Israel dispossesses Palestinians from their home so that it can build them a school

Yesterday’s much-publicized standoff in the east-Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah was yet another eviction attempt. Mahmoud Salhiya and members of his family stood on the roof with gas canisters, threatening to blow the place up if their forcible removal was carried out.

For now, the move has been temporarily averted. As the Jerusalem municipality said:

In coordination with the Israel Police, it was decided to postpone the eviction with the goal of allowing the Salahiya family to move out on their own.

Once again, the world was watching (although the international community once again seemed to be incapacitated, reduced to “bearing witness”). The British Consulate in East Jerusalem tweeted that Consul-General Diane Corner, whose office is located just opposite the Salhiya home, had joined other diplomats to “bear witness to the ongoing eviction”, as reported by Reuters. The consulate said that such evictions in occupied territory, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, were against international humanitarian law, and urged the Israeli government to “cease such practices which only serve to increase tensions on the ground”.

This follows a familiar pattern: Israel gets away with whatever ethnic cleansing it can get away with, until the resistance, international critique or condemnation become loud enough for it to delay and use other methods towards the same end.

But this eviction is actually different. While the many other evictions in Sheikh Jarrah are done by settler organizations which claim “Jewish ownership” of lands from before 1948 (a privilege which Palestinians are not afforded), this eviction is based on the pretext of the municipality having to build educational facilities at that location. The plot where the Salhiya house is located is being claimed by Israel as “absentee property” for public use.

As Oren Ziv and Yuval Abrahami report in +972 Magazine, there is are other public plots– but Jews get priority!

[T]here are alternative locations for the establishment of educational institutions in the neighborhood, which do not involve the eviction of Palestinian families. There is, for example, an empty lot on nearby Pierre Van Paassen Street, which is set out in the masterplan as being for public buildings. However, in an unusual move, the municipality decided to give up this land and hand it over, without compensation, to the ultra-Orthodox organization Ohr Somayach, which plans to establish a yeshiva and dormitories for students.

The gushing goodwill that is afforded Jewish settlers by the Jewish State is just not there for Palestinians.

That cynical policy was coupled by one of the most cynical tweets that could be imagined, by the Laborite Israeli Internal Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev. He said that Palestinians can’t both demand education and not expect to be dispossessed:

You can’t hold the stick at both ends by both demanding that the [Jerusalem] municipality take action on welfare for Arab residents and oppose the building of educational establishments for their welfare

For those who feel foreign to the idiom of the stick, it’s akin to saying “have their cake and eat it”. It’s not just misleading. It’s malicious.

Mahmoud Salhiya spoke truth from his rooftop:

They can build five schools here and my house will remain.

Salhiya shouts it from the rooftops, but Bar-Lev (which in Hebrew means “has a heart”) is not only deaf, but also heartless. Even though he’s a Laborite (and supposedly on the left side of Israeli politics). Well of course they can build five, ten and twenty schools without dispossessing Palestinians. But that was never really the point. The point is Judaization of Palestinian lands.

“This is a particularly cynical act by the municipality”, said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at the NGO Ir Amim (cited by +972). He continued:

The municipality is threatening to evacuate the Salhiyeh family, while at the same time giving up another plot of land and gifting it to a yeshiva. The municipality is succeeding in making even the obligation to provide education to the Palestinian population into part of the mechanism of dispossession and Judaization.

Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson says he cannot remember any other case in which a family was evicted for the purpose of building a school (thread here), though Israel has been dispossessing Palestinians for all kinds of pretexts. Recently, the standoffs in the Naqab (Negev) have been about Israel’s parastatal organ Jewish National Fund planting forests on Bedouin farmlands.

Now they are using schools as pretext for dispossession. And if you want to both have a home and a school, then tough luck, you should be so happy with just one of the two, because if you want both, you’re just trying to “hold the stick at both ends”, like the Laborite minister says.