Moriel Rothman uses the Shamasneh family eviction case in Sheikh Jarrah as an example of how the dispossession of the Palestinian people continues today, albeit in less dramatic fashion than 65 years ago.
From Rothman’s Times of Israel post “The Shamasneh Case: How the Nakba Continues Legally in East Jerusalem“:
The Nakba, which will be commemorated tomorrow, on May 15th, is characterized by the Israeli government’s intentional expulsion or transfer of parts of the Palestinian population. This was done in 1948 en masse and by the military, with widespread violence under the banner of desperation. It is done in 2013 in suits and with a great calm, house by house (and sometimes village by village), through jurisprudence and law and under the banner of Israeli democracy.
Tomorrow, as we in Israel remember (or try our best to to ignore) Nakba Day, let us also grapple with the thought that the Shamasneh family is facing a small scale Nakba of their own, that if the courts decide to rule in favor of the settlers, the Shamasneh family will be expelled from their own home and replaced by Jewish settlers whose goal seems to be to ensure that “Shimon HaTzadik” (as it is also called by the Jerusalem Municipality’s Light Rail) is a Jewish neighborhood, and that the name “Sheikh Jarrah” is added to the list of Palestinian villages and areas that once were, before some version of the Nakba reached them, and are no longer.
(h/t Nima Shirazi)
