Another wave of dispossession
Another wave of dispossessionAs a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah is home to about 3000 people who have been struggling over the ownership of this contested land, a microcosm of the larger Israeli- Palestinian struggle that enacts a similar logic of dispossession. Emerged as a result of UN
funding of a Jordanian project to build homes for displaced Palestinians, Sheikh Jarrah was later procured by a US based organization, Nahalat Shimon, that aided Jewish settlers in their efforts to move into Palestinian areas of Jerusalem after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. In 1982, the status of Palestinians living in Sheikh Jarrah shifted to that of tenants which made them eligible to stay on the property only as long as they paid the rent and maintained it. However, over the years certain Israeli laws allowed Jews to reclaim the property in Arab areas of Palestine if they could furnish adequate proof of their ownership. Refusing to recognize such agreements, Palestinians have henceforth been at the receiving end of expulsion since the early 2000s.
Why Sheikh Jarrah?
During the Six-Day War (1967) Sheikh Jarrah came under the de facto control of Israel after its forces occupied East Jerusalem. In 1972 the Jewish trusts laid legal claim to the land they had left behind in Sheikh Jarrah, but their documentation did not satisfy the legal requirements to complete the registration process. The trusts attempted to assert ownership nonetheless, and in 1982 they filed a lawsuit to evict many of the Palestinian residents. The residents’ attorney concluded a procedural agreement, without the residents’ full knowledge or consent, that accepted their status as tenants. That procedural agreement served as the legal basis for subsequent attempts at eviction.
Litigation continued through the remainder of the century, but several decades passed before any evictions were carried out. In 2003 the trusts sold their property rights to Nahalat Shimon International, an organization based in the United States that was created to facilitate moving Jewish Israelis into Sheikh Jarrah. In 2008 the organization stepped up legal efforts to evict Palestinian residents, and in 2009 it effected the eviction of two families. On February 15th 2021, the Jerusalem District Court upheld the eviction of six Palestinian families (27 individuals) from their homes of 70+ years in the Sheikh Jarrah nieghborhood of East Jerusalem in favor of the Nahalat Shimon settler group. The Court gave the families until May 2nd to vacate their homes, or file an appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel. In May 2021 an imminent court ruling on the eviction of four families from Sheikh Jarrah sparked a major escalation of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
In the face of repeated disappointments at the hands of the government and human rights organizations, Palestinians took it upon themselves to resist coercive Israeli policies and educate others about the illegality of the continual land acquisition. When in early 2021, Israeli courts ordered four Palestinian families to vacate their homes, the Kurd twins launched the #SaveSheikhJarrah campaign in March, an online petition that not only intended to sweep away he deluge of Israeli misinformation but aimed to unite all the Palestinians under the immediacy of the cause which was going to yet again dislocate several of them.New accounts and pages crop up every day on Instagram and Twitter to educate the audiences about the history of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict and the illegality of Israeli claims while simultaneously creating an affective model of empathy and loss by utilizing images and videos from people’s earlier experiences of similar displacements. In April 2021, Several popular pages like Jewishvoiceforpeace and #FreePalestine(SaveSheikhJarrahnow) were reposting old videos from films like My Neighborhood (2012) where Palestinian belongings were being thrown out in the courtyards and gardens while helpless owners of the house lamented over the lack of justice.
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- A Brief History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Khushboo Bhutani