Dozens of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, who were set to be forcibly removed from their homes on Sunday, May 2, were given four more days by the Israeli Supreme Court to “reach an agreement” with the Israeli settlers that are attempting to take over their homes.
In a hearing on Sunday regarding an appeal put forward by the families of Sheikh Jarrah against their eviction, a supreme court judge decided to postpone the court’s ruling on the appeal until Thursday, May 6th.
In the meantime, the court ordered the six families, numbering around 27 people, to instead “come to an agreement” with the very settlers who have been attempting to forcibly evict them from their homes for decades now.
In a statement, the families of Sheikh Jarrah said that the judge “ordered that ‘both sides’ should reach some ‘deal’ whereby the Sheikh Jarrah families admit the settler organization’s ownership of the land and pay rent to the settler organizations.”
The families said they “firmly reject” the terms of such an agreement, “for these are our homes and the settlers are not our landlords.”
“The inherently unjust system of Israel’s colonial courts is not considering questioning the illegal settler’s ownership and has already decided on the families’ dispossession,” the statement said, adding that the court was drawing out the legal process in order to “dull popular resistance and public opinion protesting these expansionist and colonial efforts.”
“As the threat of expulsion from our home remains imminent as ever, we will continue our international campaign to stop this ethnic cleansing,” the families said.
Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, who attended the hearing, said on Twitter that what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah was “not a real estate matter but a political one to Judaize Sheikh Jarrah and East Jerusalem.”
“In Israel, there are two legal systems, one for Jews… and one for Palestinians,” Tibi said.
The Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah have been embattled in a legal dispute with Israeli settlers for decades, after settler organizations staked claim to their homes using a number of Israeli laws that allow Jews to claim ownership of Palestinian property that was once inhabited by Jews, prior to 1948.
Though the families, who were settled as refugees in the neighborhood as part of a housing project established by UNRWA and the Jordanian government in 1956, dispute the validity of the settler’s claims to their homes, the Israeli courts have consistently ruled in favor of the settlers.
Since the 1990’s, right-wing settler organization Nahalat Shimon International has vigorously fought for the eviction of Sheikh Jarrah’s Palestinian residents, and the subsequent replacement of them with groups of Israeli settlers.
So far, the group has been successful in every one of their endeavors in the neighborhood, and with the backing of the Israeli district court and full support of the Israeli authorities, have displaced more than 67 Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, and continue to seek the imminent displacement of around 87 more.
In addition to the six families under threat of immediate expulsion, an Israeli district court also ruled earlier this year that seven other families in the neighborhood should leave their homes by August 1st.
In total, 58 people, including 17 children, are set to be forcibly displaced from Sheikh Jarrah to make way for Jewish settlers this year alone.
The Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been stepping up their campaign to save their families from eviction in recent weeks, with a social media campaign to #SaveSheikhJarrah, and daily sit-ins and demonstrations in the neighborhood.
Over the weekend, several demonstrations were held in Jerusalem and across the West Bank in solidarity with the families.
Videos of Israeli police suppressing peaceful demonstrations and confiscating Palestinian flags went viral over the weekend, along with the video of an Israeli settler as he was trespassing on the property of a Palestinian family in the neighborhood.
The video of the exchange between the settler and the Palestinian home owner caused outrage on social media, as the settler could be seen telling the Palestinian home owners “if i don’t steal it someone else is going to steal it.”
On Sunday night, Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah staged a sit-in and outdoor iftar to break their fasts together as a show of their continued presence in the neighborhood. Their presence, which was completely peaceful, was quickly suppressed by armed Israeli forces who broke up the gathering and fired sound bombs at the groups of Palestinians.
Rivlin was described Israel as having a sick society.
It’s gone far passed that point really. Complete and utter depravity. Savage lawless barbarians. I’m sure there are many decent Israelis fighting for change but those that defend Israel are a moral abomination.
Three unfortunate conditions that have resulted in this horrendous situation – Zionism, an Apartheid nation that commits international crimes with impunity, and the aid, weapons, and support, coming from the US, UK and the EU. The first two are uncontrollable, the last point is very much controllable, and should have been stopped years ago. They are all democracies pretending they must keep the support for an occupier going, while they watch its victims being deprived of democracy, freedom, and the right to be protected from vicious crimes against them.
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At the same time, Tel Aviv, which since its creation in 1909 as the ‘first modern Jewish neighbourhood’ in Palestine had gone from Jaffa’s ‘daughter’ to a powerful competitor, the cultural and economic capital of Jewish Palestine.
“Indeed, Tel Aviv’s encroachment on land belonging to Jaffa and the surrounding agricultural villages was already worrying enough for its last Ottoman governor, Hassan Bey, to build a mosque well north of Jaffa’s Old City in 1916 in an attempt to block Tel Aviv’s southward spread.
“Jaffa’s Palestinian Arab population described the ‘storm’ of violence in early May 1921 as a ‘revolt’ or ‘revolution’ (thawra, the same word used by protesters during the Arab Spring). For their part, Zionist officials admitted in their reports that it was a result of the ‘unnatural’ expansion of the Jewish community, whose ‘seizing and spreading’ over the rest of Jaffa and into the surrounding orchards was deemed a leading cause of the ‘mountainous’ hatred between the two communities.
“But rather than trying to mitigate the growing anger of the indigenous population, Zionist leaders pressed for unlimited immigration into Palestine, even as thousands of Jewish inhabitants of Jaffa migrated across the now official border to Tel Aviv, which was granted official recognition as a separate town 10 days after the eruption of violence.
“In the next three decades, Jaffa and Tel Aviv would continue to clash, and occasionally cooperate, as the two cities and their respective national communities developed into full-fledged national rivals. The Palestinian “Great Revolt” of 1936 also began in Jaffa, while the Jewish bombardment of the city at the start of the 1948 war precipitated one of the largest exoduses of Palestinians into exile.
“A century after May 1, 1921, the borderlands between Jaffa, now a relatively poor but endlessly gentrifying mixed neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, and the ‘modern’ Jewish centre of the united municipality, remain a constant source of tension and even violence. Just as in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank, secular and religious Jews alike take over Palestinian properties, push out the local population, and continue a self-described process of Judaisation (Yehudit in Hebrew, an official Israeli government term) that has occurred without rest now for 100 years.”
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Brings to mind:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/2/why-the-events-in-jaffa-of-may-1-1921-are-important-today
“Why the events in Jaffa of May 1,1921 are important today”
From May 1, 1921 to May 1, 2021, everything and nothing has changed between Israelis and Palestinians. Al Jazeera, May 2/21, by Mark LeVine Mark who teaches History at the University of California., and Mathias Mossberg, Former Swedish ambassador.
EXCERPT:
“Officially, the war for Palestine, which ended with the establishment of the state of Israel and the exile of three-quarters of a million Palestinians, began on May 15, 1948, with the termination of the British Mandate, the declaration of Independence by Zionist leaders, and the formal start of hostilities between the fledgling Jewish state and the country’s Palestinian population and Arab allies.
“Others point to the United Nations Partition Resolution passed on November 29, 1947, and the war that commenced soon thereafter, as the actual beginning of the conflict. But an equally plausible argument can be made that the War for Palestine began more than a quarter-century earlier, on May Day, 1921 – not in Jerusalem but in a mixed neighbourhood along the sea between Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
“It was on that May 1 that a group of Jewish Marxists loudly marched into the Palestinian area of the neighbourhood of Manshiyyeh after clashing with more moderate Labor Zionists. With flags waving and chanting loudly for workers’ solidarity, their march was met by warning shots by the British gendarmes hoping to disperse them. Unfortunately, the Arab residents did not understand their slogans; and fearing the gunfire signalled a Jewish attack on the neighbourhood, they attacked first, starting a riot that quickly moved down into Jaffa and killed 47 Jews and 48 Palestinians. Hundreds more were made homeless.
“The violence shocked the British occupation regime which was still getting its footing four years after conquering Palestine, but it should not have. By 1921, Jaffa’s rapid economic and demographic growth had made it the undisputed cultural and economic capital of Arab Palestine, where according to British police officials ‘you would get more information about political feeling than in any other part of Palestine…'” (cont’d)
“Dozens of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, who were set to be forcibly removed from their homes on Sunday, May 2, were given four more days by the Israeli Supreme Court to “reach an agreement” with the Israeli settlers that are attempting to take over their homes.”
What a sick joke! That’s like asking the starving lion to sit down and “reach an agreement” with the trapped lamb! The Israeli Supreme Court is just as racist and corrupt as the society it represents!