Nancy Murray reports about the recent trip she co-led with Eyewitness Palestine:
Sheikh Jarrah in the crosshairs
For decades, dozens of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have faced displacement after Jewish settler organizations, backed by funding from the US, went to court to have them expelled from their homes. The settlers claimed that Jews were the rightful owners of houses that had been given to Palestinian refugees by the Kingdom of Jordan when the area was under a Jordanian mandate before the 1967 war.
Last year, attempts to evict some of the remaining 38 families in Sheikh Jarrah led to vigorous protests on the part of residents and solidarity activists, which broke through the general media silence on the subject of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
This year, the struggle continues. We heard about it from Ibrahim Salem, who is awaiting a ruling in the next ten days about whether he and his mother Fatima will be forcibly evicted. They have been living in their house since 1952, and Ibrahim and his five sisters and three brothers were born there.
The Salem family has been fighting to stay in their home since the late 1980s, when settlers claimed they had bought the house from its “rightful owner.” They have never been shown a document of sale and don’t know who this alleged owner is.
For the last two decades, they have been in court, paying some $10,000 in court fees to be able to stay in their home. Earlier this year, Ibrahim’s elderly mother was pepper sprayed and he was beaten by settlers, who fenced off part of their land and constantly harass them. The Member of the Knesset Itamar-Ben Gvir, a disciple of the late far rightist Meir Kahane, set up a tent with a table in front of their house, and called it his new Knesset office. It soon became the focal point for violent settler demonstrations.
We heard about these demonstrations from Mohammed Abu Al-Humus, a well known Palestinian activist who set up his own tent near Gvir’s and has spent his days there during the last two months. Al-Humus had a broken arm and was limping badly from being hit in the leg with a rubber bullet during the demonstrations at the Al Aqsa mosque compound during Ramadan.
He told us that the army and settlers took away his tent 11 times, but the community helped him put up a new tent every time. He said that the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah is part of Israel’s plan to create one continuous settlement from West Jerusalem through East Jerusalem to the big settlement city of Maale Adumim, which is almost at the border with Jordan.
There are, he said, six consulates located in the Sheikh Jarrah area which have been ordered by the European Union not to get involved. The Quartet (the US, Russia, EU and UN) which is supposed to guide the so-called peace process is also headquartered in the area and is saying nothing publicly.
It will take international pressure, he told us, to stop the evictions. But now with all eyes on Ukraine, there is no longer much media attention on what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah. Why does the US think Ukrainians deserve the protection of international law but Palestinians do not?
Nancy Murray
Ibrahim Salem (at left) and Mohammed Abu al-Humus in Sheikh Jarrah