight the hardships suffered by the village children who run the gauntlet of the neighbouring settlement every time they walk to and from their school.

Anything the activists could do the soldiers could do better, it seemed. “The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] don’t like us coming to support the residents of Tuwani,” said one volunteer, “so they make it their mission to make everyone’s lives uncomfortable as a result.”

The shutdown of the village and the surrounding farmland was only the latest in a long line of attempts by the Israeli authorities to break the will of the Palestinians living in the area. As we drove out of Tuwani, we were shown the stump of an electricity pylon sawn down by the army after attempts by villagers to connect themselves to the national grid. Elsewhere, dirt mounds and locked gates stopped locals driving to the nearby city of Ya’ta, thus preventing them taking their produce to sell at market, and severely impairing their economic prospects.

Thanks to the army’s exclusion orders, we were forced to walk a treacherous and convoluted route through the rocky scrubland to visit communities living in even deeper seclusion beyond Tuwani. In Tu’ba, the cave-dwelling residents of the village are under no illusion about what the future holds for them, despite all the hype surrounding the much-vaunted settlement freeze.

“The freeze will have no effect round here,” the father of the household told us bitterly. Our guide expanded on the theme, telling us that the “real freeze is on Palestinian construction: 95% of Palestinian applications for building permits in Area C are denied by the civil administration, and for communities in this area they are not allowed to build above ground whatsoever”.

Those people living in caves are, it seems, tolerated by the authorities while they remain underground, but as soon as they put their heads above the surface and attempt to build rudimentary shacks and outhouses, demolition orders are served and the army are quick to enforce the letter of the law with gusto.

Meanwhile, in the neighbouring settlements of Carmel and Ma’on, building work was going on in earnest, and defiant banners on bus stops and fence posts declared the settlers’ intention to “smash the freeze”, and denounced the incumbent government as traitors to the Zionist cause. While government inspectors have been attacked during their attempts to bring settlement construction to a halt, the full force of the settlers’ wrath has – as ever – been meted out against the Palestinians.

The sickening desecration of a mosque on Friday in the village of Yasuf, near Nablus, appears to be the opening salvo in the settlers’ latest battle to force the government to back down over the building freeze, and those we met in the south Hebron hills were wary of similar reprisal attacks being carried out against their communities. “Our children are still attacked on a regular basis,” one local told us, “as well as our shepherds and farmers. Even if we call the police, we know justice will never be done, and the situation is only getting worse now that the settlers are furious about Netanyahu’s decision.”

Ehud Krinis, one of the Villages Group activists, believes that the freeze is “just an act” on the part of the government; having worked in the area for almost eight years and seen the settlers’ above-the-law behaviour first hand, he maintains “there is no effective force that can stop the settlers building more. In fact, as we can see in Susiya and elsewhere, the settlers simply see the freeze as a challenge to construct [at an even faster rate], which is what will happen over the next 10 months.”

As we sat with the head of the Bedouin clan living in Um al-Kheir – a collection of tumble-down tents and shacks literally touching the perimeter fence of the Carmel settlement – the mood of resignation engulfing the encampment’s residents was suffocating. We were shown aerial photos of Um al-Kheir’s gradual demise over the past 30 years, a situation attributable to the encroachment of the settlers and the military on to their ancestral land. It was clear that for those forced to endure the humiliation and hardship on a daily basis, the politicians’ upbeat talk was at best cheap, and at worst a flagrant denial of the facts.

For those Palestinians living under military rule, coupled with indiscriminate and incessant settler attacks against them, their children and their flocks, there is no end in sight to the suffering. While the world might have been convinced that the worm is about to turn in the Israeli political arena, a quick glance at the fevered construction still taking place in the settlements, the oppressive military activity against the Palestinian villagers and the overarching penury in which the Palestinians are forced to subsist should give onlookers food for thought about the true situation on the ground.

Freeze or no freeze, the future looks no brighter for the Palestinian locals today than it has during any of the bitter years and decades gone by.