The Ethnic Cleansing of East Jerusalem

Over the past couple of weeks, we have made a number of visits to a house in East Jerusalem in which a family is living under the threat of eviction by the Israeli authorities. The Al Kurd family have lived in their house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood (pictured right) since 1956, but on 16th July 2008 the Israeli Supreme Court issued an order to evict them. This order gives the go ahead for another 27 families living in the neighbourhood to be issued with similar eviction orders.

The Al Kurd’s house is part of a housing project which was built by the Jordanian government with the United Nations Refugee and Works Association (UNRWA), to house 28 Palestinians refugee families who fled their homes after the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 (East Jerusalem and the West Bank fell under the jurisdiction of Jordan following the 1948 Arab/Israeli war). It was agreed that after 3 years living in the houses, the refugees would forgo the food assistance they received from UNRWA in return for the ownership of the homes.

In 1967 Israel invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Shortly after the occupation began, 2 groups of Jewish settlers forged documents claiming that the land on which the houses in Sheikh Jarrah were built, belonged to them. With these documents they managed to register the land in their own names with the Israeli Land Registrar.

After continuous calls for the families to be evicted, the 2 settler groups eventually filed law suits against the families in 1982, claiming that they owned the property rights to the houses. The families appointed a lawyer to defend them. Without asking the families, the lawyer reached an agreement with the settlers, in which he recognised their ownership of the land in return for granting the families protection from eviction under Israeli law. As part of the agreement, the families would have to pay rent to the settler associations. Outraged, the families did not accept the agreement and refused to pay rent. They were subsequently issued with eviction orders by the Israeli courts.

For over 20 years, legal proceedings continued. After yet more investigations, the Land Registrar finally accepted that the settlers had registered the land using false documents and their registration was revoked. However, the Registrar refused to confirm that the Palestinian families were entitled to the ownership of the land.

In 2001, the Al Kurd family (pictured) left their home for 1 month to go to Jordan, where the father of the family was to receive medical treatment (he is partially paralysed and suffers from diabetes and heart problems). When they returned, they found that a group of settlers had broken into part of their home and were occupying it. In 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court recognised that the settlers had broken into the home and issued an eviction order but this has never been carried out. (In the picture the door to the right is where the Al Kurd family live while the door to the left is the section of the house that the settlers occupy)

In February 2008, a settler investment company, which the 2 settler groups claimed to have sold the land to, submitted a project to the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem in which they propose to demolish the 28 homes and build 200 settlement units to house new Jewish immigrants.

On 16th July 2008 the Israeli High Court, which did not accept the Land Registrar’s decision to revoke ownership of the land from the settlers and agreed that the settler investment group now owned the land, ordered the eviction of the Al Kurd family who had brought the case against the settlers who were occupying part of their home. Their eviction paves the way for the eviction of the rest families in the neighbourhood.

To reach the Al Kurd family home you have to pass down a few steps from the main road and weave through a small alleyway with houses on the left side and a very small children’s playground on the right. The first house you pass is adorned with Israeli flags – settlers have occupied it. Although all the houses in the neighbourhood were built for Palestinians, a number of them are now occupied by settlers. A temporary wooden hut sits on top of the house and in it, sits an armed security guard. There are no flags on the next house you come to – Palestinians still live in it. The next house is again adorned with Israeli flags – settlers have taken it over.

Then you come to the Al Kurd house. As you walk through a small gate, there is a large patio which is now filled with Palestinians, Israelis and international solidarity activists who sit night and day with the Al Kurd family, waiting for the police and the army to arrive to carry out the eviction order. An impromptu display of posters and banners has been arranged on the walls of the house. However there is one wall of the house that is devoid of any posters, that is because inside this section of the house, live a family of settlers.

The settlers who occupy this part of the house now, are not the same settlers who took over this part of the house in 2001. At the moment they are a young couple with 2 small children who have lived there for a matter of weeks. They belong to an organisation that basically sends people on ‘placements’ to various buildings that settlers have occupied around East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Every 2 or 3 weeks the ‘placements’ end and a new family arrives.

So while one family is defending the home that they have lived in for 42 years, the home in which their 5 children have been born and brought up, the other family is defending a building they have been moved into for the purpose of illegal occupation, they have no attachment to the building or the local community and in fact they will voluntarily leave when they are relieved of their post by the next illegal occupiers.

As we sat with the family, we heard that the settlers continually harass them. Over the years they have played loud music to keep the family awake at night, armed settler security guards have forced their way into the part of the house the family lives in and threatened them, they have brought large groups of settler children to play on the patio, put up posters of Palestinians and encouraged the children to shoot at them with toy guns. Since the court decision in July, an older male settler has come to the house at least once a day, shouting that the family should hurry up and get out of there because he is waiting to move in. One settler occupying a Palestinian home nearby was quoted as saying ‘It’s written in the Bible that we have a right to everywhere in this land, and here we are only minutes from the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.’

There is a feeling here amongst many observers that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem is one of the most contentious issues in negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Both see it as the most important site in the whole of Palestine for historical and religious reasons. The UN partition plan of 1947 stated that the city would be divided so that the Arabs had East Jerusalem and the Jews had West Jerusalem. Since the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, 250,000 illegal Israeli settlers have moved into East Jerusalem. Of the 250,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, 120,000 of them have been isolated from the city by the Apartheid Wall which has been built around their homes.

If the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood is taken over by settlers, it will mean that the largest settlement in the West Bank, Ma'aleh Adumin, and a number of other illegal settlements in East Jerusalem will be connected to the centre of Jerusalem and the Old City, where the most sacred sites for Jews and Muslims are situated. Although not a huge neighbourhood, the removal of Palestinians to make way for Israelis would be a significant step in ensuring that there was no longer an east or west Jerusalem, but one unified city – a perfect capital for the Israeli state.

As well as moving settlers in, the Israelis have done their best to move Palestinians out of East Jerusalem. They have made it virtually impossible for Palestinians to get permits to build homes, meaning that 3 out of every 4 built, are illegal and face demolition. Since 1967, 8000 buildings have been demolished, many of these are buildings with several storeys, housing many families.

Last week the Israelis demolished a 5 story building in the Beit Hanina neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. They claimed that the 5th floor of the building had been built without a permit. The owner offered to demolish the 5th floor himself, but the Israelis refused and instead demolished the whole building. They arrived in the middle of the night, told the families to get out and then blew it up the next day. The Palestinians had no time to remove their belongings, although the Israelis kindly allowed them to return to the rubble to dig out what they could and collect the bill for the cost of the demolition – 300,000 shekels (£43,500).

The cruelty did not stop there. A single mother, who just a couple of months ago had bought an apartment in the building, did not even have time to collect her purse before the building was destroyed. A few days later she discovered that her credit card had been used at a restaurant and to withdraw cash. The only people who had access to the building once she left and before it was destroyed, were soldiers. This means that having destroyed her home, they were cruel enough to steal the little she had left.

According to Jeff Halper who heads the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, ‘Illegal building is simply a pretext for destroying Palestinian families' homes and lives…The demolitions are part of a policy to stop the natural expansion of Palestinian communities in and around Jerusalem, freeing up the maximum amount of land for use by Israeli settlers…The demolitions increase the pressure on Palestinians to move into the West Bank, so that they will lose their residency rights in the city.’

Wherever you travel in the West Bank (and I presume Gaza) the picture of Jerusalem is always held up as a symbol of the Palestinian desire for freedom and independence. Not only is the city home to the third holiest site in Islam but it is of great historical importance to the Palestinian people and they have always regarded East Jerusalem as the eventual capital of an independent Palestinian state. With every demolition and eviction in East Jerusalem, and with every new Israeli settler that moves in, Israel is again changing the facts on the ground so that when negotiations on the status of Jerusalem reach a climax, they can point to the demographics and say that the whole of Jerusalem must belong to Israel.

On 9th November 2008 the Israeli army evicted the Al Kurd family in the middle of the night. The father of the family suffered a heart attack during the eviction and died two weeks later. His wife is currently living in a tent which the army, under the orders of the acting prime minister of Israel, Tzipi Livni, has destroyed several times.