Tag: Ethnic Cleansing

Support Sheikh Jarrah: International day of actions against house demolitions in Palestine

The community of Shiekh Jarrah calls on the international community to set up tents outside of Israeli embassies worldwide in solidarity with the neighborhoods threatened with eviction or demolition in occupied East Jerusalem.

Tents have become a powerful symbol of the struggle of Palestinian people living in occupied East Jerusalem. They have been set up as centres of protest in neighbourhoods threatened by numerous eviction and demolition orders, part of Israel’s wider policy to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem of its Palestinian population. Ultimately this would destroy any hope of East Jerusalem becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state. A number of the tents, notably the one in Sheikh Jarrah, have been built by Palestinian residents forcibly evicted from their homes as a result of Israel’s racist policy. Palestinians, who became refugees in 1948 & 1967 are, once again, facing dispossession from their homes and land as our governments stand by and do nothing.

The neighbourhoods most severely affected are Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Ras Khamiis, Al Tur and Sur Beher however house evictions and demolitions are not uncommon in the Old City itself. In Silwan, 88 homes in the al Bustan quarter are facing immediate destruction in order to create space for a planned national park. In addition, two apartment buildings housing 34 families in the adjacent al Abbasiyya quarter have also received demolition orders. When completed, up to 2,000 Palestinians will be uprooted from their homes.

The local communities are calling for international activists to organise symbolic protests and set up tents outside of Israeli embassies or Zionist organisations worldwide to stand in solidarity with the protest tents in the neighbourhoods of Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Ras Khamiis, Al Tur and Sur Beher.

The case of Sheikh Jarrah

The neighbourhood consists of 28 families, and is facing a number of eviction orders which are part of a plan to implant a new Jewish settlement in the area, close to the Old City. After the Al Kurd family has been forcibly removed from their home in November 2008, it is now the turn of the al-Ghawe and Hannoun families to face imminent eviction, while others are awaiting further eviction orders.

The families have gone through 37 years of legal battles, fighting for the right to stay in their houses where many of them have been born and which they legally own. To date, the Israeli courts, including the High Court, decided in favour of the Jewish settler organisations, which claim the ownership of the land based on falsified documents. The courts have not only ignored all the documents produced by the Sheikh Jarrah community which clearly prove their legal status and the ownership of the land, they have also shown that their decisions are not based on law and justice, but are clearly political decisions, serving the goal of cleansing the Palestinian people from Jerusalem.

The latest court hearing, held on the 17th May, ordered the families to sign a guarantee for 50,000 NIS and present a further guarantee for $50,000 from the bank. The court has ruled for this money to be taken if the families refuse to hand in their keys and leave their houses voluntarily by noon on the 19th July. After this date, the settler organisations have permission to enter the houses and the fathers of the families will be sent to prison, charged with contempt of court.
Now that all legal avenues have been exhausted, the families last hope is that media attention & international pressure can help stop the evictions taking place

Maher Hannoun, resident from Sheikh Jarrah faced by imminent eviction order and imprisonment, said:
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 goverments to help stop this racist policy of house evictions and demolitions.

What you can do – suggestions for further actions:

  • Contact your MPs and other political representatives to tell them about this story. Ask them to raise the issue of East Jerusalem in the Parliament and Government meetings and put diplomatic pressure on the Israeli authorities.
  • Contact media representatives in your countries and ask them to cover the story of Sheikh Jarrah and the ongoing ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem.
  • Organise demonstrations, talks, film nights or photo exhibitions in your countries. Email sheikh.jarrah@hotmail.co.uk to receive updates, tell us about your ideas for actions, events and the co-ordination of an international day of actions.
  • Set up a contigency plan with your organization or affinity group in the event that these evictions are carried out or Maher Hannoun is arrested. Send your email to Sheikh.jarrah@hotmail.co.uk to recieve alerts and co-ordinate your actions.

We ask for people to stand in solidarity with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah and support their fight for justice.

Israel pushes out its own people

Dimi Reider | The Guardian

10 June 2009

Whenever Barack Obama speaks of the Middle East these days, there’s one thing that worries “senior Israeli officials” most. “He didn’t say ‘Jewish state’,” they mutter to reporters. “He had all the time to say these two words, and didn’t. Why didn’t he?”

Binyamin Netanyahu himself utters this phrase at every opportunity. He even went as far as turning this coveted idea into a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, before being shushed by Washington.

But why this sudden insistence on what is supposed to be an internal Israeli matter, the self-definition of the state? As Abbas rightly commented, Israel can call itself the Hebrew Socialist Republic for all he cares. Why bring up this internal matter with Obama and Abbas, Israel’s primary foreign policy objectives?

The truth is that Netanyahu is speaking neither to Abbas nor to Obama. He is speaking to world public opinion, as he prepares for confrontation with a fourth party to the conflict, one that is as crucial as it is overlooked: the Israeli-Palestinian minority.

Israeli Palestinians, most of them native Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after 1948, constitute 21% of the population. Their very existence poses a critical reality check on Israel’s self-perception as Jewish and democratic, and if one throws in the population of the West Bank and Gaza, the proportion of Jews in Israeli-controlled areas shrinks to a mere 51%.

Despite discrimination in all walks of life – education, housing, civil service, politics – the Palestinian minority in Israel is slowly gaining ground. The number of Palestinian students on Israeli campuses is growing from year to year, discrimination is actively challenged both in court and in public life, and the years of housing neglect are biting back at Jewish hegemony as they push more and more young Palestinian professionals into previously Jewish-only areas.

So as almost any honest Zionist will tell you, here’s the dilemma. Israel’s proclaimed raison d’etre is maintaining a rigidly ethnocentric Jewish state, one in which Jews will never be in a minority. Being a minority must be understood in the emotional sense rather than the numerical one. This is important to our own historic memory as persecuted minorities, but even more so because maintaining a democracy is quintessential to Israel’s standing in the world community. On the other hand, given Palestinian advancement within Israel, an open democracy that plays by the rules will inevitably result in the erosion of the purist nation-state. So in the three-part Jewish, Palestinian and democratic conundrum, one element has to be dismissed. Netanyahu’s new catchphrase seems to indicate that that element will be the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Avigdor Lieberman is much maligned for his racism, but his line exemplifies one that had become very mainstream in Israel: a Palestinian state needs to be established – the sooner the better, before Palestinians in the occupied territories despair of nationalism and begin requesting the vote. Yet the geopolitical situation as it stands will, in such a scenario, still leave Israel as a bi-national state. His solution is annulling the citizenship of about half the Israeli Palestinians and redrawing the maps so that they find themselves within the new Palestinian state.

Lieberman’s position is widely shared; even self-proclaimed dove Tzipi Livni said, on several occasions, that “once a Palestinian state is established … we will be able to tell any Palestinian wishing to realise his national identity that he is now able to do it elsewhere”. More ominously, recent developments on the ground suggest the machinery for carrying out such an unprecedented task is already in motion.

The interior minister, Eli Yishay, had launched a legislative project to allow him the annulment of anyone’s citizenship without the authorisation of the attorney general. The IDF announced it would be allocating a special infantry brigade “to deal with a potential Arab uprising in case of war”. Last week’s national defence drill included just such a scenario – while most Israelis practised going into bomb shelters, army and police practised “suppressing a large-scale Arab revolt in the north” – the exact area of Lieberman’s proposed geographical experiment. And the outlandish bills recently tabled at the Knesset, ranging from banning commemoration of the Nakba to making citizenship conditional on a loyalty oath to a Jewish state, contribute to further alienation between the two communities and attach new fuses to an already much-rattled powder keg.

Are we facing the prospect of an ethnic cleansing? To a degree, ethnic cleansing has always been part and parcel of Israeli political life. Despite its bloody connotations, ethnic cleansing can be carried out in many ways. Family-by-family expulsion from “illegal housing” and discriminative economic pressure to emigrate is ethnic cleansing, too. We appear to be marching towards a nasty and brutal escalation on that front.

The reason why Netanyahu is talking over the heads of Palestinian Israeli citizens is precisely because most of them (over 70%) want to remain part of a sovereign democracy rather than the vague and improbably West Bank statelet. The reason he’s trying to create a fictional outside leadership for them in the character of the Palestinian Authority they so despise is precisely because their real leadership – their mayors, intellectuals, politicians and NGOs – persistently call for internal, Jewish-Arab dialogue over their rights and the role each community should play in a joint and truly democratic state.

Netanyahu’s efforts to throw in Israeli Palestinians with the West Bankers must be resisted. If he wants to make them part of the regional process, they should be heard speaking for themselves; if he doesn’t open the door for them as partners, they must be let in through the window, with every discussion of the peace process featuring exploration of the Israeli Palestinians’ exclusive plight. Most importantly, powerful international defence of their rights as Israel’s equal must be mounted and persistently ensured.

Israeli plans for East Jerusalem hotel raise U.S. ire

Akiva Eldar | Ha’aretz

2 June 2009

Washington is furious over the Interior Ministry’s anticipated approval of a plan to build a new hotel in East Jerusalem, just 100 meters from the Old City’s walls. The plan, which would see the demolition of a wholesale market and kindergarten, is slated to be approved today.

In conversations with Israeli officials, senior American officials have made it clear that they want Israel to freeze all plans for expanding the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem, and especially in the Holy Basin – the area adjacent to the Old City.

The regional planning and building committee for Jerusalem will discuss the plan today. It was submitted by the Jerusalem municipality, which owns the land on which the hotel is slated to be built, and the state-owned Jerusalem Economic Corporation, which will actually construct it.

The site in question is in the wholesale market, just east of the Rockefeller Museum.

The Interior Ministry’s district planning office told Haaretz that it will recommend the plan’s approval.

The plan calls for a 200-room hotel that will be nine stories tall on its eastern face (where the ground is lower). It will also include a commercial building, which will be five stories tall on its eastern face, plus another three stories underground.

The plan will require the existing wholesale market to be demolished, along with a Palestinian kindergarten.

The hotel plan is only one of several proposals for expanding the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem. Another, which would involve evicting hundreds of Palestinians from King’s Valley, on the outskirts of Silwan, was approved yesterday by the Jerusalem municipality’s planning committee despite the opposition of the city’s legal advisor, Yossi Havilio.

Israelis accused of settlement by stealth

Dominic Waghorn | Sky News

24 May 2009

The Israeli Government is being accused of a plot to transform East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements and drive out Palestinians by stealth.

The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz
The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz

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 Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years
The Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years

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.

Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran
Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran

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.

Palestinians protest annexation of East Jerusalem

21 May 2009

On Thursday 21st of May, a group Israeli and International activists staged a protest contesting the celebration of Jerusalem day, which marks Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967.

Activists held placards showing support for the persecuted Palestinian population of occupied East Jerusalem as right-wing Israelis marched by on their route from the West to the East of the city. The protest caused anger amongst the marchers and they repeatedly attempted to take the banners and rip them. The police arrived and forced the protest back, and away from the march, by physically pushing the activists.

The protest continued through Jaffa St and Ben Yehuda Street, where it was met with another baying crowd of right-wing Israelis who chanted “Death to all Arabs” and attempted to intimidate the activists by pursuing them through the streets.

A demonstration earlier in the day was held outside Damascus Gate, involving local Palestinians. Speeches were made and chants of “End the occupation” were shouted by the crowd, with the event passing peacefully.

Jerusalem day is an Israeli national holiday celebrating the supposed unification of Jerusalem and the establishment of Israeli control over the old city in June 1967. Israeli’s sovereignty of East Jerusalem is not recognized by the international community and it’s regarded as illegally occupied land.

Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem have long suffered discrimination and violence since it’s annexation in the ’67 war. Recently the number of house demolition orders in East Jerusalem has increased dramatically, a result of Israel’s continued policy of attempting to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from the land.