commentary from Israel & the West Bank
Posts tagged sheikh jarrah
David Shulman on Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
Jan 10th
Sheikh Jarrah by David Shulman
January 8, 2010 Walaja and Sheikh Jarrah
by David Shulman
I should know better by now, but still I’m often surprised. Or perhaps naked malevolence always comes as something of a surprise (here’s an optimistic thought about human beings). We had a few moments like that this week. The Jerusalem municipality has announced that it is planting another hornet’s nest in yet another Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This time it is Et-Tur, on the top of the Mount of Olives; twenty-four housing units are scheduled to be built there for fanatical settlers, in addition to the several hundred recently announced for Shu’afat, the creeping annexations in Silwan and Ras al-’Amud, the plans for a huge housing complex at Jabal Mukabbar, and the wave of evictions we have been witnessing in Sheikh Jarrah. At this rate we’ll be marching from protest to protest around the clock (to what effect?). Then there’s Bir al-’Id in south Hebron, where the Palestinian shepherds were recently allowed to return home after ten years of exile (supposedly because the army wanted their territory as a firing range; in fact because of the continuous work of dispossession and Israeli settlement). We’ve worked happily beside the returning families in recent weeks, rebuilding the shattered stone terraces and goat-pens, cleaning out the wells. The original cave-homes are no longer livable, so the shepherds put up some simple tents; and then, inevitably, around the middle of the week they received demolition orders from the Civil Administration (the Occupation authority) for all of the above, tents, goat-pens, terraces, everything that comprises the simple foundation for renewing life in this tiny spot on a rocky hill overlooking the desert.
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prisoner of conscience
Dec 26th
Written by one of the activists that was arrested in Sheikh Jarrah last week. No English translation is available, so it is a good time to start
learning Hebrew…
אסירת מצפון
מאיה ברנר
מאיה ברנר עדיין מתלבטת אם להתגייס או לסרב, אבל אחרי שנעצרה במהלך הפגנה בשיח’ ג’ראח היא מרגישה שיהיה לה קשה מאי פעם לשתף פעולה עם המערכת. ועדיין היא לא מוותרת
נחשו מה? בהמשך ישיר לשבוע שעבר, השבוע היה תורי להיעצר בהפגנה בשייח ג’ראח. אחרי התופת שלא הייתה מביישת שום תיאור של דנטה משבוע שעבר, החלטתי להגיע השבוע עם עוד שני חברים לבושים במדי צה”ל, מאופרים כליצנים במידה ותסריט האימים, שהשבוע יהיה אלים לא פחות משבוע שעבר, אכן יתגשם. תכננו לעשות קצת צחוק מהאלימות המשטרתית בדרכנו החיננית והגרוטסקית.
אז הפרחנו בועות סבון, שיחקנו בצלחת מעופפת בסולאו מושן באמצע המהומה, צעקנו למי שנעצרו “תודה שבאת!!!” כשאלה נגררו משם על ידי מג”בניקים, שוטרים, יס”מניקים ואולי עוד כמה מוטציות של אדם וחווה. בשלב כלשהו ניגש אלי בחור שמעולם לא פגשתי ולחש לי שהשוטרים מתכננים למלא את מכסת המעצרים שלהם גם בליצנים. כמו ילדים טובים שיש להם עוד כמה תוכניות לסוף השבוע- התרחקנו, יצאנו מלב המהומה, נעמדנו בסוף ההמון וחיפשנו דרכי מילוט. זה לא עזר. יס”מניקים חביבים עטו עלינו חיש מהר. בעודו מוביל אותי לבית המתנחלים הסמוך, היס”מניק שתפס את ידי מאחורי הגב אף נתן לי מחמאה מפוקפקת ספק הביע אכזבה ממני:”לפחות את לא מתנגדת”. “אני לא מאמינה באלימות” עניתי לו כמו טייפקאסט של שמאלנית טובה שנדחקה לפינה. “אני אעשה לך ג’סטה ולא אסגור את האזיקון חזק”. עבר כבר כמעט שבוע ועדיין יש לי סימנים על פרק היד.
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Christmas in Sheikh Jarrah
Dec 26th
Christmas in Sheikh Jarrah By David Shulman
This time I was sure they’d arrest me—I’d somehow eluded them, without trying to do so, the last three times I was here for the Friday demonstration—but once again it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m too old? Last week they clearly went after the young people. Gabi was standing next to his son, Boaz, who was arrested (though he had done nothing to deserve the honor); Gabi asked the policemen to take him, too, but they refused and pushed him rudely away. It’s almost insulting. We had 27 arrestees who spent the Shabbat as guests of the police in the appalling detention cells in the Russian Compound.
Anyway, I came prepared, with the Phaedrus in my pocket. “That’s some dialogue,” Amiel says to me, “but I’m not sure you’ll be reading it under optimal conditions.” He’s worried: the police have cordoned off Sheikh Jarrah, and they’re also making unpleasant noises about our march through town, even though this demonstration is completely legal, permit and all. Many policemen stand watching us as we gather on King George Street and start handing out the large placards inscribed in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Bernie gets an Arabic one: “Stop the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah!” It’s a considerable improvement, he says, on the sign he made for himself at his first political demonstration, as President of Hillel, in the 60′s in Montreal. That one read: “Cultural Imperialism Retards the Dialectic.” Hm. Times have changed. Not sure I could march to the barricades under that banner. I’m given a small red plastic horn, purchased in south Hebron, and told to blow it in time with the drums.
Today’s march through town is mostly easy. Last week people threw rotten eggs, and there were some slaps and punches, too. I get soaked by a sudden deluge from a window on the second floor of one of the houses en route. It’s actually almost welcome in the afternoon sun; I look up and see the man who drenched me gloating, happy that he’s found a target. The atmosphere, as in earlier weeks, is carnivalesque. Of course we’re here, as everyone knows, on serious business—getting more serious every week; there are, we are told, another 25 Palestinian families slated for expulsion from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. But the protest is taking off, and every week there are more demonstrators: some 250 today right at the start, with more joining us as we approach the site of eviction. The police have clearly fanned the flames, probably doubled the crowd, by their all-too-predictable attempts to quell the protest by force. I suppose no one ever really learns from experience.
We stand at the edge of the somber street in Sheikh Jarrah, almost in sight of the stolen houses; and as we chant our cries and slogans, the arrests begin, this time from deep inside the crowd. Plainclothes Shabak (Israel Security Agency—Secret Service) agents, milling among us, grab the activists who spent last weekend, or the one before, in jail. As it happens, in court this week the judge cancelled the police ruling banning these volunteers from Sheikh Jarrah for thirty days. Apparently, the police didn’t get the message; or maybe they didn’t want to get it. Maybe someone higher up gave them an order to disregard the court’s ruling. Or maybe they’re just angry at being mocked, or even—a happy thought—a little jealous. Perhaps they’d prefer to join the protest party;
I’m sure it’s much more fun that what they’re up to. Still, there’s something terrifying about an arrest that happens like that, when a stranger, anonymous, unmarked, suddenly turns against you and starts beating you in fury as he pushes you through the crowd toward the waiting patrol cars. First Amiel is captured, then Koby, then another six; Sarah waves a copy of the judgment in the face of the Shabaknik who is trying to arrest her, but he is utterly uninterested in this document; miraculously, she escapes his clutches and disappears. Leah, our lawyer, is with us, and for once she is reassuring—the police can’t hold them in jail for disobeying an order that has been rescinded. I hope she’s right.
I think something new is happening in Jerusalem. I see it in the young people who bear the brunt of this demonstration, who organize it and lead it and cheerfully face the Border Police and the blue police and, much worse, the clandestine Shabak operators week after week. Once again, many of my students are here. They, I am sure, are our future, and I trust them to see it through. They are clearly feeling the bizarre happiness that so often floods you at such moments—the happiness that naturally flows from saying “no” to self-evident evil.
Hence the drummers and the clowns and, specially for today, the Santa Clauses in brilliant red and even one masquerading demonstrator dressed in an Israeli Army uniform painted totally white, his face and hair also white—the soldiers and the police seem particularly troubled and angered by him and, not unexpectedly, try to arrest him, but I think he manages to get away. As before, the police head for the drummers. As Natasha says to me—she grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia—it’s like in totalitarian regimes; they’re always afraid of drummers, of festive resistance, of the disorder and freedom of masquerade. So, naturally, last week in Sheikh Jarrah they arrested the clowns; you can see an eloquent picture by going here
In a way the whole deep foolishness and wrong are present in that moment. It’s one thing to arrest peace activists like our Ta’ayush veterans, or even to swoop down at random on non-violent demonstrators, many of them young students, many young women, and drag them off to the police vans. But to attack and arrest a clown? Probably from the beginning of human civilization, clowns play out the essence of our freedom and embody, as no one else, the very possibility of speaking truth. They’re also given to a volatile playfulness and an irreducible, insouciant innocence, the true enemies of earnest repression. There is simply no witness like a clown, no one better equipped to plumb the depths of our sadness. Now look closely at the two grim policemen firmly grasping their prey: could anyone look more ridiculous than they? Think of the immense daring, the superhuman courage one needs to arrest a clown. Only a country, or a city, intent upon a great crime would send its soldiers to do battle with clowns. And since, despite my early morning gloom, I’m in an ever-so-slightly optimistic frame of mind after today’s demonstration, after the drums and the masque and the sweet shared moments of defiance, let me follow this hopeful thought as far as it takes me, a Christmas gift for those among us who celebrate this day. Deadly earnestness, for all the vast and brutal machinery that underpins it, is ultimately a disease with a rather poor prognosis. In the end, the clowns—we, that is—will win.
A Busy Weekend
Dec 19th
A busy weekend in Israel for Ta’ayush and the Israeli direct action left. Above is clear video from last Friday’s Sheikh Jarrah protest. Quoted in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, Meretz Chairman Chaim Oron said “It’s unthinkable that every week left-wing protestors are prevented from expressing legitimate protest, while right-wing protestors, who violently and blatantly violate the government’s decisions, are being treated forgivingly.”
While the police and border patrol were working out their feelings of masculine insecurity on the non violent leftists in Sheikh Jarrah, Ultra Orthodox residents of Jerusalem actually got violent in their protest of the Intel Corporation opening its Jerusalem branch on Shabbat. They threw stones at police and burned garbage throughout their neighborhoods. No one was arrested, confirming the double standards that exist as a fact of everyday life in Israel Full text on Yediot Ahronot’s website.
Finally, Ta’ayush activists and Palestinians encountered some good ole settler violence near the extremist illegal outpost of Ashel. Report here form Ynet and video of one of the fine citizens of Asahel below.
Demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah This Friday
Dec 15th
Weekly Protest March from the Mashbir plaza to Sheikh Jarrah
Join a march from West to East Jerusalem in protest of the injustice committed against the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. The march will end in Sheikh Jarrah with a protest against the settler enterprise in the neighborhood and against the suppression of Palestinian opposition.
The march will start Friday at 12:30
from the Mashbir plaza, on the corner of King George and Ben Yehudah
To a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah that will begin at 14:00
Every Friday for the past few weeks, there has been a march to Sheikh Jarrah to protest the eviction of Palestinian residents from their homes. During the demonstration last Friday, the police stormed the crowd with unprecedented force, wounding ten demonstrators and arresting twenty three. The harsh police response seems planned in advance in order to suppress the mounting protests and to silence the public opposition to the policy of judaizing East Jerusalem. Brutal suppression of legal and nonviolent demonstrations will not silence the opposition.
For further information- Maya 0547423044 or Gali 0544679756
For transportation from Tel Aviv – Yuval 0507336117
צעדת מחאה שבועית מרחבת המשביר לשייח ג’ראח
הצעדה ממערב למזרח ירושלים, במחאה על העוולות הנעשות לציבור הפלסטיני במזרח העיר.
הצעדה תסתיים בשייח ג’ראח בהפגנה נגד מפעל ההתנחלות בשכונה, ונגד דיכוי המחאה הפלסטינית.
נתחיל לצעוד ביום שישי בשעה 12:30
מרחבת המשביר ברחוב קינג ג’ורג’ פינת בן יהודה
להפגנה בשכונת שייח ג’ראח שתתחיל ב – 14:00
בשבועות האחרונים מתקיימת מדי יום שישי הפגנה נגד גירוש תושבי שייח ג’ראח מבתיהם. במהלך ההפגנה ביום שישי האחרון התפרצה המשטרה לעבר המפגינים תוך שימוש בכוח חסר תקדים, פצעה יותר מעשרה מפגינים ועצרה 23 מהם. תגובת המשטרה נראית כמתוכננת מראש על מנת לדכא את ההפגנות ההולכות וגדלות, ולהשתיק את המחאה הציבורית סביב המדיניות המכוונת של ייהוד מזרח ירושלים. דיכוי ברוטאלי של הפגנות חוקיות ובלתי אלימות לא ישתיק את המחאה.
לפרטים- מאיה 0547423044 או גלי 0544679756
להרשמה להסעות מתל אביב- יובל 0507336117
David Shulman Reports from Yesterday’s Sheikh Jarrah Protest March in Jerusalem
Dec 5th
Ta’ayush member and prolific writer David Shulman has provided a report from yesterday’s Sheikh Jarrah protest march in Jerusalem. His words, as always, are moving and profound:
December 4, 2009 Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem
Exhibit A. Kindly examine the attached photograph. Let’s make an inventory. Three stuffed animals, two face up, one face down. The yellow-and-red one, half animal half cushion, has an inscription: “I love you.” One school bag. Two unidentified red toys. Five pieces of yellow lego. One armless, legless doll. One yellow brush with blue bristles. An Arabic newspaper. A broken pole wrapped in red cloth. A broken flower, perhaps freshly cut, probably thrown out with the vase it sat in.
I don’t want to overload your inbox, so I won’t add more pictures of this patch of ground in front of the al-Kurd family’s house in Sheikh Jarrah. I can tell you what’s there. A kitchen stove, its glass top shattered, green splinters everywhere. Broken microwave lying on its face. Pieces of bicycle and a children’s tractor. Shoes, mostly children’s. Many more pieces of lego. A few pots and pans. Some sheets. Boxes of odds and ends—cellphone, cords, electric wire. Plastic shovel for playing in the sand.
Exhibit B. See attached photograph. Immediately adjacent to the above: Border Policemen outside the door of the house, now inhabited by Israeli settlers. The police are there, needless to say, to protect them. Note the Israeli flags strung over the windows, just to rub it in. The people taking photographs and milling around are Israeli peace activists who came for today’s protest march: ordinary people, shocked by what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah and angry enough to spend this Friday afternoon on the long walk through downtown Jerusalem, then along Road Number One which divides east from west—the future border between the Israeli and the Palestinian cities– past the American Colony Hotel and the neighborhood mosque to this street where, as of Sunday, a third Palestinian family has been violently expelled from its home.
We’re riding a wave of such expulsions. Last Friday we were here, Eileen and I, in this very courtyard, before the court ruling; we spoke at some length with the eloquent, moderate father of the al-Kurd family, who told us the story in gentle Arabic. He had told it many times that day. “We were refugees from Haifa in 1948. Everyone in this neighborhood is a refugee, some from Lydda and Ramla, some from Jaffa. After the 1948 war, the Jordanian government gave us these plots of land to build on, in exchange for our UNRWA cards. The cards were worth a lot of money, but we wanted to live normal lives in our own houses, so we gave up our status as refugees. We have lived in this home since the 1950′s. The Israeli settlers claim the land belongs to the Jews and they went to court, for years we were in the courts. But this is my house, it is our home, I built the annex in the front and planted the fruit trees. Now the court has ordered the annex to be sealed off and they forced us out. Settlers came with the soldiers in the night and started throwing our possessions outside, just like that, and they hit us, one of them grabbed my daughter by the throat and tried to strangle her. They are very violent. We cannot live with them. They hurt us and they insult us and they are thieves and the soldiers help them. The court has left us, for now, with the back part of the house; the front is locked and sealed. On Sunday the court will decide finally. I don’t believe they will force us to leave. I don’t believe they can be so unjust. Come meet my mother, she will tell you.” We peeked through the window: his mother was sleeping, the afternoon receding into night. We sat with him for a few moments in the tent he has put up in the courtyard across from what used to be his front door. His wife, a handsome, modern woman, rushed into the back of the house and emerged with a box of baklava to offer us; it was ‘Id al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, when guests are especially welcome.
Then on Sunday the court ruled in favor of the settlers, and they moved in immediately with the soldiers to back them up, as is normal in East Jerusalem these days. That’s how the lego and the stuffed animals landed up in the courtyard.
This is the third recent eviction in Sheikh Jarrah—after the al-Hanun and al-Ghawi families lost their homes to settlers– and six more families have already received court orders preparing them for this same fate. We’ve tried our best to stop it, we’ve run an international campaign, we’ve kept volunteers in the houses and protestors outside, we’ve done what we could in the courts and the press, and we’ve failed and will no doubt fail again unless some of you who read this report find a way to bring effective pressure to bear. Let me say at once: the legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is complicated, but it’s also largely irrelevant. The settlers, through what is called the Sephardic Community Committee, have produced documents to support their claim that these plots of land belonged to Jews during the Ottoman period, over a century ago. Ergo, they must be restored to Jewish hands (like all the rest of Palestine? And what about the hundreds of Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem now inhabited by Jews? No Israeli court is about to return them to their original owners.). All the Palestinian families who live here received the land from the Jordanian government, as Mr. al-Kurd said. They are large families; two generations have been born and grown up in these houses. The whole question has been in the courts for decades, and the rulings have sometimes favored the Palestinians, at other times the settlers. I’m not about to make any judgment relating to the legal niceties.
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Sheikh Jarrah – In Memoriam
Aug 10th
Last night in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah there was a vigil, a memorial to the families’ homes from which they were evicted. First they were refugees and now they are homeless. After weeks of legal battles, sit-ins and press conferences, several hundreds gathered to acknowledge a critical defeat in the battle over the future of this land and the two peoples who want to live here in peace.
Yes, the Supreme Court ruled, yes, the Palestinians were evicted in accordance with the law and yes, the Jews who moved in there did so legally. But this is a matter of the future viability of a Palestinian state, and the true test, or more correctly, disclosure of Israel’s true intentions and integrity. Assuming the Jews who moved into these houses (and now pray on the rooftops looking down on the newly homeless families in the street), did in fact live there at some point, this only strengthens the argument that all Palestinian refugees are entitled to reclaim their lost homes all over Israel. Israel’s legal system has set this precedent. It has given legal credibility to the 7 million Palestinians who once lived somewhere in Israel and cannot return.
Israel could not be making it any clearer that its policy is to allow, encourage and facilitate Jewish settlement anywhere and everywhere it wishes, right in the middle of Palestinian communities, with the ultimate aim of clearing them out.
How can Israel, in its claim to represent the Jewish people, who have experienced the worst forms of discrimination, violence, ghettoization and homelessness, now inflict it on another people? And what exactly is it trying to achieve? Have we heard any Israeli politician actually articulate what the objective is here, other than showing off the country’s ability to kick people out and take over whatever place they want? What does Israel think it will gain from these reprehensible actions?
Never Get Used to the Unspeakable Violence-a Report from Sheikh Jarrah (16/1/2010)
Jan 17th
Posted by Joseph Dana in Villages
2 comments
Below is a report about the events in Sheikh Jarrah last Friday. It is written by an activist and captures some of the intense emotion that binds the Israeli direct action left. In such a long battle, I love the moments when the left energizes and rekindles the passion necessary to keep fighting. Over the past two months, Sheikh Jarrah has provided the backdrop for this spark of renewed passion. While the battle of Sheikh Jarrah might be lost in reality, the spark of passion is important to sustain us for the other battles throughout Israel and Palestine:
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
- Arundhati Roy
On Friday, January 16, members of Anarchists Against the Wall were part of organizing a vigil at the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah commemorating the continued theft of Palestinian houses by settlers. The gathering was not approved by the Jerusalem police, arguing that they approved already in the same week a live music performance, and that there is no need for a demonstration also.
Understanding the obvious stupidity of that logic, activists gathered outside of the street where settlers stole Palestinian houses with the approval of the Israeli courts. The entrance to the street itself was blocked by the Israeli military and police under the pretext that leftist activists walking into the street will be dangerous for the public safety. Those who met at an earlier point were surrounded by police and soldiers, who demand to see their ID’s and ordering some to appear for an investigation in the following week. They were not allowed to walk in a group, only in pairs, and were followed until the very point of arriving to the neighborhood.
Realizing that they will not be allowed to join their Palestinian friends who have been sleeping in the street since being evicted from their houses, activists gathered at a distant location, holding signs and chanting.
Arrest of Bashar Abu Rahma
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