Tuesday, August 11, 2009

One of the saddest things I have seen yet

So on the 5th I went to see the families I had heard about on the news that the US was battling to keep in their homes. The US had been furious about Israel evicting people out of the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood so I decided to go and check it out for myself. What I saw I will never forget.
So the short version of the story is that some Jewish organization showed up recently claiming the title to the land in a completely Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Their paperwork is supposedly from the Ottoman era in the 1800s, but there is no way to verify the authenticity of the documents. On the land in question live scores of families. The family I met had a lot of members.
The family has lived in the home they were evicted from for more than 50 years. When the 1948 war started, they fled the violence as refugees. They went to the only place they could settle since they had lost their homes in historic Palestine at the point of a gun; they went to Jordanian lands. They got a contract from the Jordanian government and the UN giving them title to a house that would be built for them if they would repay the food assistance given to them for a period of three years. They did this, and so the house was given over to them. They lived in the house peacefully for decades, and then the 1967 war came, and what had been Jordanian land became occupied by Israel. Then this settler organization whose stated goals are to essentially ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem of Arabs and replace them with immigrant Jews comes along and tries to claim the land. They get good legal help, and the Palestinian families, who are refugees and cannot afford much, are forced to find representation on their own. The process was lengthy, but at the end of the day, the courts decided to throw these refugees out on the streets. They showed up with hundreds of policemen and broke the arm of the son of the owner of the house, and they caused other injuries as well. They took the family and then forced other families out who did not have their names on the eviction warrant, so they took 3 houses in all. The settler organization then transferred ownership to some Zionist extremists who have no problem living in a house where generations of people have lived.
The man who heads the household asked me how can immigrants from Europe come and take the house he has lived in for 50 years without paying him for it? I did not have an answer for him. On top of this, the Israeli government spokesperson said that his family should have made alterate living arrangements. I wanted to vomit; they expect refugees thrown out of their homes to just get up and find a nice new house?
From my judgment, it looks like the israeli court system just allowed legal theft. The only way you ca n do something like this to a person and his family is if you believe he is not human, which I think many Israelis think this of Palestinians.

No comments:

Post a Comment