Tag: Jerusalem

Palestinians to Arab states: You can stop Jerusalem light rail

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

17 November 2009

The chairman of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ office, Dr. Rafiq Husseini, on Monday urges all Arab countries to cancel their business ties with two French companies – Veolia and Alstom – involved in the construction of a Jerusalem-based light railway which passes through the West Bank.

Husseini spoke in a press conference organized by the BNC – The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee – made up of several non governmental organizations.

So far, the Palestinian civil society organization are those which have initiated local and international activities calling for various types of boycotts (mainly on companies which are active in the occupied territories, and on Israeli academics and artists.)

It seems that the international attention their activities have garnered has encouraged the Palestinian Authority to join in the boycotts: The new Palestinian minister of economy, Hassan abu Libdeh, recently declared that the PA considers itself obliged to enforce the ban (so far declarative only) on selling settlements products in the Palestinian market.

Also present at the press conference were Jerusalem Mufti Mohammad Hussein and Orthodox Archbishop Attallah Hanna, both of whom supported the requested boycott.

This is the first time that the BNC has publicly addressed Arab nations, specifically Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and requested that they join the boycott and cancel their existing contracts with the French companies.

Until recently the committee has focused – with the assistance and support of organizations abroad – on arranging activities in the West which have brough to the termination of business deals with the two companies in Sweden, Britain, France and Australia.

The committee has petitioned the Saudi government to end their business deals, specifically with Alstom, but have yet to receive a response.

Saudi Arabia has contracts worth billions of dollars with Alstrom to build a railway to Mecca, as well other deals to constryct power plants.

Husseini lambasted those Arab countries continuing to work with the two companies, accusing them of “not fulfilling their duties” despite the repeated requests by the Palestinian from them and from the Arab League.

The committee worded softer criticism and said in a press release that “the BNC strongly urges Arab governments to practically translate their consistent verbal support for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem into action, at least by refusing to deal on a business-as-usual basis with companies implicated in violation of international law and Palestinian rights.”

According to the committee, building the light rail on occupied territory is a violation of international law.

Palestinian cave-dweller fights Israeli eviction

YNet News

12 November 2009

A Palestinian camping in an ancient cave near Jerusalem says he has been told by Israeli authorities to get out because the hillside is slated for a housing development and his “illegal” home will be demolished.

The predicament of Abdel Fattah Abed Rabbo, a 48-year-old father of 10, highlights the dispute between Israel and Palestinians living in the steep hills between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, on land the Israelis annexed in 1980.

Abed Rabbo says he was actually brought up in the cave by his parents but occupies it now simply as a way of upholding his claim to 5 acres of stony hillside. His family lives in an apartment in a Bethlehem refugee camp.

“Three days ago, Israeli building planners came. They started landscaping this entire area,” he told Reuters Television this week.

“The purpose is, of course, to build an Israeli settlement, called Givat Yael, which is to become the biggest settlement in the Jerusalem area,” he said.

Abed Rabbo says he received his first demolition warning five years ago, and got a follow-up notice last December. In the meantime, he says, Israeli authorities have three times knocked down the tent camp he put up on the land at al-Walajeh.

He is tangled in a complex legal maze that Palestinians say is really all about national rights but Israel insists is simply about property rights and unauthorized building.

The land straddles the 1948 Green Line which formed Israel’s eastern border at the establishment of the Jewish state. It lies just west of the Jewish settlement of Gilo, a suburb community of Jerusalem which is actually in the occupied West Bank.

The World Court has ruled that Israel’s settlements are illegal. Israel rejects that and officials say, in any case, the community planned for Givat Yael will not be a “settlement”, since the land has been part of Jerusalem for nearly 30 years.

Town planning

Givat Yael is planned to house 45,000 people, with a commercial zone and sports centre. The Interior Ministry’s district planning office recently granted final approval.

“They consider my presence here a problem, because they want to be build 14,000 housing units on al-Walajeh lands,” said Abed Rabbo. “I tell them the owners of this land are here, they are the rightful owners, and you’ve no right to build here.”

Some 500,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, whose legitimacy is also disputed by the United Nations, the United States and most major powers.

City councilman for East Jerusalem Yakir Segev rejected claims that the hillside will become yet another settlement, taking land the Palestinians want for a future state.

“First of all, it’s not a settlement,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood within the municipal borders of Jerusalem.”

“Second of all … they were given court orders — not military orders … It’s not a matter of political dispute or political argument as far as we are concerned,” he said.

The Israeli-run Jerusalem municipality has rejected a request by al-Walajeh Palestinians to legalise 95 homes in the village built without a permit and at risk of demolition.

“The village will disappear, because most of the houses are under the master plan of Gival Yael,” says Meir Margalit, a left-wing opposition member of Jerusalem City Council.

Palestinians say Israeli planners have offered a number of concessions in return for consent, including retroactive permits for homes already built, a change in the route of Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in the vicinity of the village, and easier access to Jerusalem.

So far they have refused these offers.

If al-Walajeh is legally part of Jerusalem, its residents might expect to have Jerusalem identification cards. But they do not “because of the Givat Yael project”, says Margalit.

“It would be more difficult to expel them from their land if they had Israeli ID’s.”

And without a Jerusalem identity, Abed Rabbo is an illegal resident in his own cave.

Ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem

Art Gish

9 November 2009

My teammate woke me at 6:00 a.m. “We need to go over to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to accompany the al Ghawi family, a Palestinian family that Israeli police evicted from their home on August 2.” The family is now living in a tent on the sidewalk across the street from their home.

Immediately after the police evicted the al Ghawi family, four Jewish families, involving twenty people, moved into the al Ghawi house. This is part of the Israeli government’s program to remove Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and turn this Palestinian neighborhood into a Jewish neighborhood. The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is only one of the Jerusalem neighborhoods that the Israeli government is actively ethnically cleansing.

Since the family never knows when they may be attacked by the Jerusalem police or settlers, a common experience for the family, internationals stay at the tent around the clock. The police have demolished their tent four times since August. The al Ghawi family is part of the nonviolent resistance to this take over.

I sat on the curb near a fire Fuwad, one the men of the family, had built to warm us from the morning chill, and to boil some tea which he shared with us.

I watched settlers emerge from the house, presumably on their way to work. They looked us over as they passed near us with their guns. I wondered if the homeless family camped out in front of their stolen house touched anything in the hearts of those settlers.

The Ghawi family built this house in 1956 on land purchased in 1952 from the Jordanian government by the United Nations (UNWRA) for refugees from the new state of Israel. The settlers claim that land in the distant past had been owned by Jews, thus giving Jews today the right to confiscate the land. The Ghawi family now is threatened to become refugees a second time.

It became clear to me as I spent the day with the family that their morale was high. Neighbors stopped by to chat and drink tea with the family. They are not giving up and they are not going away.

Residents of Sheikh Jarrah demonstrate against settlements in East Jerusalem

4 November 2009

sheikh jarrah

On Wednesday 4 November 2009, a vibrant demonstration was held in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. The demonstration was organised as a protest against Jewish settlers taking over a Palestinian house in Sheikh Jarrah, belonging to the Al Kurd family, on the previous day. It was also a protest against the ongoing home confiscations, home demolitions, and evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem.

The demonstration gathered about 150 demonstrators and was covered by a number of press reporters. In addition to Sheikh Jarrah families, participant organizations included Israeli activists such as Ta’ayush and Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and international activists such as the International Solidarity Movement, Michigan Peace Team, and Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel.

Heavily armed Israeli police officers observed the demonstration but did not intervene to stop it, unlike their action on 26 October when a gathering of about 50 people in the same location triggered the police to violently disperse the crowd and arrest 4 persons.

Settlement by stealth belies promises of restraint

Donald Macintyre | The Independent

4 November 2009

Maysaa Al-Kurd has lived all her life in the home her family moved into in 1956. The pomegranate tree standing in the garden was planted by her father when she was still an infant nearly half a century ago. But that hardly reassured her yesterday when she heard the Jewish settlers break into the next-door extension building her brother Nabil built to house his family in 2001.

“I heard the door opened by force,” she said. “And then I heard one of them say: ‘This furniture belongs to whom?'” Later she saw “with my own eyes” a settler breaking a television set. Outside, a refrigerator, cushions and household furniture, apparently removed by the intruders, stood for several hours in the pouring rain. Inside, broken glass could be seen above a stove.

What Ms Kurd, of the inner-city East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, was hearing at about 10.30am yesterday was the latest in an accelerating series of highly charged and organised moves by settlers into the city’s Arab sector. Armed with a court order saying they own the property, the settlers – about 40, according to Ms Kurd – decided to break in just four days after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, dismayed Palestinian and other Arab leaders by praising the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “unprecedented” promise of “a restraint” in illegal settlement activity.

Mrs Clinton sought on Monday to “clarify” her remarks by acknowledging that Mr Netanyahu’s proposals fell well short of the settlement freeze the US had earlier called for. And, while Mr Netanyahu has offered temporarily to halt authorisations of new settlement building in the West Bank, he has resolutely set his face against any slowdown in East Jerusalem. The UN says that 194 people were forcibly displaced from their homes in East Jerusalem by evictions and demolitions between January and July of this year. Israel insists it annexed the Arab sector of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War in 1967, but this is rejected by most of the international community who endorse Palestinian aspirations for it to be the capital of a future state. In Amman, the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed “concern” over events at the Kurd house and added: “The current situation is obviously particularly tense in respect of Jerusalem.”

Since a 2001 court order the rooms invaded by the settlers have been closed and used only to store furniture. But for Ms Kurd, whose property is one of at least 24 that settlers are hoping to acquire in this sensitive neighbourhood, their sudden arrival only intensified her fear of losing her home. “We are all worried for the future,” she said, “not just in Sheikh Jarrah but in all East Jerusalem.”

Only last week about a hundred Israeli security personnel arrived to remove a nearby protest tent that the Palestinian Ghawi family had been sleeping in since being evicted in August. That move came 24 hours after bulldozers levelled the homes of six families across East Jerusalem on the grounds they did not have the proper permit. Human rights activists say it is exponentially harder for Palestinians than Israelis to obtain permits.

Another elderly member of Ms Kurd’s extended family, Mohammed al- Kurd, died after being evicted last August from his home and moving into a similar tent to the Ghawi family’s. Like other of his relatives, he had refused to pay rent to the post-1967 Jewish owners, partly, some diplomats say, because they still dispute the historic right of ownership.

Maysaa al-Khurd said that her “life and blood” was in the house. Asked about the settlers’ argument that they have a right to the land because Yemenite Jews lived there before 1948, she added that her own family were 1948 refugees from what was now Israel. “My family are all from Haifa. Can I go there and say I own the house and I have the key? Can I tell the people there that is my house? They will kill me.”

Police stood guard outside the Sheikh Jarrah house while settlers occupied the adjacent building but eventually left on police advice. However two security guards employed by them were still there at the end of the day.

Although the house and its land was allotted to the Palestinian family in 1956 by the UN Relief and Works Agency and Jordan – then in control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem – the Israeli authorities expropriated numbers of properties in the area as state land after 1967. In some cases – apparently including this one – the land was later transferred or sold to companies or organisations representing settlers. None of the departing settlers would speak to reporters, but Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority governor of Jerusalem, said: “The changing position of the American administration led to this.”

Nabil al-Kurd, a father of four children, was summoned from work by his family when the settlers arrived. He was later told by police the settlers would be ordered to stay away pending 10 days in which Mr Kurd could lodge an appeal.