Tag: Jerusalem

ei: The struggle is not over – Remembering Mohammed al-Kurd

By Pam Rasmussen

Please visit the website ‘Though Shalt Not Steal’

To view original article, published by The Electronic Intifada on the 26th November, click here


Abu Kamel and his wife, Um Kamel, eat breakfast with international volunteers at the al-Kurd’s family home. (Photo by Pam Rasmussen)

The saying that a man’s home is his castle goes back to the 1500s. Whether it is a mansion or a mud hut, a home to which you can retreat and be safe is a basic human need. But since 2001, Abu Kamel (Mohammed al-Kurd), his wife and five children were forced to fight every day for the right to stay in the East Jerusalem home his family had lived in for decades. And although the Jewish settlers who tried to push them out — literally — didn’t put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, they might as well have.

Two weeks after the al-Kurds were finally evicted from their home on 9 November, Abu Kamel suffered a fatal heart attack. Now, Um Kamel (his wife, Fawzieh) who I grew to admire and respect while I camped on their patio as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) must wage the fight alone.

In October, my friend Jean and I traveled to Palestine from the United States to volunteer with the ISM during the fall olive harvest. When a foot injury ended my usefulness at olive-picking, we left Nablus for East Jerusalem, where the ISM had been keeping watch on the al-Kurds patio since the summer hoping to prevent the eviction that eventually came.

The al-Kurds’ house is part of a project that the Jordanian government built with the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA, to house 28 families who were forced to flee their original homes in 1948, after the Nakba, the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Abu Kamel’s family was forced to flee West Jerusalem during the ethnic cleansing, and settled in the house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. All of the parties involved agreed then that ownership of the houses would be transferred to the families within three years.

There they lived in peace until shortly after the June War in 1967, when two groups of Jewish settlers claimed ownership of the land, despite the earlier, documented agreement between Jordan and UNRWA. The struggle that followed took both parties into the courts, then escalated dramatically in 2001. When Abu Kamel suffered a heart attack and his family left the house to take him to medical treatment elsewhere, one of the settler families took advantage of his ill health. They moved in and occupied an extension to the home that the al-Kurds had renovated for one of their sons. When they returned, the al-Kurds faced the agonizing choice of abandoning their longtime home or living side-by-side with the representatives of a group that was trying to force them out. Despite Abu Kamel’s fragile health, they chose to stay and fight.

Early this year, the situation began heating up. Despite the fact that the Israeli Supreme Court had ruled that the settlers claim on the land is fraudulent, an investment company acquired the right to raze all of the Palestinian homes in the community and replace them with 200 settler housing units and a commercial center. 15 July 2008 was set as the eviction date, and while the al-Kurds who became the standard bearers for the entire neighborhood appealed once more to the court, the ISM moved in to help. In response, the settlers’ organization hired their own protection, an armed guard.

We lived in two tents set up on the patio, and one of us was present 24 hours a day, sleeping in shifts throughout the night. Um Kamel brought us tea at 7am, and she and Abu Kamel joined us for a traditional breakfast at 9am. A midday meal followed at 3pm. Although language was a bit of a barrier at first, we soon warmed up to each other and the routine. Abu Kamel was a quiet, solid presence, and Fawzieh was a model of cheerfulness and perseverance in the face of adversity. In addition to preparing our meals, she regularly played host to visiting delegations from international and Israeli peace organizations telling her family’s story over and over, marshaling support for their cause as well as for the Palestinian community overall.

I will remember our time with the al-Kurds as a highlight of my stay in Palestine, an oasis of warm hospitality in a hostile surrounding. One week later, just after we reluctantly returned to our home in the United States, I got the news: at 3:30 in the morning on Sunday, 9 November, the Israeli army swooped in and forced the al-Kurds out, while detaining the ISM volunteers who had taken our place. That was the beginning of the end for Abu Kamel. Suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, the 61-year-old Mohammed was admitted to the hospital on 22 November. Just hours later, he died.

Abu Kamel lives on through Fawzieh, however. She has kept up the fight with the help of the ISM and other volunteers by camping in a tent close by her rightful home. Despite further attempts by the Israeli army to discourage her, this time through fines and destruction of her canvas shelter, she and her fellow protesters are persevering. This is nonviolent resistance at its best, and its up to us to show that it can work.

Pam Rasmussen works in the healthcare field and lives in Maryland. Visit www.thou-shalt-not-steal.org, sign the petition and send a message to the Israeli government.

Abu Kamel of the al-Kurd family has died two weeks after Israel forcibly evicted him from his home of 52 years

Abu Kamel of the Al-Kurd family, evicted by Israel from their home in Occupied East Jerusalem on the 9th November, has died after suffering from a severe heart-attack.

This comes two weeks after he was taken immediately to hospital following the night-time invasion and forcible eviction from his home of 52 years by Israeli forces.

The funeral will be held at 11am, 23rd November in Sheikh Jarrah, Occupied East Jerusalem.

Suffering from dangerously high blood pressure, in the aftermath of his family’s eviction from the emblematic house in Sheikh Jarrah and consequently being left homeless, 61 year-old Abu Kamel suffered from a deterioration with his long-term health problems and was re-admitted to hospital at around 10pm, Saturday 22nd November. It was soon announced that he had suffered from a heart-attack and died.

Fawzia al-Kurd has now lost her husband and her family home within two weeks due to the Israeli state’s campaign expand Jewish settlements in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. Despite high-profile formal complaints from the US State department, numerous foreign consulates, and European politicians, who openly questioned the legality of the settlers claims, Israel violently pursued its plans to evict the refugees from 1948.

The price of Israel’s political campaign against the refugees now includes the life of a 61 year-old man. As aide to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Haten Abdelkader stated on the 9th November, ” They want to expel Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah. It is an escalation before the municipal elections,”. He also noted that as the expulsion went ahead even though the decision is being appealed that this “demonstrates the problem is no longer legal, but political.” (AFP)

It should also be noted that after having been made refugees from West Jerusalem in 1948, the al-Kurd family were subsequently made refugees a second and third time as Israel evicted them from their home on the 9th November before proceeding to destroy the tent that was established on the 19th November.

The health of Abu Kamel was central to the Israeli campaign to occupy the al-Kurd house. In 2001, as the family was abroad in Jordan visiting Abu Kamel while he was receiving treatment, settlers broke into part of the family home that they have continued to occupy ever since.

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. The al-Kurd family began living in the neighbourhood after having been made refugees from Jaffa and West Jerusalem. 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 build 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. While the al-Kurds family continued legal proceedings challenging the settlers claim, the settlers started filing suits against the Palestinian family.

In 2006, the court ruled the settlers claim void, recognizing it was based on fraudulent documents. Subsequently, the Al-Kurd family lawyer petitioned the Israeli Land Registrar to revoke the settlers registration of the land and state the correct owner of the land. Although it did revoke the settlers claim, the Israeli land Registrar refused to indicate the rightful owner of the land.

In 2001 settlers began occupying an extension of the al-Kurd home. Despite the fact that their claim to the land was revoked, settlers were given the keys of the al-Kurds family home extension by the local Israeli municipality. This was possible after the municipality had confiscated the keys of the extension that the al-Kurd family built on their property to house the natural expansion of the family.

When this extension was declared illegal by Israeli authorities, the Israeli municipality handed the keys over to Israeli settlers. The al-Kurd family went to court and an eviction order was issued against the settlers. When the al-Kurd family were evicted on the 9th November 2008, the settlers were allowed to remain in the property, despite their own eviction order.

In July 2008 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the eviction of the al-Kurd family, for their refusal to pay rent to the settlers for use of the land. Although the settlers claim to the land had been revoked two years earlier, the court instead based their decision on an agreement made between a previous lawyer and the settlers. It should be noted that the al-Kurd family -and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as a whole- rejected this agreement and fired their legal representative at the time.

Israeli forces again demolish protest tent in east Jerusalem, Palestinian resident of Sheikh Jarrah remains in Israeli custody

9:30 am 20th November, Occupied East Jerusalem: Israeli forces have again demolished the protest camp in Sheikh Jarrah, set up after the eviction of the al-Kurd family on the 9th November.

A bulldozer arrived at the private property at 8:45am with orders to destroy the tent and the surrounding fence where the al-Kurd family has been living since they were evicted from their home on the 9th November 2008. The camp is situated on Palestinian-owned private property.

The Israeli bulldozer later created a wall surrounding the residents who remained on the site of the protest tent. The wall that the Israeli forces are creating is on Palestinian owned private land.

Yesterday the tent was also demolished, and one Palestinian and four internationals were taken into Israeli police custody. The Palestinian resident of Sheikh Jarrah continues to be held.

The family re-constructed the tent yesterday in order to continue their protest. Today, while the fence surrounding the private land was being bulldozed, neighbors dismantled the tent in order to save it from repeated destruction.

The decision to remove the al-Kurd family paves the way for the takeover of 26 multi-story houses in the neighborhood, threatening to make 500 Palestinians homeless and signifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Occupied East Jerusalem by the Israeli State. In July the US State Department brought forward an official complaint to the Israeli government over the eviction of the al-Kurd family, openly questioning the legality of terms on which the Israeli Jewish settler group claimed to have purchased the land. (see www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1005342.html).

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. The al-Kurd family began living in the neighbourhood after having been made refugees from Jaffa and West Jerusalem. 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 build 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. While the al-Kurds family continued legal proceedings challenging the settlers claim, the settlers started filing suits against the Palestinian family.

In 2006, the court ruled the settlers claim void, recognizing it was based on fraudulent documents. Subsequently, the Al-Kurd family lawyer petitioned the Israeli Land Registrar to revoke the settlers registration of the land and state the correct owner of the land. Although it did revoke the settlers claim, the Israeli land Registrar refused to indicate the rightful owner of the land.

In 2001 settlers began occupying an extension of the al-Kurd home. Despite the fact that their claim to the land was revoked, settlers were given the keys of the al-Kurds family home extension by the local Israeli municipality. This was possible after the municipality had confiscated the keys of the extension that the al-Kurd family built on their property to house the natural expansion of the family. When this extension was declared illegal by Israeli authorities, the Israeli municipality handed the keys over to Israeli settlers. The al-Kurd family went to court and an eviction order was issued against the settlers. When the al-Kurd family were evicted on the 9th November 2008, the settlers were allowed to remain in the property, despite their own eviction order.

In July 2008 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the eviction of the al-Kurd family, for their refusal to pay rent to the settlers for use of the land. Although the settlers claim to the land had been revoked two years earlier, the court instead based their decision on an agreement made between a previous lawyer and the settlers. It should be noted that the al-Kurd family -and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as a whole- rejected this agreement and fired their legal representative at the time.

Another Palestinian family expelled from their home in East Jerusalem and hundreds of houses demolished. Israel’s colonial policies kill any chance for a peace process!

Press release from Luisa Morgantini, Vice-President of the European Parliament

Brussels, 12th November 2008

Israeli police recently expelled the Al–Kurd family from its house, in the dark of night, in the Sheikh Jarrah area in East Jerusalem. The family includes Umm Kamal, the mother, her husband – who is partially paralysed and suffering from chronic heart disease – and their 5 children. Already refugees in 1948, when they were displaced from West Jerusalem, the family has once again been dispossessed of its home, where it has been living since 1956.

A group of extremist settlers claim ownership to that house and 26 other houses in the same neighbourhood, on the basis of an Ottoman title deed dating from 1880, the authenticity of which is doubtful and which is also disputed by United States.

One week ago, a European Parliament delegation to the Palestinian Occupied Territories, composed of deputies from different political groups and including myself, visited the Al-Kurd family in its home: we witnessed the violence and abuse suffered by the family because of settlers who live in the same courtyard. They no longer have that home.

In the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, more than 500 Palestinians face the daily threat of expulsion from their homes because of Jewish extremist associations’ claims, who apply Palestinian Population Transfer policies.

The expulsion of the Al-Kurd family is part of a colonial Israeli policy, which jeopardises any chance of a peace process, day by day, demolition after demolition, colony after colony, and particularly in Jerusalem.

In this city, after many years of labour, right-wing and ultra-orthodox administration, which permitted the illegal the expansion of Israeli colonies to the eastern part of the city, Nir Barkat – who made the construction of new Jewish colonies within East Jerusalem the first priority of his campaign – was yesterday elected mayor.

An end should immediately be put to these policies and they must be condemned and sanctioned by the International Community.

The situation of confusion generated by the change from the Bush administration to the subsequent and more promising Obama administration means that we cannot remain silent about these and similar violations in West Bank as well as in Gaza where, due to the siege, the situation continues to deteriorate. Only yesterday were crossings reopened, after 6 days’ closure, after a black-out resulting from a total lack of fuel and after the state of alert declared by UNRWA which denounced – because of the closure – the absolute impossibility to distribute aid to the 750.000 Palestinians living in the refugee camps. And we now shudder to think about the possibility that the truce will definitively be broken because of the four Palestinians killed today by fire from Israeli warplanes, which came back to fly and shoot from the sky above the Strip.

Last Monday, the EU Presidency expressed its deep concern at the demolitions by Israeli bulldozers of several Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem. It is high time that Brussels does all in its power to ensure that the arbitrary and unilateral measures by the Israeli Government do not destroy all chances of a peace process. This is more urgent today than ever before and it is evident that all useful instruments must be used – including the suspension of the EU-Israel Association agreement – to ensure that International Law is respected.

The National: Family’s eviction draws global outrage

By Jonathan Cook

To view original article, published by The National on the 17th November, click here

The middle-of-the-night eviction last week of an elderly Palestinian couple from their home in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers is a demonstration of Israeli intent towards a future peace deal with the Palestinians.

Mohammed and Fawziya Khurd are now on the street, living in a tent, after Israeli police enforced a court order issued in July to expel them.

The couple have been living in the same property in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood since the mid-1950s, when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. The United Nations allotted them the land after they were expelled from their homes in territory that was seized by Israel during the 1948 war.

Since East Jerusalem’s occupation by Israel in 1967, however, Jewish settler groups have been waging a relentless battle for the Khurds’ home, claiming that the land originally belonged to Jews.

In 1999, the settlers occupied a wing of the house belonging to the couple’s son, Raed, though the courts subsequently ruled in favour of the family. The eviction order against the settlers, unlike that against the Khurds, was never enforced.

The takeover of the Khurds’ house is far from an isolated incident. Settlers are quietly grabbing homes from Palestinians in key neighbourhoods around the Old City of Jerusalem in an attempt to pre-empt any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

What makes the case of the Khurd family exceptional is that it has attracted the attention of western consulates, particularly those of Israel’s important allies, that is, the United States and Britain. They have appealed without success to the Israeli government to intercede.

In particular, the diplomats are concerned that the takeover of the Khurds’ home will set a dangerous precedent, freeing settler groups to wrest control of most of Sheikh Jarrah. The settlers plan to oust more than 500 Palestinians from the neighbourhood and build 200 apartments for Jewish families.

If the settlers can take control of other areas, such as Silwan, Ras al-Amud and the Mount of Olives, the Old City and its holy sites would be as good as sealed off not only to Palestinians in the West Bank – as is the case already – but also to nearly 250,000 Palestinians in the outlying suburbs of East Jerusalem.

Because the Palestinians expect East Jerusalem and its holy places to be the core of their state, the Sheikh Jarrah judgment effectively offers the settlers a blocking veto on any future negotiations.

That may be one reason why the Israeli government has shown little inclination to intervene in cases like that of the Khurds. In Israeli law, all of Jerusalem, including the eastern half of the city, is the “indivisible” capital of the Jewish state.

The eviction order also worries western diplomats because it opens up a Pandora’s box of competing land claims that will make it impossible for Palestinian negotiators to sign up to a deal on the division of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority has already pointed out to the consulates that nearly two-thirds of West Jerusalem’s land was owned by Palestinians before the creation of Israel. Fawziya Khurd, for example, lived in Talbieh, in what is now the city’s western half, before 1948.

If the settlers can make property claims in East Jerusalem based on title deeds that pre-exist 1948, why cannot Palestinians make similar claims in West Jerusalem?

The US involvement in the Khurd case demonstrates its desire to mark its red lines in East Jerusalem. The concern is that Israeli actions on the ground are seeking to unravel the outlines of an agreement being promoted by Washington to create some kind of circumscribed Palestinian state.

In the US view, the basis of such a deal is an exchange of letters between George W Bush and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, in spring 2004 in which the US president affirmed that Israel would not be expected to return to the armistice lines of 1949. Instead, he declared that Israel would be able to hold on to its “population centres” in the West Bank – code for the established settlement blocs.

As a result, the current US administration has turned a blind eye to continuing construction in the main settlements, home to most of the West Bank’s 250,000 settlers. The unstated agreement between Tel Aviv and Washington is that these areas will be annexed to Israel in a future peace deal.

In an indication of Israel’s confidence about the West Bank settlements, the Israeli media reported at the weekend that Ehud Barak, the defence minister and the leader of the Labor Party, had personally approved hundreds of new apartments for the settlers in the past few months.

The separation wall is being crafted to include these blocs, eating into one tenth of the West Bank and leaving only a few tens of thousands of settlers on the “wrong side”.

For the time being, the US is showing indecision only about two settlement-cities, Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim. If the wall encompasses them, it will effectively sever the West Bank into three parts.

In relation to East Jerusalem, the White House has so far appeared to favour maintaining the status quo. That would entail the eastern half of the city being carved up into a series of complex zones, or “bubbles” as they have been described in the Israeli media.

Another 250,000 Jewish settlers live in East Jerusalem, though almost all of them reside in their own discreet colonies implanted between Palestinian neighbourhoods. These settlements are considered so established by Israelis that most of their inhabitants do not regard themselves as settlers.

However, the more ideological settlers of the kind taking over homes in Sheikh Jarrah refuse to accept partition of the city on any terms. They are trying to erode the Palestinians’ chances of ever controlling their own neighbourhoods in the eastern half of the city.

Backed by powerful allies in the courts, government and municipality, the settlers look set to continue expanding in East Jerusalem.

Nir Barkat, the millionaire businessman who was elected mayor of Jerusalem last week, forged close ties with some of the most extreme figures in the city’s settlement movement during his campaign.

Like his chief rival for the mayoralty, he has promised to build a new Jewish neighbourhood, called Eastern Gate, that will be home to at least 10,000 settlers on land next to the Palestinian neighbourhood of Anata.

The move, much like the eviction of the Khurds, has been greeted with silence from the government. Both developments are a sign of Washington’s powerlessness to force even the limited concessions it expects from Israel in East Jerusalem.