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Back to Jerusalem: And it's Burning!
Eileen Fleming
Published 01/31/2010 - 2:28 p.m. CST
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eileen Fleming

What follows this expose by The Palestine Monitor, published first on 28 January 2010, is something I wrote on the topic in 2009 and 2005.

Jerusalem Is Burning


Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) is one of several organisations working to bring the violations occurring in East Jerusalem to the attention of the world. Their Chief Executive, Rabbi Asherman reports, “I see Jerusalem in flames, and know that my words will not succeed in conveying the horror of what I see or the dread in my heart…”

RHR was formed in 1988 and though the work of the organisation is broad its current focus is on the situation in East Jerusalem, in particular the events unfurling in Sheikh Jarrah.

The struggle for justice in Sheikh Jarrah

Maya Wind is the RHR press officer and every week she has been coordinating demonstrations across Jerusalem to expose and protest the injustices occurring in Sheikh Jarrah.

Sheikh Jarrah is one of the most contentious neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem with 28 properties embroiled in a legal battle between fundamentalist Israeli settlers and the Palestinians who live there. Maya describes the atmosphere as “extremely, extremely explosive. There are constantly violent outbreaks (…) settlers are provocative on purpose.”

The silencing of protest

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Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv gather in Sheikh Jarrah in support of the evicted Palestinian families
Photo: Brady Ng

The protest in Sheikh Jarrah has begun to build a self sustaining momentum, with regular crowds of hundreds turning out. Last week two coach loads of activists drove up from Tel Aviv: it was the largest demonstration yet in Sheikh Jarrah. But as the demonstrators grow in number and the media start to cover the event extensively, so do Israeli security forces attempts to shut the protest down. Last Friday the police refused to grant the permit for marching from West to East Jerusalem and stormed the crowd of demonstrators, arresting 22 of them. The human rights community in Israel has moved quickly to condemn this cynical attempt to silence legitimate protest.

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Israeli police cracking down on the demonstrators
Photo: Brady Ng
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Holding back the demonstrators
Photo: Brady Ng
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As the demonstration continued through the afternoon, the israeli police called for reinforcement for crowd control
Photo: Brady Ng

"The police are calling us outlaws and anarchists, despite the fact that the crowd here is mostly composed of professors from the Hebrew University and Jerusalemite teens who sing protest songs to the sound of drums,""While the officers suppress our protests, sometimes violently, haredim and settlers riot unhindered in the neighborhood and attack Palestinian residents – sometimes to the point at which they require medical treatment." said Avner Inbar, a left-wing activist.

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Israeli police clear a path for Jewish settlers who are entering Sheikh Jarrah
Photo: Brady Ng

Apathy and dissent

Security tactics are getting more extreme and so to are the reactions ordinary Jerusalemites are having to the demonstration as it weaves from the predominantly Israeli West to the Palestinian East of the city. Maya reports, “We’re called traitors, cursed at, eggs are thrown at us. But that’s only positive, it shows we are having an impact, that we are making people outraged and that’s important because I’m equally outraged by what’s going on here.”

Maya works throughout the week to engage ordinary Israelis with the issue of Sheikh Jarrah, in particular targeting young people through flyering universities and nightclubs where the main obstacle she faces is not opposition but indifference.

“People are just very apathetic; they can’t be bothered to find out what’s happening in East Jerusalem. For many Jerusalemites East Jerusalem might as well be another country, they never venture here.”

With a wisdom that belies her 19 years, Maya joined RHR after being released from Israeli prison last March having served time following her refusal to serve in the Israeli Army. Four years ago a conversation with a Palestinian girl turned her life around.

“I was 15 and I had one conversation with a Palestinian girl who told me one story about something soldiers did to her father and that was the burst of my bubble.”

As a young teenager Maya had to reeducate herself about the reality of the Israeli Occupation and she is now an active member of the peace movement. Alongside the demonstration Maya regularly stays over with families under eviction orders. Her aim is to bring these human rights violations to the attention of the world and to show solidarity with the families under threat, “for the morale of the family it’s very important for them to feel, in this case, that the occupiers care and that there are Israelis who are opposing this.”

To find out more about Sheikh Jarrah on Palestine Monitor

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi...

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi...

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spi...

 To find out more about Rabbis for Human Rights visit http://www.rhr.org.il/index.php?lan...

The Many Layers of NaHalat Shimon beg the question: Where's the money coming from?


Published first August 8, 2009 [Occupied East Jerusalem] Last Sunday morning just before sunrise, Israeli forces evicted seventy more Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which is being taken over by the Nahalat Shimon settlers.

"The events in Sheikh Jarrah garnered international censure from the European Union, the United Nations (UN) and from Britain, which said it was 'appalled' at the move. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday night called the Israeli evictions "deeply regrettable" and she urged "the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions." [1]

Israeli forces also demolished the Al-Kurd family protest tent for the sixth time. The Al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood last November, just prior to my first visit and I returned again on June 10, 2009.

Less than a five minute walk from my room at the Ambassador Hotel and less than ten from the Old City of Jerusalem is the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Around the corner from my hotel and up the hill from the Al-Kurd Tent is a newly erected community center with a plaque "Dedicated to the Children of Shimon Hazadik Neighborhood" from a Dr. Rubin Brecher and family of Lawrence, New York.

According to Jewish tradition, Shimon Hazadik (which means 'The righteous') was the High Priest at the time of Alexander the Great. He reminded the people of what's important in the world and he used to say: "On three things the world stands: the Torah, on Service [prayer] and on acts of kindness."[2]


Mrs. Al-Kurd, known as Um Kamal [mother of Kamal] and her now deceased husband Mohammed had lived in the neighborhood from 1956 until the morning of November 9, 2008 when the Israeli police enforced a court order that evicted them.

When I returned to the tent on June 10, 2009 and asked Um Kamal where her calm strength and perpetual smile came from, she gestured to the sky and responded, "Allah: God gives me."

Maher Hannoun interjected, "Um Kamal is a strong woman because she has a strong connection to this land where we both were born! Even for millions of dollars we would never sell our land, our hopes, our dreams! We are here legally and we have a contract that was signed between the government and UNWRRA, but what gives us the real power to fight is seeing all the people who come to be with us here believing in human rights. We need every one to carry our message around the world that this is our home and we will never leave here.

"In Gaza they attacked with F16 tanks. In Jerusalem they attack with evictions and transferring property. More than 500 homes in this neighborhood have already received eviction notices. They are building 200 settler units and an American Israeli company named Nahalat Shimon Builders is behind it."

Nahalat Shimon is also the name of a settler group and a real estate company.


On August 2, 2009, "Israeli riot police wielding clubs kicked out two Palestinian families from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday, defying international protests over Jewish settlement activity in the area. Clashes erupted after police moved in at dawn around the homes in the upmarket Arab district of Sheikh Jarrah following an Israeli court decision ordering the eviction of the 53 Palestinians, including 19 minors.

“I was born in this house and so were my children,” said Maher Hanoun, whose family was evicted along with the neighboring Ghawi household. “Now we are on the streets. We have become refugees.”

"The Supreme Court ordered the evictions following an appeal by the Nahalat Shimon International settler group which claimed Jewish settlers have title deeds for the properties, despite UN and Palestinian denials. Jerusalem authorities have also given permission for the construction of about 20 housing units in Sheikh Jarrah, in defiance of global calls for a halt to all settlement activity in occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank." [3]


On November 9, 2008, at 3:30 AM, Reverend Richard Toll was awakened in his hotel room in the Ambassador while the Israeli Occupying Forces/IOF broke down the door of the home of the Al Khurd family. Rev. Toll informed me that he was jarred awake by a woman’s pain filled scream that was indescribable.

 
The Al Khurd family had lived in their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood since the days when east Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. The United Nations upon contract with Jordan allotted them the land after they became refugees when they were expelled from their home in west Jerusalem by Zionists during the 1948 war.

Hasib Nashashibi, of the Ensan Center for Democracy and Human Rights [an NGO coalition of Palestinian Muslim and Christians] explained to me, “When Jordan controlled this land and the UN granted privileges to the Palestinian refugees including those from west Jerusalem, such as education, health care, and relief and development; they also allowed the refugees to give up some privileges and receive a home and land deed instead. Jordan never fulfilled their obligation to send the written documentation that these west Jerusalem refugees are land owners and not tenants. Now the Israeli’s are trying to make them refugees for the second time!”

 
Since East Jerusalem’s occupation by Israel in 1967, the Oriental Jews Associations and the Knesseth Yisrael Association have been waging a brutal take over of the Khurds’ home, claiming that the land originally belonged to Jews.

In 1972, they succeeded to register the land in their name with the Israeli Land registrar. In 1999, settlers burst into the home and set up an occupation in a wing of the house that belonged to the couple’s son, Raed. The Khurd family hired lawyers and have spent a fortune in court battles and in 2006, the Israeli court finally revoked the claim of ownership by the settlers. However, on February 25, 2007 the Israeli Supreme Court issued an order to evict the settlers but it was never enforced!

In Israeli law, all of Jerusalem, including the eastern half of the city, is considered to be the “indivisible” capital of the Jewish state and religiously fundamentalist settlers have been claiming land all over occupied East Jerusalem based on title deeds that pre-existed 1948.

Since Israel became a state 531 Palestinian villages have been destroyed and 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees in 1948, and Israel continues to make more!

President George W. Bush became a willing collaborator in this on going injustice in his infamous 2004 exchange of letters with Ariel Sharon. Bush agreed that Israel would not be expected to return to the armistice lines of 1949 and declared that Israel would be able to hold on to its “population centers” in the West Bank. This is nothing more than Orwellian spin that attempts to justify the established settlement blocs for every one of them are illegal under international law.

 
"Michshol Hafrada" is Hebrew for "The Separation Wall" and separation translates to Apartheid in Afrikaan.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out And to whom I was likely to give offence. Something there is that does not love a wall, That wants it down.-Robert Frost


The Wall has divided Palestinians from Palestinians and has stolen their aquifers, denies them access to their land, jobs, families and holy sites and for every mile it consumes over $1.25 Million USA Tax dollars.

The Wall was deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice but no president has yet demanded Israel to tear down this wall!

The so called Holy Land is a Swiss cheese of land locked enclaves; known as Bantustans in Afrikaan. Jewish only colonies have been implanted to divide the Palestinian neighborhoods throughout occupied territory. Over 100,000 Palestinians are trapped and then daily humiliated and tortured at the over 600 checkpoints that deny them access to their families, land, jobs, resources and holy sites.

Since 1967, over 22,000 dwellings -averaging eleven people per unit- have been bulldozed by Israeli forces usually because they interfere with settlement expansion.

Israel attempts to justify their immoral actions with three distinct categories:

1. Collective Punishment: Homes of suspected terrorists-in reality that is anyone who opposes the occupation- as well as the families of suicide/homicide bombers.

These punitive actions amount to 15% of the over 22,000 homes destroyed since 1967.

2. Administrative demolitions for lack of building permits: Israel refuses to issue any and this accounts for 25%. In occupied east Jerusalem one out of four Palestinian homes have a demolition order.

3. Security: The blanket reason given for all of Israel’s injustices and illegal actions.


On December 20, 2006, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his relentless work confronting and challenging South Africa's Apartheid regime was quoted in The Guardian: "I've been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land. I have seen the humiliation at the checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about…Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice…If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land."

I imagine Shimon Hazadik might remind "the children" who are taking over the neighborhood that,"From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught...that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, 'vomit you out' if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah [command]:

"When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself' but also 'you shall love the other.'" [4]


I also imagine Shimon Hazadik might be interested- as we all should- in knowing from whom and where the money comes from that equips the Nahalat Shimon settlers. 

1.  http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0804/p06s12-wome.html
2.  http://www.chabadonline.com/scripts/tgij/paper/Articlecm.asp?articleID=1289
3.   http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\08\03\story_3-8-2009_pg4_6
4.   Rabbi Lerner, TIKKUN Magazine, page 35, Sept./Oct. 2007

Dear Reader: This chapter is based on an actual email conversation I had with an Episcopal priest.

He gave up talking to me after my third email to him and is now in Jerusalem working with the Holocaust Memorial.

 
Excerpted from KEEP HOPE ALIVE

Chapter 16: A CONFRONTATIONAL CONVERSATION


"Father Paul, you cannot possibly be telling me that an Episcopal priest has been taken in by fundamentalist theology?" Terese incredulously asked the new assistant to the rector at St. Joan of Arc Episcopal Church in Orlando, who also served at the noon mass every Wednesday.

Father Paul Hendricks was a passionate evangelist on a mission to convert every Jew he encountered to become a Christian. Terese had kept her silence for the first six months she had been listening to his Wednesday noon sermons, but finally broke her silence after the rest of the parishioners had departed.

Paul sighed and shook his head. "Look, Mrs. Hunter, I read your op/ed in the newspaper about Israel and Palestine, and we both agree we want peace; we just go about it differently."

"Father, let me say that the fastest growing cult in the U.S.A. is the cult of Christian Zionism. Approximately 25 million U.S. Christians believe as you do, and I am most depressed to see that the simple answers of fundamentalism have reached their tentacles into the thinking man’s church. You just preached for thirteen minutes on Genesis 12:3--‘I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse: and in you all the families of the world are blessed’--as if God meant blessings to be political power and military might. Father, surely you understand that the belief of the ancient Israelites, who held that they were chosen, as if they were somehow special from others, as if God esteemed them above others, is just basic primitive nationalism. Come on, Father, looking down on one’s enemies to foster one’s own tribal interest and praying to God to smite one’s enemies is what the ancients did. Isn’t it about time we moved beyond that limited thinking?"

Father Paul clenched his fists and held them behind his back, as he suppressed a simmering rage. He stood nine inches above Terese’s upturned head, and with a slick smile and condescending tone told her, "Mrs. Hunter, you are very misled. The text is understood to mean a blessing to Abraham’s lineage--"

Terese cut in. "Agreed! And Genesis 12:3 was promised even before Ishmael, the father of the Arab nation, and Isaac, the Jew, were born! And what about the very first mention of Israel? Jacob was renamed Israel for having wrestled and struggled with God. That is how I understand Israel; everyone who struggles and wrestles with God is Israel, too. Israel means more than a geographical location, Father Paul."

"Mrs. Hunter, the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of the prophetic scriptures, and God’s covenant with Israel is eternal, exclusive, and will not be abrogated. I refer you to Genesis 12:1-7, 15:4-7, 17:1-8; Leviticus 26:44-45; and Deuteronomy 7:7:8."

"And Father, I refer you to Matthew 5:43-45, which does not only critique Genesis 12:3; it blows it apart, for Christ commanded, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despite-fully use you, that you maybe children of your Father."

The two had reached Paul’s SUV and he silently prayed he could make a swift escape, but Terese had positioned herself at the driver’s door, and if he were to open it swiftly, she could be easily moved aside. Father Paul entertained the thought for more than a moment, but remained mute and still, as the tiny woman exploded with a torrent of words.

"Look, blind allegiance to the Israeli government has allowed them to become a big bully, and isn’t God always on the side of the oppressed? My sense is that you Zionists see the political state of Israel as a replacement for Christ, at the center of the Christian faith, and that certainly is not Christianity!


"How do you take Genesis 12:3 to literally mean that blessings equal land and political power, yet ignore God’s promise in Genesis 21:17-20 to ‘make a great nation out of Ishmael’s descendants and that ‘God was with the boy.’ Yet your way of thinking allows the growing apartheid wall to continue, and supports occupation and oppression of people that God also made promises too.”

"Mrs. Hunter, why don’t you make an appointment and we can discuss this further? I really have to go."

"Okay, I can take a hint, but let me leave you with this: when religion and politics are in bed together, everybody gets screwed! The Israeli government is using you Zionists as apologists in support of their agenda of illegal occupation and settlements in the West bank, Golan, and Gaza, on literal biblical grounds taken out of context. Your blind allegiance to every act of Israel, understood as being orchestrated by God and which should therefore be condoned, supported, and even praised, makes me want to puke! And I wonder about the true motives of Christians who actually relish the idea of Armageddon and love to speculate on who gets ‘left behind.’ Christ was very clear that there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who were so sure they were in, but get left out. God has always been on the side of the oppressed, and your uncritical endorsement and justification for Israel’s racist and apartheid policies are an abomination."

The stunned and silent priest watched in relief as Terese turned, flipped her braid, and walked away.


"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever.  Use a pile driver.  Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again.  Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack...And never, never, never, never, ever, never give up." - Sir Winston Churchill



Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine


Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"  
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"


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Added: February 04, 2010. 12:27 PM CST
The Alternative
Arab society features apartheid of women, apartheid of homosexuals, and apartheid of Christians, Jews, and democracy. Gays are being hanged in Saudi Arabia, genocide is taking place in Sudan, and women across the Arab world are murdered for not wearing a hijab or for falling in love with the wrong man.

Yet despite all of the above, eight out of the eight last United Nations’ resolution pertaining to human rights happened to deal with Israel – the only state in the region where minorities have the right to vote and a country whose legislature includes Arabs almost from day one.
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