This photo was taken by the talented Ahmad Nimer, from Nablus and working in Ramallah, who had a permit to visit Jerusalem for the day, for the first time in 12 years.
The photo, posted here shows the garden of the American Colony Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, bordering Wadi Joz, in [East] Jerusalem:
At 5am today (Sunday — the first day of the Israeli work week), Israeli demolition machines that look like large mechanical dinosaurs arrived at the site of the “Shepherd’s Hotel” in East Jerusalem.
Just over an hour later, these dinosaur-like machines began their work:
Hagit Ofran of Peace Now writes on her blog, Eyes on the Ground in East Jerusalem, that today’s move was the “demolition of hope”.
Haaretz says ownership of Shepherd’s Hotel in East Jerusalem is “contested”.
The property has stood vacant for years, as a behind-the-scenes struggle was waged over its fate. It is not far from the Hyatt Regency Hotel that Israel constructed in the nearby Mount Scopus neighborhood, where a main campus of Hebrew University is located, as well as the Hadassah-Mount Scopus Hospital.
The demolition of this “iconic” building — which Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat reminded us today was originally constructed in the 1930s as the family home of the then-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and nationalist leader, Hajj Amin al-Husseini — will make way for “a major new Jewish settlement…backed by American settler financier Irving Moskowitz”, according to the report by Hagit Ofran.
She adds that it will be the first settlement construction since the June 1967 war in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood (north of the Old City of East Jerusalem).
Husseini was exiled by the British, who seized his house and turned it into a military base. In the 1948 fighting that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel in the former British Mandate of Palestine, the property was under the control of the Jordanians, who allowed a trustee for the Mufti’s estate to “rent” it to “hoteliers”, Sa’eb Erekat’s message said.
However, a Palestinian source in East Jerusalem previously recounted that the Farwaji family, which operated several hotels in East Jerusalem, acquired control of the property during the Jordanian administration, and operated it as the Shepherd’s Hotel. Upon the death of the principal member of the family, some of his heirs — his sisters — decided they could not keep up the Shepherd’s Hotel, and it was sold.
In 1984 or 1985, Irving Moskowitz reportedly bought it…
The Los Angeles Times reported (perhaps at least partly wrongly?) here that “Israel took control of the building in the 1980s on the grounds that it was absentee property, meaning the owner did not live in Jerusalem or was a member of an enemy state. It later sold it to Irving Moskovitch, an American multimillionaire and strong supporter of the Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem”.
The Guardian reported here that “His ownership is contested by the Husseini family”.
The Guardian story added that “A handful of settler supporters witnessed the demolition. Daniel Luria of Ateret Cohanim, a rightwing pro-settler organisation, said: ‘There is no more beautiful sound than the destruction of the house of a notorious, not just Nazi sympathiser, but Nazi’. Haj Amin al-Husseini was an ally of Hitler”.
The Jerusalem Post reported here that “The building received a construction permit from the municipality six months ago, the last stamp of approval needed before construction can begin. Construction was delayed for six months over a dispute with [AbdelQader?] a son of Faisal al-Husseini (1940-2001), a cousin of Haj Husseini and a former Palestinian Authority minister for Jerusalem affairs, who claimed that the family owned part of the parking lot that will serve as an entrance to the future complex. They lost the court case about a month ago, allowing Moskowitz to start demolishing the building”.
The JPost story added that “Moskowitz’s original plan included 100 apartments, but it was scrapped because it would have needed to go through a lengthy approval process by the Local and District Planning and Building committees. Since the plot had been zoned for up to 20 residential units under the a master plan for Sheikh Jarrah, by not exceeding the zoning plan Moskowitz was able to bypass the regular approval process, which includes approval from the Interior Ministry”.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said: “this move contradicts the logic of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties on the status of Jerusalem. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties should mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem, and safeguards its status for people around the world. Ultimately, the lack of a resolution to this conflict harms Israel, harms the Palestinians, and harms the U.S. and the international community”.
Earlier, the EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Ashton issued a statement saying: “I strongly condemn this morning’s demolition of the Shepherd Hotel and the planned construction of a new illegal settlement. I reiterate that settlements are illegal under international law, undermine trust between the parties and constitute an obstacle to peace. Furthermore, we recall that East Jerusalem is part of occupied Palestinian territory; the EU does not recognise the annexation by Israel”.
And Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said “The demolition of Shepherd Hotel by Israeli settlement organizations in the Arab Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, which seek to impose new realities on the ground, runs counter to international law and the relevant UN resolutions”. He urged immediate international action.
Despite all the international comment, and all the local outrage, the site was quite quiet on Sunday evening. One — just one — police van was on stand-by across the street. And the two demolition machines were folded up like two great dinosaurs, sleeping on the front lawn… ready to resume work in the morning.
Here’s former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, wading right into the middle of the weekly Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah on 22 October, accompanied by two other members of The Elders visiting the region, including delegation leader Mary Robinson and Ela Bhatt — and a whole squad of nervous U.S. security agents, some in suits, and some in short-sleeved shirts:
Via the Israeli Occupation Archives, here.
The Elders delegation visiting the region visited the weekly Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah today, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said, according to a report in Hazaretz, that “the eviction of Palestinians from their homes might be in accordance with Israeli law, but is against international law”.
IT’s too much!
Weekly Friday demonstrations have been held since last autumn, focussing on the serial eviction of Palestinian refugee families from UNRWA-built homes (28 are targetted) who are replaced by Israeli settlers who say their aim is to restore a pre-1948 Jewish presence in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, north of the Old City. This effort to displace Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah is taking place around a tomb said to be of Simon the Just (Shimon Hatzadik), High Priest in the Second Jewish Temple, that has became a focus of Orthodox Jewish pilgrimage in the past decade, and the plan is to clear away the Palestinian homes and build a housing complex for 200 Jewish families.
This Friday, however, the weekly demonstration will be re-focussed on the situation in Silwan — completely on the other [southern] side of the Old City of East Jerusalem — where 88 houses have been under threat of demolition for the past couple of years, mostly for having been built without proper permits, and where a seven-story building (also built without proper permits, in an area where two stories are the current maximum permitted, with a future possibility of four) draped in an Israeli flag banner, towers over the Palestinian neighborhood, inhabited by Jewish religious families under organized private and publicly-funded security protection.
Photo of demonstrators gathering in Silwan on Friday under the crenelated walls of the Old City and the dome of Al-Aqsa mosque – from Wadi Hilweh Information Center in Silwan
At the beginning of the week, the Jerusalem municipal planning committee refused to hear a counter-proposal from Palestinian residents, and went ahead to approve a plan pushed by the Mayor, Nir Barkat, to demolish 22 of the 88 Palestinian homes and construct a “King’s Garden” [Gan Hamelech] tourism center in the Al-Bustan [garden or park] area of Silwan. It caused an uproar.
Continue reading Friday demonstrations in East Jerusalem to focus on Silwan
Demonstrators dressed and made up as the underdog blue Nav’i people from Pandora in the film Avatar participated, as shown here, in the now-traditional Friday demonstration against eviction of Palestinian refugees from the homes built for them in the 1950s by UNRWA in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, when this area was under Jordanian administration.
And, here (as we reported yesterday) are the other blue people who turned out to demonstrate earlier on Friday, in the West Bank village of Bil’in, where the protest was directed against The Wall being constructed by the Israeli military — in this case, on confiscated Palestinian land — in order to separate areas of Palestinian and Israeli population.
From a link on Facebook, a post on Joseph Dana’s blog on the Friday demonstrations that have been taking place for the past 3 to 4 months in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where Palestinian refugee families are being evicted, one by one, from homes they have been living in for over 50 years and replaced by Jewish (even if they might not all – yet – be Israeli) settlers whose aim is to reclaim property that they claim belonged to Jews before the proclamation of the State of Israel in May 1948.
It is, as Israeli activists seem to be arguing, a terrible form of victor’s justice — if even true — because these and other Palestinians are barred from seeking restitution of properties they lost from 1948 on.
Joseph Dana wrote that “Sheikh Jarrah is about the families that live on the streets because of Israeli actions to take over their homes in favor of extremist settlers, backed by American money, that want to derail any possibility for peaceful reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. Sheikh Jarrah is about Palestinians. Yet, over the past months, Sheikh Jarrah has become a symbol of the (failing) Israeli democractic system. The growing police repression, the crackdown on leftist views, the double standards that plague Israeli society and the breakdown of communication between Israelis courts and police are all on full display in Sheikh Jarrah. Because of the waves of arrests and clearly misguided treatment of Israeli protesters at the hands of the Israeli police, the objectives of the Sheikh Jarrah protest have changed. The media has entered the picture, deciding to document the treatment of Israelis in Sheikh Jarrah. Last week, high profile public figures like Yossi Sarid joined the protest. Did he meet with the Palestinian families that are homeless? Did they write articles about the situation that these Palestinians are facing? The answer is not that clear. He wrote about Israelis. He wrote about Israeli democracy and about the state conduct regarding Israelis. This is an important issue in Israeli society and I am personally happy that the debate has reached such high levels in the media discourse. But I am scared that we have lost sight of the big picture in Sheikh Jarrah. We need to reformulate our approach in order to place the emphasis on the Palestinian narrative of this story. If in the process, the weakness of Israeli democracy is shown, then that is great. But this cannot be the main focus of the protest”. These observations are posted here.
As we noted in an update on our post about these matters yesterday, Gershon Baskin (co-Director of IPCRI, the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information), reported that — unlike the previous weeks, which saw a total of about 70 Israeli activists arrested — there were (no doubt because of political pressure due to the intense media coverate) NO arrests in yesterday’s Sheikh Jarrah demonstration.
Palestinians demonstrating in the West Bank did not have an equally pleasant and uplifting time, however. Though I haven’t yet seen a report about whether or not there were any further arrests (maybe those who send out the information are under detention) — there was one significant arrest at 2am on Thursday morning in a raid on the house of Mohammed Khatib, a protest leader in Bil’in — but Palestinian TV showed live footage of Israeli soldiers shooting plenty of tear gas…
Thanks to a another link on Facebook, this one posted by Didi Remez, we learn that Radio Netherlands interviewed correspondent/reporter David Poort in Sheikh Jarrah during Friday’s demonstration. Asked if the group included many Palestinians, Poort replied: “The people I see in front of me are mainly from Tel Aviv, there are hardly any Palestinians taking part in these left-wing demonstrations because they’re afraid if they get arrested their their papers, their legal papers, will be withdrawn. Also, they’d be held up in jail for a very long time and whenever these Israeli activists get arrested they’ll be out the next day.” These remarks can be heard by clicking on the audio here.
Today is Friday. Palestinian television will normally be show the Friday prayers from Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, located in the Old City of East Jerusalem, but this Friday Palestinian TV will broadcast live from Burrin, a village in the northern West Bank, near Nablus, where a mosque under construction, the Suliman al-Pharisee Mosque, was served a demolition order, just five days ago — last Sunday, the day on which the Palestinian presidential and legislative elections were supposed to have been held, before they were postponed. The mosque has been entirely built (on Burrin land classified as Arab B), and it’s all finished, except for the minaret…
And, at 3:00 in the afternoon, as they have for nearly four months, a new and growing coalition of Israeli anti-occupation activists will meet to demonstrate their opposition to Jewish settlers replacing Palestinian families in East Jerusalem homes built for them by the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, in Sheikh Jarrah, in the early 1950s under the Jordanian administration. The police have refused to give the activists a permit. But a judge has ruled on Thursday that no permit is needed, as long as the activists don’t block the streets, or make political speeches.
UPDATE: Here is a photo just posted by Didi Remez on Facebook, showing the Israeli author David Grossman – in center of photo below – attending this week’s protest at Sheikh Jarrah just before 3:00pm – (photo apparently taken by Itamar Broderson). Grossman is one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, and is also a supporter of the Geneva Initiative between Palestinian and Israeli “civil society”, and bereaved father of an IDF soldier who was killed just hours before the end of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon.
UPDATE: Bernard Avishai reported later on his blog (here) that Dr. Ron Pundak of the Peres Peace Center, and another supporter of the Geneva Initiative, was also present.
UPDATE: IPCRI’s co-director Gershon Baskin reported via Facebook before sunset that the Sheikh Jarrah demonstration is over — “and no one was arrested this week”.
HOWEVER, in the West Bank, it was different. The IDF spokespersons unit reported via Twitter that:
– “120 rioters, hurling rocks @ violent protest @ Bi’lin, security forces responding w riot dispersal mean”
– “100 rioters hurling rocks @ violent protest @Nil’in, security forces responding w riot dispersal means”
– “100 rioters hurling rocks @ violent protest @ Dir Hidhan N of Ramallah, security forces responding w riot dispersal means”
Continue reading It's Friday – protests in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem + West Bank
Last Friday afternoon, Israeli police arrested 17 Israeli anti-occupation demonstrators who had crossed the Green Line and assembled in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, where over the last year three families have been thrown out of homes built for them in the early 1950s by the the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on land allocated by the Jordanian authorities who administered the land following the 1948 war that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel.
Jewish (they may not all be Israeli citizens) settlers immediately moved into those three homes, guarded by their own private security organization — and by the Israeli national police and Border Police. The situation in this area is now very tense, but violence has been astonishingly limited.
There have been some verbal confrontations, but the two sides generally make enormous efforts to ignore each other’s presence.
There seems to be no actual threat to the Jewish settlers, other than legal challenges by the Palestinians, and now the protests organized by a new coalition of Israeli activists.
Israeli anti-occupation demonstrators have begun holding Friday afternoon protests there, on a weekly basis over the past several months, in support of the threatened Palestinian families. Last Friday’s arrests may have marked a turning point.
Here is a photo of Didi Remez (from his Facebook site) at the 15 January protest demonstration organized by Israeli anti-occupation activists in solidarity with threatened Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah. In this now-iconic image, Didi Remez is objecting to the arrests made by the Israeli police, and telling them to “Arrest me, too!”. The police complied – he was arrested.
After all the commotion, a bigger demonstration is expected today.
UPDATE: Here is a photo of the start of today’s demonstration just tweeted by CNN’s Kevin Flower
After last Friday’s arrests, in which the head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Hagai Elad, was among those taken into custody when he simply approached police to attempt to mediate, the demonstrators spent over 36 hours in jail during the Israeli weekend and the Jewish sabbath, before an Israeli judge ruled that the arrests were not warranted.
This Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah has now become the talk of the town — and of elsewhere in the region.
One of the organizers of the weekly Friday Israeli anti-occupation demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, Didi Remez, has posted a notice about today’s demonstration, saying that “Police have refused to grant license for [this] Friday procession; refusing to provide reasons. The vigil, unequivocally ruled legal and not requiring licence by Jerusalem Justice of the Peace, will take place at 15:00, as usual. Police, however, have warned organizers that, ruling or no ruling, they will forcibly break up the demonstration”.
Didi Remez was one of those arrested last Friday. He was also reportedly one of the first of some 20 demonstrators arrested today.
Another photo of the Didi Remez at the Friday 15 January 2010 demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem.
UPDATE: True to their word, the Israeli police broke up the demonstration. They arrested some 20 Israeli demonstrators, including veteran Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who told the Ynet website that the arrests were “arbitrary and unruly”. Sarid also said: “I have been following the developments here for the past few months and I have read about what the police did over the past week. I became nauseous and wanted to vomit.” YNet reported that former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg and Hadash MK Mohammad Barakeh also participated in the demonstration, and that protesters “waved signs reading, ‘Free Sheikh Jarrah’ and chanted, ‘Cowardly settlers, leave the homes at once’. The YNet story can be read in full here.
UPDATE: Ben Lynfield has just reported in The Scotsman that “Yehuda Shaul, an activist in the former soldiers’ group Breaking the Silence was dragged away after he led the crowd in a chant of ‘democracy is not built by evicting people from their houses’.” Ben’s article can be read in full here.
The new activism by committed Israeli human rights groups who are against the Israeli occupation, and against Israeli injustice to the Palestinians, is impressive.
In the past, the more traditional Israeli protests, by what the Israeli media calls “left-wing” Israelis, usually took place in Tel Aviv or in West Jerusalem.
In the past months, a new coalition of Israeli human rights activists — who have not entered politics — has come to support Palestinians both in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem. Groups of younger activists from groups like Anarchists Against the Wall have been joined by more established and traditional (but no less committed) groups like Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
Notable have been the Israeli human rights activism in Sheikh Jarrah, where the first two extended Palestinians were evicted by their homes by Israeli police and Border Police and then almost immediately replaced by young, militant, organized Jewish settlers, at the beginning of August. We have reported on this new form of Israeli — non-violent — activism, and its suppression by Israeli police and Border Police, previously here.
A new tradition has developed [over the past three months] of weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah on Friday afternoon (just before sundown, and the start of Shabbat).
This past Friday, 17 Israeli human rights activists were arrested by the Israeli police and Border Police — including the Executive Director of ACRI, Hagai El-Ad, and reportedly also the head of Rabbis for Human Rights. They were just released today — after spending almost 40 hours (36 hours, they reported later), including all of Shabbat, in jail.
Didi Remez reported on Facebook that “Four of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers defended the group at {befor} the Jerusalem Justice of the Peace, arguing that the dispersion of the protest was part of a campaign to stifle dissent and freedom of speech … Judge ruled arrests were categorically illegal”.
”
In a separate posting on Facebook, Didi Remez posted a message from ACRI attorney Dan Yakir in which Yakir wrote:
“Like every Friday over the last three months, last Friday, January 15, 2010, there was a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah against Jews moving into the neighborhood.
The police rejected the organizers’ request to march from the Hamashbir L’Tzarchan department store in downtown Jerusalem to Sheikh Jarrah, so 150 protestors held a protest watch in the neighborhood.
Even though this sort of protest does not require a license, within 15 minutes a police officer ordered the demonstrators to disperse and within a short time 17 demonstrators were arrested. One of the detainees was Hagai El-Ad, the Executive Director of ACRI, after he tried to no avail to persuade the officers there was no legal basis for dispersing the demonstration.
On Friday evening ACRI submitted a request to release the detainees, but the request was not heard.
On Saturday night the detainees were brought to the Magistrate Court and the police asked to release them on the following conditions: to require them to report for investigation, to pose NIS 5000 in bail and to stay out of Sheikh Jarrah for 60 days.
Lawyers Lea Tsemel and Tamar Peleg Sarik from Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Michael Sfard of Yesh Din and Dan Yakir of ACRI represented the detainees. After a two-hour hearing, in the early morning Judge Eilata Ziskind accepted our arguments that it was a demonstration that did not require a license, that there was no basis to disperse it and that the police had not substantiated the argument that there was a danger of disturbing the public order“.
A spokesperson for ACRI later told the Jerusalem Post that the organization “had not initiated the demonstration, but that [Hagai] El-Ad and other members attended it in order to monitor the conduct of Jerusalem police towards the protesters, not to demonstrate against Jewish settlement in Sheikh Jarrah. The spokesperson said ACRI had received complaints about police conduct during protests for months before Friday’s arrests. On Friday, when El-Ad approached officers to complain about the arrest of protesters, he was himself detained, the spokesperson said, adding that it was the first time a member of ACRI had ever been arrested at a protest. On Sunday, El-Ad told The Post that he attended the rally as part of ACRI’s ‘efforts to protect freedom of speech’, adding that although the organization was not behind the vigil, on a personal level he sympathized with its organizers, calling what is going on in Sheikh Jarrah ‘a moral outrage’. El-Ad said that he believes the police arrested him because they thought he was one of the organizers of the protest, because he had approached them to tell them that their efforts to silence the vigil were illegal. El-Ad said he believes his arrest is merely part of the ongoing efforts on the part of police to intimidate protesters in Sheikh Jarrah, citing the over 70 demonstrators who have been arrested there in recent weeks … Following the arrests, Jerusalem police said that the demonstration was led by ‘anarchists and leftists’ who did not follow police orders and that if they continued to take part in illegal protests, they should expect to be arrested.” This article was published here.
UPDATE: A Haaretz editorial on the following day (Monday 18 January) said that “The arrest of 17 civil rights activists demonstrating in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on Friday and their detention by the police overnight represents another stage in the Israel Police’s get-tough attitude and willingness to infringe on freedom of demonstration, protest and speech in this country. The right to demonstrate is an important component of freedom of expression, and something which Israeli courts have enshrined as a ‘supreme right’. The detainees, who included the director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Hagai Elad, endangered no one and broke no law; their arrest was therefore nothing less than false arrest. Moreover, the police’s claim that the protesters had no license to demonstrate was rejected by a court, which declared that a protest vigil does not require a permit and there was no reason to disperse it or arrest the protesters. The only conclusion is that the police have decided to wage war on the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah and use force to end the protests, something they have neither the right nor authority to do … It’s the police’s duty to preserve order at demonstrations and no more, unless there is a reason to disperse protesters. But by no means should they prevent demonstrations from taking place. The arrest of the protesters for no reason creates the suspicion that the police have had enough of these demonstrations. It also shows that the police discriminate between demonstrators from the right and left. While right-wing activists run amok in the West Bank to protest against the construction freeze and are almost never arrested, civil-rights demonstrators are being detained in increasing numbers. The public security minister and police commissioner must stop this dangerous deterioration of their organizations. They must act immediately to closely guard freedom of demonstration and ensure that the police do not do anything to harm it. A society without protests is a sick society, afflicted by lethargy and complacency that breed evil. A police force that falsely arrests peaceful demonstrators is dangerous and harmful to democracy“. This Haaretz editorial, Dangerous Police, was posted here.
