Palestinians threatened with eviction in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood: "The Zionists want the neighbourhood for the Jews"

JerusalemThese days are seeing the worst spiral of violence between Israelis and Palestinians since 2014, a situation that so far has already cost more than 139 dead in the Gaza Strip, 8 in Israel and 10 in the occupied West Bank. A tension that has been simmering since the beginning of Ramadan a month ago, when the restrictions covered by the pandemic led to clashes with the police at the end of April, but especially intensified in recent days by the violent demonstrations of radical Zionist groups. At the origin of this latest crisis - now obscured by the noise of the bombings - is the conflict over the eviction of 36 Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Refugees twice

One of these families is that of Muhammad Sabagh, who has lived in this building since 1956, when the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees built 28 homes for refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. "East Jerusalem then belonged to Jordan, which unfortunately did not issue us with ownership papers and then abandoned us when Israel occupied the area in 1967. Soon after that, problems began for Palestinian families in the neighbourhood", explains Muhammad, 76, a native of Jaffa who lives in the building with about 40 other family members. "The last two years have been very difficult: in January 2019 we received the eviction order, but thank God we were able to stop it until December last year, but since then we have been suffering every day for whether it would be the last day we would live in this house, whether we would become refugees again", Muhammad concludes.

For the moment, Muhammad has gained a few days, as the Supreme Court decided earlier this week, amid days of unbridled violence on the streets of Jerusalem, to postpone a hearing that was scheduled for Monday to decide the future of four of the 36 threatened families. The hearing was rescheduled for 30 days later.

"Tomorrow, in a week, in a month, it doesn't matter. I know that in the end they will succeed in evicting us. That's what they've been trying to do for years. They want the neighbourhood for the Jews", says a despondent Abd al-Fattah Iskafi, 71, who has lived in the neighbourhood since he was 6, when his parents, refugees from the 48th Baq'a neighborhood of West Jerusalem, moved in. Like Muhammad, Abd al-Fattah explains that the legal problems began in the early 1970s: "They started telling us that this area of the neighbourhood belonged to the Jews, so we hired a lawyer... a Jewish lawyer, since there weren't many Arab lawyers here at that time, and he signed a paper without our consent in which we agreed to stay in the apartment but not to be the owners", he says.

Legal discrimination

To understand this conflict one has to know that according to Israeli law only Jewish Israelis can claim property that was theirs before the war of '48. Thus, as the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled, the area in question was bought by Jewish communities from its Arab owners in 1875, still under Ottoman rule. A small Jewish community was founded there and lived alongside the Arab community until the '48 war, when the area fell into Jordanian hands. In 1967, with Israel's victory in the third Arab-Israeli war and the annexation of East Jerusalem, the Jewish communities reclaimed their property rights under Israeli laws that benefited them, including this area of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where Palestinian refugee families such as the Muhammad and Adb al-Fattah families had settled.

From that moment on, a legal battle and a hell that lasted for years began, especially since the area was acquired in 2003 by the Zionist pro-settlement NGO Nahalat Shimon, which belongs to the American company Nahalat Shimon International and about which very little is known. Since then it has already succeeded in evicting several families and hopes to evict at least 300 more Palestinians, as it intends to build housing for Jewish families. "When we saw in 2008 that our neighbour, Fauzia, was being evicted, we realised that it was real, and that sooner or later it would be our turn. This creates a lot of anguish, it tears you up inside", Abd al-Fattah explains.

The Zionist and government side has sought to portray the case as a simple property dispute, while for activists and human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch it is a clear example of discrimination to expel Arab families and Judaize East Jerusalem based on the evidence of opposing legal outcomes depending on whether the person claiming pre-1948 property is Jewish or Arab. In the opinion of Muhammad al-Kurd, a 22-year-old who belongs to one of the 36 Palestinian families at risk of eviction, in the Middle East Eye portal, "this is the continuation of the Zionist project in Palestine initiated in '48. The policy of colonial expansion has replaced artillery with an inherently colonial and asymmetrical judicial system to favor Jewish Israelis".