Stop Evicting Palestinians from Jerusalem

As on every Friday for months now, several hundred Israelis gather here in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in Arab East Jerusalem, to stand in vigil as a protest against the eviction of Palestinian families from homes they have lived in for decades.

By James Carroll (Middle East)

Published: Sat 27 Feb 2010, 10:12 PM

Last updated: Mon 6 Apr 2015, 8:42 AM

In August, seven families—about 50 people, including 35 children—were forced out of their homes, and immediately replaced by eight families of Jewish Israelis, members of extremist settler groups.

The Palestinians have been living in tents across the street from their house ever since. Six other nearby families have received eviction notices.

I spoke with one of the evicted fathers, Fouad Ghawi, who had lived in the house since 1954, when he was 8. He and his family were Palestinian refugees from Jaffa during the 1948 war, and his father traded in his UN refugee card, which guaranteed him basic support, for the right to move into the house the UN Relief and Works Agency and Jordan were building on vacant land. In return for finishing the house, the Ghwai family would get the legal deed. Three generations of the Ghawi family had lived there ever since—until last August, when an Israeli court ordered them out. They had no deed because, he told me, “the Jordan government would not put it in our name until we had proper plumbing, and then the 1967 war broke out.’’ Jordan’s authority ended.

One of the organisers of the protest vigil, Zvi Benninga, a 24-year-old Israeli medical student and Jerusalemite, told me, “It is so blatant because they were expelled for a second time by Israel—first in 1948, and now again.’’ The protest engages several critical issues. The government evictions depend on cloudy questions of pre-1948 ownership rights which, in most of Israel, have been simply deleted. Equivalent enforcement of “absentee property’’ laws elsewhere in Israel would lead to evictions of tens of thousands of Jewish Israelis.

The evictions also raise the larger question of Israel’s “creeping annexation’’ of East Jerusalem, not only through the expansion of settlements, which Benjamin Netanyahu, defying President Obama, refuses to freeze, but also through legally dubious removal of Palestinians from other Jerusalem neighborhoods like Silwan, just down the slope from the old city.

That other key Arab neighbourhoods, like Abu Dis, have been cut off from Jerusalem by the so-called “security barrier’’ points to the even larger question - whether, as far as the current Israeli government is concerned, the hard-won consensus that the promised Palestinian state would have its capital in East Jerusalem no longer applies. “This will stop any peace agreement,’’ Benninga told me.

The weekly demonstrations are being led by younger Israelis, although veterans of the Israeli peace camp have shown up, too - including prominent figures like the novelist David Grossman, the philosopher Moshe Halbertal, and the literary critic Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi. “J Street,’’ the American Jewish lobbying group, has sent a petition of support signed by 10,000 Americans. Today, Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, is here to support the evicted families. When I asked him what the vigil meant, he said, “This is an iconic group. Intellectuals, blue collar people, Jews, Arabs, old, young—representing thousands of people. This is a permanent reality.’’

Untie this knot in the nearly hopeless Israeli-Palestinian tangle and many others could be untied as well. The demonstrators are not interested in being valourised as champions of a vibrant Israeli democracy. Instead, they look to be bolstered by the broader world against the once-marginal figures who have more and more power in Israel. (The foreign ministry is headed by the far-right Avigdor Lieberman. This week, his deputy snubbed five US congressmen, including William Delahunt of Massachusetts, while Tzipi Livni, the opposition leader, warned “The Jewish state has been taken hostage by the ultra-orthodox parties.’’)

A critical stage has been reached, with the government-encouraged status quo showing up as disaster in the making, as much for Israel as for Palestine.

Jamalat Ghawi, a mother of four, told me from her place in the ad hoc tent across the street from her house, “I feel frustration and anger, and worry for my children. They dream of their house at night. They are terrified. They have no idea where they are going.” Today, they are not alone.