Near the end of my roughly one and a half hour commute from Ramallah to Jerusalem, I arrive at the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem (click on map above to enlarge). Sheikh Jarrah is home to numerous Foreign Consulates, hospitals, Palestinian homes, and an ever increasing Jewish settler population. The Sheikh Jarrah settlement scheme is one of the most contentious outside of the Old City, along with the settlement in the al-Bustan neighborhood in Silwan, and one of the most perilous when trying to resolve the question of Jerusalem.
This settlement scheme has become even more hazardous in recent weeks and days given the forced eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and the recent approval of settlement construction on the site of the Shepard Hotel. Last month the Jerusalem municipality approved a plan to construct 20 apartments plus a three-level underground parking lot on the site with construction slated to begin immediately. The hotel is owned by the family of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husseini; however, after Israel conquered East Jerusalem during the 1967 War, an Israeli government agency, the Custodian for Absentee Property, took control of the hotel and associated land. The land was then 'sold' by the Israeli government to US millionaire Irving Moscowitz in 1985, who is funding the current Shepard Hotel settlement plan.
Daily my bus goes past the Shepard Hotel, and I get dropped off on the road above the Shimon HaTzadik settlement. From here my closest route to PASSIA is directly through the settlement itself, comprised of 7-8 settler groups and roughly 40 settlers. The rock stairway down and through the settlement is marked by an Israeli security booth with armed guards. On my left while walking down the narrow stairway are homes now occupied by Jewish settlers and on my right are homes that have been lived in by Palestinian families since the 1950's. Midway down the stairway is a second manned security booth and a small playground for the children of the settlers and not the children of their Palestinian neighbors. There are gold plaques on the doors of the settler occupied homes commemorating there acquisition, and the stairway is strewn with Israeli flags commemorating Israel's sovereignty over all of Jerusalem.
After walking down the stairway I pass the supposed tomb of Shimon HaTzadik, the Second Temple High Priest. The settlers have transformed this area in core of Sheikh Jarrah into a Torah learning center and synagogue, which is bustling on Saturdays as the site of regular Shabbat prayer services. Directly across the street, used to lie the Sheikh Jarrah Protest Test, which was established following the eviction of the al-Kurd family from their home in November 2008. The tent was recently destroyed for the sixth time by Israeli authorities.
Before leaving Sheikh Jarrah and arriving at PASSIA in Wadi al-Joz, I pass the home of the Hanun family who along with the Ghawi family were forcibly expelled from their homes three days ago to make way for settler families who immediately occupied the homes. These expulsions resulted in the displacement of 53 people, including 19 children, and were the culmination of a long running legal battle between Jewish settler organizations and the Hanun and Ghawi families over ownership of the properties. The settler organizations claim the disputed land was purchased from local Arab owners in 1875 during Ottoman rule. Recently, the Israeli courts rejected an official letter issued from the Ottoman land registry archives in Ankara, Turkey stating that the archives have no record of the registration of any land in Sheikh Jarrah to a Jewish organization.
Regardless of Israeli domestic law, the evictions and settlement construction are illegal under international law. The fourth Geneva Convention explicitly states that "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
Perhaps most disconcerting about Jewish settlement within Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, such as Sheikh Jarrah, is the tremendous danger they pose to the "peace process." These settlements interweave Jewish and Palestinian residents within the heart of traditionally Palestinian neighborhoods, making the partitioning of Jerusalem along the Clinton Parameters of 2000, which would see Palestinian areas become part of a Palestinian state and Israeli areas become part of the State of Israel, virtually impossible.
Transforming Jerusalem into the capital of two states for two people is absolutely necessary to resolve both the Palestinian- and Arab-Israeli Conflicts. Without a just solution to the question of Jerusalem peace will forever remain out of reach.
Please click on the photograph slideshow on the right, which contains a series of images of Sheikh Jarrah, including pre- and post-eviction. The photographs were provided by Jason Hicks and Natalie Van der Aa.
No comments:
Post a Comment