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Israel evicts Palestinian family in Jerusalem’s Old City and replaces them with settlers

Israeli police forcibly evicted a Palestinian family from their home in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday, immediately replacing them with a group of Israeli settlers.

The Abu Asab family, who live in the Muslim Quarter of the city, had been handed an eviction notice by the Israeli Supreme Court, ordering them to vacate the property by February 28th.

The court ruled that Jewish settlers were the “rightful owners” of the property under the pretext that Jewish residents lived in the home pre-1948.

Video footage of the eviction shows Israeli forces shoving and assaulting members of the Abu Asab family as they removed them from the home.

One Palestinian woman, purportedly a resident of the house, can be seen weeping as settlers hung Israeli flags from the home and locked the front door.

“It’s my house, it’s my whole life,” she cried. “They took everything.”

According to local sources, the family were forced to leave without clearing the home of their furniture and other possessions.

Sources added that two men from the Abu Asab family were also arrested by Israeli police during the eviction.

According to settlement watchdog Peace Now, the Abu Asab family are originally from the Baq’a neighborhood of southern Jerusalem, and were kicked out during the Nakba in 1948. In the 50’s, they relocated to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City in a home that once belonged to the Jewish Meisel family. The Meisel family left their home during the 1948 war.

Twenty years later, in 1970, the Israeli Knesset enacted the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which stipulated that property assets formerly belonging to Jews in East Jerusalem would be returned to them.

Meanwhile, Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in the Nakba were not granted the same right.

“The Maisel family dedicated the property to a trust. A few years ago, settlers managed to appoint themselves as directors of this trust, and in their name they sued the family who lived in the property in protected rent during the days of the Jordanians and paid rent regularly,” Peace Now said.

“With this crooked legal situation, the court granted the settlers the house and the Abu Asab family became refugees for the second time. Meanwhile, the police, cognizant of the fact that throwing a family out of the house will not look good in the media, are not allowing anyone to approach,” the statement concluded.

The view from the roof of the Abu Asab family home in the Old City of Jerusalem (Photo: Quds News Network, Facebook)
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The only Democracy in the ME and Light unto the nations carrying out the orders of their beloved and revered Supreme Court.

If this was a Jewish Israeli family ( as in Illegal squatters on occupied lands )being evicted , the world would known about it in seconds flat.The zionist tears would fill the dead sea .The howling and cries of antisemitism would be heard throughout the ME and beyond.

Invitations to the World,s media would have been sent to every corner of the planet.

The reason why Israelis refuse to end the occupation is because they are afraid of the tables being turned and this sort of abuse being applied to them .

Israel will crash and nobody will care

As the Baal Shem Tov used to say, fuck you will deliver a short term dopamine hit but is not advisable

You see, this shows that the Palestinians are unwilling to make any sort of peace and end-of-conflict agreement.

If they could just compromise, and give up their homes and possessions to any Jew who wants them, and move away out of sight, then all would be well, wouldn’t it?

If nothing else, the eviction of the Abu Asad family reinforces the claim that Palestinians are second class citizens (at best) and that Israel is enforcing apartheid-like policies with zeal. Because Jews once lived in the house, Jews have a right to reclaim it. How interesting. This sounds like an unpleasantly familiar refrain to a familiar song. Modern Zionism teaches us that because Jews lived in the land of Palestine 2000 years ago, they have a God-given (and politically opportunistic) right to re-settle in Palestine today. Implicitly this has come to mean “and the people living there now can be rightfully dispossessed.” One people has a claim over another because God said so or because modern history has dictated it. Democracy? Where does that fit in with biblical Manifest Destiny – or the colonial assumption that white westerners have the “burden” of “civilizing” the lesser races and the right to seize and exploit their lands. The internal logic within these arguments is self-evident but acceptable only if it is taken as a given that democracy has no natural place in human affairs.

The next time someone chuffs out the claim that Palestinians living in Israel have the same rights as Jewish Israelis, this is a model refutation. It is reinforced by the fact that Israeli law has codified the reverse: that the Nakba Palestinians do not have the same right to reclaim the homelands they lived in 71 years ago. Of course not. That would be hinting at the equality of different peoples- and that has never been part of a colonial or imperial – or contemporary Zionist plan.

The comment I would love to make…Mondoweiss would not print it.