Tag: Ethnic Cleansing

Settlers occupy and damage Sheikh Jarrah home

Ma’an News

26 July 2009

Residents on Sunday tried unsuccessfully to prevent Israeli settlers and police from reaching a home owned by Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

During the incident former Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Hatim Abdul Qader was detained, apparently while trying to block more attacks on a home that had earlier been ransacked by a group of rightist settlers.

The former minister had not been released by early afternoon on Sunday. Abdul Qader resigned his post earlier this month, but remains in charge of Jerusalem affairs within the Fatah movement.

Another Palestinian and eight foreign solidarity activists were also detained by Israeli forces operating in the area when, according to Ma’an’s correspondent, they tried to prevent settlers and police from occupying the home of Darwish Hijazi.

A number of local residents reportedly sat on the road leading to the home in an effort to stop Israeli bulldozers moving near the house, and Israeli policy attacks and injured several protesters, according to witnesses.

Dimitri Diliani, spokesman for Fatah in Jerusalem, and Abdul Qader were quoted as saying that residents were adamant about preventing settlers from occupying the Hijazi home.

Diliani added that dozens of Fatah activists had meanwhile managed to expel a group of settlers from a nearby piece of land, while Israeli police nonetheless brought backup forces and threatened to arrest protesters who refused to leave the area.

The arrests came just 48 hours after Abdul Qader warned on Friday that Israel risks provoking a new upheaval if it continues destroying Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem.

“After the incident of opening the tunnel in 1996 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu said that ‘no one warned me of the consequences of opening the tunnel and if I received a warning then I would not have done it,'” he said, referencing riots that cost 70 Palestinians and 17 Israeli soldiers their lives after the opening of the Western Wall tunnels.

“We are warning [Netanyahu] now of the consequences of the demolitions, because the consequences will surpass those of opening the tunnel in Jerusalem,” Abdul Qader said.

Abdul Qader made his remarks alongside hundreds of residents of the Bustan neighborhood in East Jerusalem’s Silwan area. Some 88 houses on the sliver of land near the Old City are slated for demolition because they were built without permits from the Israeli municipal authorities. But some of the structures were built before Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.

The official alleged that Israeli authorities in Jerusalem are enabling settler groups to take control of Palestinian neighborhoods.

U.S. warns Israel: Don’t build up West Bank corridor

Aluf Benn | Ha’aretz

24 July 2009

The U.S. administration has issued a stiff warning to Israel not to build in the area known as E-1, which lies between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. Any change in the status quo in E-1 would be “extremely damaging,” even “corrosive,” the message said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed in the past to finally build the controversial E-1 housing project – as have several premiers before him, though none has done so due to American pressure. He opened his recent election campaign with a visit to Ma’aleh Adumim in which he declared: “I will link Jerusalem to Ma’aleh Adumim via the Mevasseret Adumim neighborhood, E-1. I want to see one continuous string of built-up Jewish neighborhoods.”

He has also warned in the past that failure to build in E-1 would allow the Palestinians to create territorial contiguity around Jerusalem.

Just before his government was installed this spring, the media reported that Netanyahu had reached an agreement with his largest coalition partner, Yisrael Beiteinu, to unfreeze construction in E-1. However, that clause was ultimately not included in the coalition agreement.

The plans for E-1 call for building 3,500 housing units, along with commercial areas and tourism sites, to create a single urban expanse stretching from Jerusalem to Ma’aleh Adumim and strengthen Israel’s hold on East Jerusalem, which would then be completely surrounded by Jewish neighborhoods.

The United States has always vehemently opposed this plan, fearing it would deprive a future Palestinian state of territorial contiguity, cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank – all of which would thwart any hope of signing a final-status agreement and establishing a Palestinian state.

President Barack Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, vigorously opposed building in E-1 during the terms of prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. Sharon did approve construction of a police station in E-1, and under Olmert, infrastructure work in the area continued. But neither ever approved construction of either the residential units or the commercial buildings, for fear of a confrontation with the United States.

Four years ago, after resigning from Sharon’s government, Netanyahu attacked him for giving in to American pressure on E-1. “A sovereign government must build in its eternal capital,” he said. “Sharon set a precedent that will lead to the division of Jerusalem.”

The Obama’s administration – which opposes all construction in East Jerusalem, even of a few houses – would be even more outraged by a large-scale project such as E-1.

It is demanding a moratorium on Jewish building in East Jerusalem until an agreement is reached on the city’s legal status, arguing that the cumulative effect of even small-scale projects would destroy any chance of a peace agreement and arouse fierce opposition in the Arab world, especially among East Jerusalem Arabs. Small projects include the construction of 20 apartments in the Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood or plans to build new Jewish housing in Silwan.

At Sunday’s cabinet meeting, however, Netanyahu rejected this American stance. “United Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Our sovereignty in it is not subject to appeal, and among other things, this means that Jerusalem residents can buy apartments anywhere in the city,” he said. “We cannot accept the idea that Jews should not have the right to live and buy anywhere in Jerusalem.”

Next week, three senior American officials will visit Israel: special envoy George Mitchell, National Security Advisor James Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Mitchell will continue his efforts to reach agreement on a settlement freeze, including in East Jerusalem, while the other two will focus on the Iranian threat.

1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children’s textbooks

Ian Black | The Guardian

22 July 2009

Israel’s education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the “catastrophe” of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.

The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led government of Israel’s historical narrative over the Palestinian one.

The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah – normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their “war of independence”: the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.

Netanyahu spoke for many Jewish Israelis two years ago when he argued that using the word nakba in Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Palestinians have always maintained that the 1948 refugees were the victims of Israeli “ethnic cleansing”. But in recent years a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune.

Reflecting those changing perceptions, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s last prime minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, referred to Palestinian “suffering” at the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.

Netanyahu’s Likud takes a different view. “There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme,” said the education minister, Gideon Saar. “The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis.” There was bitter controversy in 2007 when nakba was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools only, by the then education minister, Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party.

“In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a ‘catastrophe’,” Saar told MPs in the Knesset yesterday. “There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe.”

Arab MP Hana Sweid accused the government of “nakba denial”. The follow-up committee for Arab education said: “Palestinian-Arab society in Israel has every right to preserve its collective memory, including in its school curriculums.”

Jafar Farrah, director of Mossawa (Equality), an Israeli-Arab advocacy group, told Reuters the decision to excise the term nakba only “complicated the conflict”. He called it an attempt to distort the truth and seek confrontation with the country’s Arab population.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said the decision showed insecurity. “Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident,” he said. “We need not be afraid of a word.”

Israeli Arab activists have also pledged to carry on marking Nakba Day in the face of planned legislation that would withhold government money from institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.

These include commemorating the nakba – on the same day as Independence Day – “rejecting Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people” and supporting an “armed struggle or terrorist acts” against Israel. An initial version proposed by the far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman would have banned all Nakba commemorations and carried sentences of up to three years in prison.

By the book

Japan has long been criticised for toning down aspects of its wartime atrocities in textbooks, particularly the Nanjing massacre and use of sex slaves. Russia has taken up Soviet techniques of airbrushing history, a book being banned two years ago for positing that Vladimir Putin had established an “authoritarian dictatorship”. A decade after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, black schoolchildren in South Africa were still studying textbooks that extolled the voortrekkers and offered only minimal explanations of their own history. In Britain it was an exam paper that caused offence when a poem by Carol Ann Duffy containing referencing knife crime was removed from the GCSE syllabus. The Carol Ann Duffy poem began: “Today I am going to kill something. Anything./ I have had enough of being ignored and today/ I am going to play God.”

Campaigners for evicted Palestinians call on Barack Obama to intervene

Rachel Shabi | The Guardian

20 July 2009

Campaigners protesting at the eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for a Jewish development today appealed to President Barack Obama to stop the settlement going ahead.

The families, who have lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood north of the Old City, were given until last Sunday by an Israeli court to leave their homes, and now face fines, arrests and eviction. The decision affects 55 people, including 14 children.

The families say that, as refugees from the 1948 war, they were given the houses in 1956 by the UN’s refugee agency and the Jordanian government, which controlled the area until 1967.

But the Israeli court upheld a prior claim to the land by the Sephardi Community Committee, which subsequently sold the rights to an Israeli construction company with reported US investment ties.

“They have the power and we could be evicted or arrested at any time,” says Maher Hannoun, head of one of the families at Sheikh Jarrah. “But I will never run away from my house. It is my job to protest my house and my children.”

Nahalot Shimon International, the company that the court decreed current owner of the site, has plans to build a new 200-unit settlement in the area – which would affect a further 20 or so Palestinian families.

“My children keep asking me, ‘Daddy are we going to live in a tent?’ What do I tell them? I tell them I have hope that it won’t happen,” says Hannoun, a 51-year-old salesman whose family is from Haifa, now in Israel, and Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.

The neighbourhood is close to the site of the Shepherd Hotel, where the US recently demanded that Israeli halt a construction project. Building has not yet commenced at the site of the old, disused hotel – a vast stone building and sprawling terrace, once owned by the grand mufti of Jerusalem and bought by the American millionaire Irving Moskowitz in 1985.

Yesterday, the Guardian revealed that 80-year-old Moskowitz is funding many illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel after the 1967 war – a move not recognised by the international community. Israel maintains the Jewish right to reside in any part of Jerusalem.

“It is not about the Jewish right to live in East Jerusalem,” says Meir Margalit, a Meretz party member of Jerusalem city council. “But about settlers who have come with a dangerous political agenda to ‘Israelise’ the area, change the demographic and in that way undermine any kind of political solution in the future.”

Most Arabs can’t buy most homes in West Jerusalem

Nir Hasson | Ha’aretz

21 July 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed this week that Jerusalem is an “open city” that permits all its inhabitants, Jewish and Palestinian, to purchase homes in both its eastern and western parts.

“Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city. There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city’s east,” Netanyahu said in response to the U.S. request to halt a Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.

An examination by Haaretz, however, presented a rather different situation on the ground. According to Israel Lands Administration rules, residents of East Jerusalem cannot take ownership of the vast majority of Jerusalem homes.

When an Israeli citizen purchases an apartment or house, ownership of the land remains with the ILA, which leases it to the purchaser for a period of 49 years, enabling the registration of the home (“tabu”). Article 19 of the ILA lease specifies that a foreign national cannot lease – much less own – ILA land.

Attorney Yael Azoulay, of Zeev and Naomi Weil Lawyers and Notary Office, explains that if a foreign national purchases an apartment they must show the ILA proof of eligibility to immigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return. Non-Jewish foreigners cannot purchase apartments. This group includes Palestinians from the east of the city, who have Israeli identity cards but are residents rather than citizens of Israel.

Most residences in West Jerusalem and in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem are built on ILA land. All the neighborhoods built after 1967 – Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot, French Hill and Armon Hanatziv – are built on ILA land. Even in the older neighborhoods of Kiryat Hayovel, Katamonim and Beit Hakerem, tens of thousands of apartments are built on ILA land and cannot be sold to Palestinians. In the ultra-Orthodox central Jerusalem neighborhoods of Geula and Mea Shearim, as well as in Rehavia and Talbieh, there are homes built on private land – mainly owned by one of the churches or purchased in the past by Jews.

It goes without saying that a Palestinian seeking to purchase an apartment in a Haredi area would be rejected out of hand, and Rehavia or Talbieh would in any event be out of the range of most East Jerusalemites’ budget.

Nevertheless, dozens of Palestinian families have moved into Jewish neighborhoods, mainly French Hill and Pisgat Ze’ev. Most are renting, while a few buy apartments without registering them. Lawyers in the field say the law is not always applied, and that if a resident of East Jerusalem were to apply to register the apartment at the ILA, they would not have problems doing so.

If the amendment to the Israel Lands Administration Law is passed – the bill is in an advanced stage – an Israeli apartment owner would be able to take ownership of the land and could then sell it to anyone, including foreign nationals and Palestinians.