Tag: Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah: another day sleeping under the sky

Alternative Information Center

6 August 2009

The neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, housing about 500 Palestinians in East Jerusalem is under siege. Armed forces have been stationed here since early Sunday morning when the Hannoun and Gawi families were forcibly evicted from their homes by as many as 500 police officers. Now it’s a waiting game. The families are sleeping on the sidewalk in front of their homes until they’re taken away by force. This isn’t the first time they’ve been made to leave their homes. They are Haifa refugees from the 1948 Nakba, what Israel calls the War of Independence. The UNRWA made an agreement with the Jordanian government (who controlled East Jerusalem at the time) to provide them with houses in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in 1956, where the families have been living ever since.

Since the two evictions on Sunday, 2 August, 23 people have been arrested, including members of the Gawi family. Two children from the Hannoun family were walking around with their arms in slings from being roughed up by the cops when they were dragged out of their homes. About 250 supporters, including members of Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Hadash, Anarchists Against the Wall, and the International Solidarity Movement demonstrated outside the Hannoun family home on Sunday evening before more than 20 police officers violently arrested 13 protesters, most locals (both Israelis and Palestinians). All were released within 24 hours on condition they do not return to Sheikh Jarrah, for at least three weeks including those who live there.

Excessive Use of Force

A young man, not older than 20 suffered a leg injury during the eviction on Sunday. According to locals, he was imprisoned for six hours before he was allowed to seek medical treatment. The combination of tear gas and the pain from his injured leg has weakened him so much, that he was not even able to talk to us.

Charihen, 20, from the Hannoun family was hit by police with a rifle, leaving her arm in a sling. She is studying Psychology at Abu Dis University. On the day of the eviction, she was supposed to write an exam, which she missed. The only thing she was able to take with her when she was forced out of her home was a textbook she needs to study for her summer course.

Charihen says she yelled at the armed forces, asking why the Israeli settlers are allowed to live in their house. A policeman replied, “They are Jews, you are Arabs… So they can stay!”

Her mother wasn’t even allowed to put on decent clothes and was thrown out on the street in her pajamas.

Monday morning residents woke up to tear gas outside their windows. The police blocked the entrance to the dead end street where the Gawis’ old home remains. Locals couldn’t leave for work or school for at least two hours Monday morning. When some people tried to protest against the road closure, the police responded with tear gas and arrested three Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah. At least one was badly injured. Some more locals went to the hospital from the affects of the chemicals in the air, including six women. Hasib Nashashibi, a member of the Coalition for Jerusalem, mentioned that “red gas” had been used, which is, according to him, known to be especially aggressive. After asking another member of the Coalition for Jerusalem how they could use tear gas against civilians, she countered: “We are not civilians, we are Palestinians… They think of us as terrorists… Therefore the way they threaten us is barbarian!”

Court Hearings after Eviction

Saleem Hannoun left the makeshift camp outside his former house on Monday to attend a court hearing. The eviction order was addressed to his brother Maher Hannoun. He never got an eviction order, nor did his second brother whose home is on the other side of Maher’s. Yet the police broke the windows and dragged out the members of all three households on Sunday. Nine families in total between the Hannouns and Gawis were forcibly removed from their homes in this manner without ever receiving eviction orders in their names. The court judge ordered Saleem to bring his bills to another hearing on Wednesday. However, settlers are already inside his home. All his belongings have been thrown out of the house. Earlier in the day, Saleem was sifting through a dumpster for his shoes. He says the police dragged him straight from his bed without allowing him time to put on shoes.

“The Israeli government doesn’t think about us, all they think about are the settlers!” the member of the Coalition for Jerusalem claims. She mentions further that immediately after the evictions, settlers moved into the houses. The Gawi family watched as a female settler went back and forth from their house to the Hannoun house for one hour, trying to decide which she wanted.

Incident with Settlers

Around 9 pm on Monday, ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers attacked a handful of Palestinians sitting on the street. They threw stones and spat at them. About 100 settlers were shouting and swearing at the emerging crowd of local Arabs. One of the aggressors spat into the face of a boy who was no older than five years of age. Police arrived quickly and silenced the situation peacefully. Although the settlers had started the quarrel, only two police officers confronted them. The other 25 armed security forces and several cars separated the upset Palestinian community.

Jerusalem, the Island

The recent evictions are part of a plan to surround the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah with Jewish settlements, in order to separate the approximately 500 Arabs from the rest of the city and take control of the major roads in the area, says Nashashibi. This is an act of “separation, holding the land for false reasons.” In the end, there will be a long settlement straight through Jerusalem from road No.1 to Ma‘ale Adumim, the biggest settlement in the West Bank. This will separate Jerusalem from the West Bank. He believes they’re creating another island. “Hebron is an island, Nablus is an island, Gaza is an island, they are all surrounded by settlements.”

International Response

Although the United Nations special coordinator for Mideast peace, Robert Serry visited Sheikh Jarrah on Monday afternoon, Jerusalemites are still frustrated with the international community. They aren’t doing anything against the ongoing crimes against international law Israel is committing. So says a member of the Coalition in referring to the Geneva Conventions related to occupied territory

“They should put political pressure on Israel about exactly these two cases!” and further “The international community must start seeing Israel as a state over law! Because what they are doing here is against international law, and they are breaking all the international conventions.”

In an official statement, Serry says, “I deplore today’s totally unacceptable actions by Israel” and further “These actions heighten tensions and undermine international efforts to create conditions for fruitful negotiations to achieve peace,” calling on Israel to adhere to international law and its Road Map obligations. Finally Israel must “cease and reverse such provocative and unacceptable actions in East Jerusalem.”

Similar statements came from the EU. “”The Presidency of the European Union reiterates its serious concern about the continued and unacceptable evictions in East Jerusalem, notably the evictions by Israeli authorities of two families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood,” in addition, the Presidency “recalls that house demolitions, evictions and settlement activities in East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.” The statement also noted that they “contravene repeated calls by the international community, including the Quartet, to refrain from any provocative actions in East Jerusalem.”

After 24 hours of silence about the recent incidents, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared: “I have said before that the eviction of families and demolition of homes in East Jerusalem is not in keeping with Israeli obligations, and I urge the Government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions.” Adding, “Both sides have responsibilities to refrain from provocative actions that can block the path toward a comprehensive peace agreement. Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot be used to prejudge the outcome of negotiations, and they will not be recognized as changing the status quo,”

Passing by the entrance on Tuesday, 4 August, at 8 PM, the road to the Gawi’s home was again blocked by police. We were stopped from going through, although a man with long payis (sidelocks), wearing a long black robe and a black top hat was allowed through at the same time. Wednesday, 5 August, the road remained closed and al-Jazeera news network reporters were told they cannot enter without permits.

Background

According to Hatem Abo Ahmad, the lawyer representing the Hannoun and Gawi families, when the Jordanian government built the houses for Palestinian refugees in Sheikh Jarrah the administration was supposed to transfer the property rights to the families within three years. This never happened. Instead, the Oriental Jews Association and the Knesseth Yisrael Association used Ottoman period documents to claim ownership of the land in Sheikh Jarrah in 1982.

Ahmad says he holds a letter from the Turkish government proving that there was no original document to the one presented by the settler organizations, which supposedly dates back to sometime around 1870. This evidence was presented to the court in March of this year, about a month after the court ordered the Hannoun and Gawi families must leave their houses by March 15, or they would be evicted. The court ruled the documents presented had come two years too late. The appeal had to be made within 25 years of the original claim to land put forward by the settlers. The Hannouns and Gawis were served papers on 30 July, saying they had 10 days to voluntarily leave their homes or they would be taken out by force. They have been living there since 1956.

Taking over Jerusalem

Matt Kennard | The Guardian

5 August 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document their inevitable eviction. Well, last Saturday at 5.30am the Israeli border police did come and forceably evict them (so forceably that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross.

Sheikh Jarrah is in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when visiting Jerusalem as the Quartet’s “Peace Envoy”. When you look out of the Hanouns’ window, you can see Blair’s hotel 30 metres away; Blair can probably see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. He has said nothing.

The most disturbing fact about Israel’s eviction programme is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to build new illegal settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could do so. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem.

The Hanoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun’s father was a refugee from the nakba (or “the catastophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948). The Jordanian government gave them the property in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home.

As in other parts of East Jerusalem, Maher was offered payment if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he said to me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.”

Across the way, there is a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman now lives after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when their house was violently repossessed with the help of more than 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s US election victory). After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused money to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she said from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.”

I don’t know what happened to this women in the eviction on Saturday night, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration is that they are much more honest about their colonisation programme than their “centrist” predecessors. The Netanyahu administration is now willing to get rid of some “outposts”, in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu is just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Maher agrees: “I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” he said.

The next stop in this attempt to cleanse the putative future capital of Palestine of its indigenous population is the Bustan area of Silwan which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three-hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in Biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in 960 BC.

In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that the lore was true. Now, the Israeli government wants to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archaeological theme park. Eighty-eight houses are due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians.

London protests against Sheikh Jarrah evictions

4 August 2009

On Monday afternoon from 5pm a large group of protesters put up tents and banners next to and across the road from the Israeli embassy in central London to protest the evictions of 53 Palestinians in Sheik Jarrah on Sunday. Police initially tried to move the protest but the protesters refused to move. Eventually the inspector in charge of Kensington and Chelsea police force arrived and agreed the protesters had every right to protest Israel’s crime of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Occupied East Jerusalem.

The protesters erected tents in solidarity with the 9 families who were thrown on to the streets by the occupying Israeli forces to make way for extremist Jewish settlers. The protesters were angry and upset at Israel’s blatant disregard of international law and world opinion in removing the families including 19 children from the ancient Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah near to old city of Jerusalem that is a fundamental part of a future Palestinian state.

Following condemnation from the British consulate, the US administration, the French government and the United Nations. The protesters have said they will continue pushing the British government and the European Union to follow up their words of condemnation with actions that punish Israel for the ethnic cleansing that it is perpetrating in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The determined protesters seriously call into question the favourable EU-Israel trade agreement, the supply of over 150 arms contracts by the British government to Israel and the full diplomatic relations Britain and the EU have with Israel in the light of it’s serious breaches of international law and of the 4th Geneva convention.

Activists demonstrate for a Danish condemnation of the evictions of Hanoun and Ghawe Family in Sheikh Jarrah

ISM Denmark

4 August 2009

Denmark demonstrates against ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah
Denmark demonstrates against ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah

On Monday 4 August at 5pm approximately 20 danish solidarity activist gathered in front of the Danish foreign ministry to call for a condemnation of the eviction of another two families in Sheikh Jarrah, occupied East Jerusalem.

The activists carried a banner saying “Stop Ethnic Cleansing” in danish as well as signs asking the politicians to actively condemn settlements and evictions in The Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The manifestation remained calm for the hour and half it lasted.

After the media storm the injuries and arrest of a Danish solidarity activist in Sheikh Jarrah caused in Denmark one danish party have suggested in parlaiment an official condemnation of the evictions of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

The eviction of the Hanoun and Ghawe family made 53 persons homeless, made them refugees again.

The 28 houses in Sheikh Jarrah threatened with evictions are build by the Jordanian kingdom and UNWRA in 1956 as a housing project for Palestinian refugees from 1948.

All the families live with a knowledge about where their family home was 61 but have no possibility of moving back to that house since it has been given to Israel in 1948. Despite of that, the houses that were given to the Palestinian refugees in return, are now being taken by Israeli settlers on claims that the land they are build on was owned by jewish people in the 18th century. The settler organization that claim the houses have no legal evidence for the claims, contrary the Palestinians just evicted, that have showed documents in court of the changing owners of the land since the otteman era.

Israeli settlers moved into the houses of the evicted families on Sunday afternoon only a few hours after the families had been violently removed from their homes by Israeli forces.

The US, the UK and the UN have all condemned the evictions of the Palestinian families as they represent an obstacle for achieving peace in the region as well as jet again shows Israels disregard for international law.

Evicted Palestinians stand their ground – on thin mattresses

Ilene R. Prusher | Christian Science Monitor

4 August 2009

It was 13-year-old Diala who was awoken first, just after 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, by the commotion outside. She rushed to the window, saw special riot police in black uniforms, and ran to wake her parents.

By the time she did, the Israeli police were already breaking in through doors and windows, forcing the 17-member Hanoun family – three brothers, their wives, and children – to leave the home their relatives acquired a half-century ago. In all, 58 Palestinians were evicted in this predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah.

Though they had received – and refused to obey – a court order in May to leave after losing a longstanding dispute over property rights, it was still a shock.

“I had one shoe on and one off, and the policeman who was ordering me out tried to move aside the glass they broke to make sure that I didn’t cut my feet,” says Diala’s mother, Nadia Hanoun. A few hours later, they stood across the street and watched as the police escorted a few families of Jewish settlers into their homes.

“He was concerned about my feet bleeding, but he doesn’t see the bleeding in my heart. It’s so difficult for us to see them move in people who are not from here, into our house, into the home my husband was born in, while we’re on the street,” says Mrs. Hanoun, sitting in the shade of a tree about 50 feet from their front door, now blocked off by a line of security barriers and several police vans with flashing lights. The family has for two nights slept on the thin mattresses piled behind her; she says they have no other place to go.

The events in Sheikh Jarrah garnered international censure from the European Union, the United Nations (UN) and from Britain, which said it was “appalled” at the move. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday night called the Israeli evictions “deeply regrettable” and “provocative.” Such a move “is not in keeping with Israeli obligations and I urge the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions,” she said.

Who is responsible?

Neither the Jerusalem municipality nor any government office is taking responsibility for the incident, pointing instead to the courts. There, a decades-long battle over the houses has ensued, in which a group of Jewish families say they can show that their forbearers owned the houses here as far back as the late 19th century, when the area was administered by the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish families say they were forced to abandon the houses during a spate of Arab attacks in the area in the 1920s and 30s. In the war for Israel’s establishment in 1948, the territory became part of Jordan.

In 1956, 28 Palestinian families who were refugees from Israel after 1948 were resettled in Sheikh Jarrah as part of an UN project to assist people made homeless in the war. The Hanoun family, who say they are originally from Haifa, was one of the recipients – and Maher Hanoun, Nadia’s husband, was born in the house.

The story gets more tangled from there. Both the Israelis and Palestinians involved in the dispute say that they have Ottoman-era property ownership documents called tabu which proves that they are the rightful owners. Palestinians say that the Hijazi family – who now live elsewhere in Jerusalem – can show they own the land. But the Jewish families, represented legally by a real estate group called Nahalat Shimon International also have Turkish tabu papers they say prove the land is theirs.

According to a briefing (PDF) by Israeli advocacy group Ir Amim, an Israeli group that opposed the evictions and advocates a Jerusalem “equitably shared by the two peoples,” Nahalat Shimon is seeking to build a 200-unit settlement, Shimon HaTzadik, in the area. It’s unclear who is behind the real-estate company, which is sometimes characterized as a settler group.

“We don’t focus on the specific settlers’ groups because in our view the one who is really responsible in these cases is the Israeli government and the municipality,” says Orly Noy, a spokesperson for Ir Amim,

After an Israeli court ruled in the Jewish families’ favor, the Palestinian families were given a court order to leave by July 19. The families refused. “We know their documents are forgeries,” says Rami Hanoun, whose arm is in a sling after being injured by police when he was evicted from the house.

Arabs see ethnic-cleansing of Jerusalem

Hosni Abu Hussein, a lawyer for the two extended Palestinian families – which include eight nuclear families – says that six of the eight nuclear families who were evicted were thrown out illegally, when police overstepped their orders. But two of the eight families, including Maher, Nadia, and three children, don’t have a strong case for getting reinstated.

“This eviction was done in an illegal matter and without due process,” says Abu Hussein. “The duty of the authorities as they see it is to cleanse Jerusalem of Arabs.”

Though that’s a harsh accusation, it is a sentiment that is felt throughout East Jerusalem, where many Palestinian residents are facing either eviction or demolition orders. Just two weeks ago, Israeli officials approved the construction of settler apartments in another part of Sheikh Jarrah on the grounds of the old Shepherd Hotel. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat defended the move, saying it was inconceivable that Jews not be allowed to live anywhere they chose in the city Israel has declared as its undivided and eternal capital.

Two different spokesman – one for the Justice Ministry and one for the Jerusalem mayor’s office – said they could not comment on the case because it was solely in the hands of the court.

A plethora of international organizations have expressed dismay over the evictions, which came amid attempts to revive the peace process. The Obama administration in particular has asked Israel to freeze settlement growth in the West Bank and not to authorize projects that aim to settle Israelis in the heart of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, thereby changing the “status quo” and frustrating hopes for a two-state solution that would include a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

Some Israelis vehemently disagree with their government’s policy in Sheikh Jarrah. Two of them are professors Yaron Ezrahi and Ruth HaCoheh, a couple who came down the hill from a conference at nearby Hebrew University to visit with the Palestinians families and sit with other visitors empathetic to their plight.

“It’s going on under our noses, so how can we not come? We find it outrageous,” says Prof. Ezrahi, a political scientist who has been a frequent critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. “These kinds of actions destroy the moral fabric of our society.”