Tag: Jerusalem

Israeli forces evict the Hanoun and al-Ghawe families from their Sheikh Jarrah homes

UPDATE: Seven of the arrested activists were released after court, with a condition to not be in Sheikh Jarrah for 3 weeks. One American solidarity activist has been taken to the immigration prison for deportation.

Another international activist is reportedly refusing to give her name and intends to go on hunger-strike, according to the released activists who were in detention with her.

Rami Hannoun is being treated at a local hospital after being beaten by Israeli forces.

For Immediate Release:

2 August 2009: Israeli forces have evicted the Hanoun and al-Ghawe families from their homes.

At around 5:30 in the morning, Israeli police arrived at the Hannoun family home and broke into the house through the windows. They forcefully removed Maher Hanoun, his wife Nadia and their 3 children. The police violently separated the family from the international and Israeli solidarity activists that were staying in the home. Police then arrested the international and Israeli solidarity activists that were staying with the family. Similarly, Israeli police came into the al-Ghawe family home at 5:30am and removed the family and internationals staying in the home.

Settlers arrived with a truck and began to move the al-Gwahe Hannoun family possessions out of their home. Everyone outside of the house was forced across the street, away from the house.

According to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces beat a Palestinian male who was trying to intervene when police were yelling at an elderly Palestinian woman. Additionally, media personnel were pushed around by police when they were trying to get close to the evicted Sheikh Jarrah homes.

Amongst those arrested are at least 7 international activists and 1 Israeli activist. They are scheduled to be brought to court in Jerusalem at 11am.

Maher Hannoun, Palestinian resident of Sheikh Jarrah:

Despite condemnation from the international community about the evictions of my neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, the Israeli government continues to pursue the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem. My family were refugees from 1948 and now we have become refugees again. We were forced out of homes to make way for settlers, contrary to international law. The legal case that residents presented in court included an Ottoman-era document which discounts the settler associations claim of ownership over Sheikh Jarrah land and homes. But the unjust policies of Israel to judaize East Jerusalem render our legal proof of ownership irrelevant.

Jody McIntyre, a British solidarity activist:

I woke up to the sound of a brick through the front window. By the time I could get up, I was being pushed out the door by Israeli forces. They wouldn’t allow me to take my wheelchair and were physically violent towards me and the others in the Hannoun house. The unjust policies of the Israeli government are not just written documents, they affect real families. The government has made the Hannoun and al-Ghawe families homeless, and their only crime is being Palestinian in a system that is racist against them.

The case of Sheikh Jarrah

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem was built by the UN and Jordanian government in 1956 to house Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. However, with the the start of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, following the 1967 war, settlers began claiming ownership of the land the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was built on.

Stating that they had purchased the land from a previous Ottoman owner in the 1800s, settlers claimed ownership of the land. In 1972, settlers successfully registered this claim with the Israeli Land Registrar.

The 28 families of Sheikh Jarrah face eviction from their homes. In November 2008, the al-Kurd family was violently evicted from their home in Sheikh Jarrah. Two weeks thereafter, Mohammad al-Kurd died from a stress induced heart attack.

In 2004 Nadav Shargai from Ha’aretz reported that: “A process of Judaization has already begun . The compound is currently, and
gradually, being cleared of its Arab population by means of legal procedures.” (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml? itemNo=481362&contrassID=1&subContrassID=7&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y)

Settlers take over a Palestinian house in Sheikh Jarrah

Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)

27 July 2009

On July 26th a group of settlers led by Arie king took over a Palestinian house in Sheikh Jarrah to which they where given custody of in a very controversial decision of the Israeli court. While trying to prevent the settlers from taking over the house and demolishing it, 11 activists (three Palestinians, seven internationals and one Israeli) where arrested.

At about 11:30, with the support of police and army units, settlers came to demolish a home whose owner passed away recently. This is part of the settler organization’s larger campaign to dispose Palestinians of their land and to settle Jews in the East Jerusalem neighborhood, especially in the holy basin – the area which surrounds the old city of Jerusalem.

Activists at the scene attempted to non-violently prevent the entrance of the settler bulldozer into the home, an effort that was met with unrelenting force by the police and army, and ended with the violent arrest of the 11 activists. The activists were held and interrogated at Salah-Adin police station in Sheikh Jarrah, and 8 of them were transferred to the Russian compound and held overnight.

Currently, 28 families face eviction in the East Jerusalem neighborhood, and others have already been evicted and settlers now occupy their houses. Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood, and the continued efforts by settlers to move Jews there is yet another way of creating “facts on the ground” and preventing any real, just solution from being reached in the future.

Relevant Links:

http://www.standupforjerusalem.org/index.php?action=innerp&id=4

Two-day-old Silwan info center in jeopardy

Abe Selig | The Jerusalem Post

26 July 2009

“We built this place last Sunday, and on Tuesday, the police arrived with orders to knock it down,” said Ahmad Qara’een, as he sat inside the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, a 35-sq.m. covered wooden deck erected by residents of east Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood.

Qara’een does not dispute the lack of a building permit, although he does maintain that the center was built on privately-owned Palestinian land, with the consent of its owner.

The issue for Qara’een and his colleagues, who built the center to disseminate information about Silwan they say is not made available to the tourists who throng the area, is what they see as a double standard. A number of structures belonging to Jews in Silwan – some only a few doors down from the center – also lack permits, but the city has not issued demolition orders for them.

“It’s like a state within a state here,” Qara’een said. “The settlers get to do what they want, but we can’t have anything. It’s like the law doesn’t apply to them.”

The Jerusalem Municipality on Sunday disputed Qara’een’s assertion that the center had been slated for destruction, telling The Jerusalem Post, “They were not given demolition orders, just a notice that their building is illegal. Furthermore, the municipality is working in all areas of Jerusalem to enforce the law when it comes to illegal buildings.”

Still, Qara’een and others at the Wadi Hilwah Center said that permits were not the issue.

“This has nothing to do with permits,” said Nihad Siam, who works with Qara’een. “It’s all about politics and the desire of the government to shut us up and push us out of here.”

Silwan’s Wadi Hilwah neighborhood has emerged as one of the main points of friction between east Jerusalem’s Palestinians and Jewish residents, who are increasingly moving into eastern neighborhoods of the capital.

Silwan, just outside the Old City, has seen a rise in Jewish residents in recent years, many inhabiting homes purchased by the Elad and Ateret Cohanim organizations. Additionally, the city has drawn up plans to raze a significant number of homes in the area to begin work on a City of David archeological park – a move residents like Qara’een and Siam said would “turn the neighborhood into Hebron.”

“Is it my fault that I was born here?” asked Qara’een. “Is it my fault that King David walked here over 3,000 years ago? Why should I have to pay the price?”

A report released on Sunday by Peace Now, however, stated that “the hasty response of Israeli authorities to the opening of the makeshift Palestinian information center clearly points not only at the discriminatory use of law enforcement against Palestinians in East Jerusalem but also at an effort to silence the voices of the local residents.”

The report goes on to say that the “City of David Visitor’s Center, which is approximately 50 meters away from the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, and was established by the Elad organization, includes mobile and non-mobile structures including a shop, a cashier’s office, general office space and bathrooms.

“An application for a permit for these structures was submitted by Elad in November 2007, but was rejected by the municipality,” the report says.

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.