Jewish Settlers Force Way Into East Jerusalem Home, Evict Arab Family (PHOTOS)

JERUSALEM — (AP) Jewish settlers forced their way into a disputed house in east Jerusalem on Tuesday, using hired guards to evict an elderly Palestinian woman and tossing the other residents' belongings into the rain-swept yard.

The settlers displayed what they said was a court order granting them ownership of the simple one-story building. Human rights groups said the takeover was a push by Jewish settlers to expand their presence in east Jerusalem.

• • • • • An elderly Palestinian woman gestures as she sits with her belongings in front of a disputed house in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheik Jarrah, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009. Jewish settlers claiming ownership forced their way into a disputed house in east Jerusalem on Tuesday, using hired guards to evict an elderly Palestinian woman and tossing the belongings of the 29 other residents into the rain, witnesses said.

Sovereignty over the traditionally Arab sector is one of the most explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel captured the area in the 1967 Mideast war and immediately annexed it – a move recognized by no other country. The Palestinians consider east Jerusalem the capital of their hoped-for state.

Palestinians and their Israeli supporters clashed with the Jewish settlers after they took over the building, and police intervened to restore calm, arresting one of the Israeli protesters, a police spokesman said.

Similar clashes have broken out over nearby buildings in recent months.

"It's clear to me that this is another case of settlers taking the law into their own hands," said Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann of Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli group that opposes Palestinian home evictions and demolitions.

"It's just another step-by-step way of pushing them (the Palestinians) out," he said.

Grenimann said 29 members of the al-Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighborhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to uphold the settlers' claim to the ownership of that building.

Conflicting claims and religious tensions make east Jerusalem – which includes the Old City, with key holy sites revered by Muslims, Jews and Christians – a frequent flashpoint.

Palestinians want to make it their future capital, while Israel insists on retaining control of the whole city.

Israel has built homes for more than 180,000 Jews in new east Jerusalem neighborhoods since the 1967 annexation.

The U.S. and others have criticized Israeli settlement in east Jerusalem and urged Israel to stop evicting Palestinians and demolishing their homes there, saying such moves disrupt peace efforts.

Comments

[Artemis34]

12:58 AM on 11/06/2009

Aside from the settlement issue, ownership seems to be the question:

Settler has a "court order granting them ownership"

The article does not say the evicted family ever purchased the house or if they were just squatting.

And it does not say they ever purchased the house from which they were evicted before.

I can be a citizen of one country and purchase property in another country. It is a business transaction. Doesn't necessarily mean anything political.

[Tasies]

12:05 PM on 11/05/2009

NO NEGOTIATIONS until Israel agrees to return to the 67 borders or wait it out until Israel is engulfed demographically. Palestinian women need to keep on having those babies and in time Israel will be a long lost memory. They'll be part of "Eretz" Palestine. Great job being near sighted and undermining your long term existence Israel.

[Dailykook]

03:47 PM on 12/29/2009

We should be vigilant against anti-semitism

[Tasies]

04:30 PM on 12/29/2009

We should also be vigilante against racism, anti arabism, ethnic cleansing, occupation, colonization, deceit, and whole sale destruction.

[Tasies]

04:32 PM on 12/29/2009

...vigilant, that is. Mr. Crook.

[Thabit]

07:16 AM on 11/05/2009

Israel , the internet has changed the game , no way to control the message like you used to even working shifts and controlling the moderators , the truth is getting out . The day is coming when you will have cried wolf one time too often , then you are on your own

[riff4u]

05:29 AM on 11/05/2009

I think your understanding of the situation is ass backwards. The people shooting the rockets from New Jersey are living in refugee camps with nothing displaced by the fat cats in New York who stole their land and homes. I think that is the reality of your analogy.

[Artemis34]

01:19 AM on 11/06/2009

I did not note "stealing" in this article.

The settlers had a "court order granting them ownership"

And there is no mention that the evicted family was even in the residence legally, had any ownership right, had ever paid or purchased the property...

If I'm a New Yorker and I legally purchase a house in NJ with money, have I stolen it? No.

If you are squatting in the house I own in NJ and I evict you, is that wrong just because you are from NJ and I am not? No.

You have a chicken-egg argument. Are people violent because they are isolated or are they isolated because they are violent? I think we know how each party would answer.

The peace process will have to be non-violent.

Using the American analogy, by your estimate, none of us but native Americans have any right to be in the Americans at all. And / or the US would have to return a lot of territory taken as part of our "manifest destiny."

At least both Palestinians and Jews originated in the land of Israel. None has a more ancient claim than the other.

[iLoveOldNY]

04:11 AM on 11/05/2009

Stay classy, Israel.

[totalliberal]

03:51 AM on 11/05/2009

Lovely people. Following in the footsteps of Moses. Sla/uter the people, then take their land. Somebody should write a book........ Oh ya, they already have.

[vascopyjama]

02:17 AM on 11/05/2009

The settlers can do anything they like, Congress said so.

[MarcusT]

12:36 AM on 11/05/2009

Ottoman archives show land deeds forged

By Jonathan Cook

26 March 2009

Jonathan Cook reveals how archives from the time when the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine – archives that had hitherto been withheld from Palestinians – prove that Jewish settlers had forged documents to enable them to steal Palestinian homes.

[Artemis34]

01:20 AM on 11/06/2009

Did you read in the article the evicted family had a deed?

[mlm4420]

09:36 PM on 11/04/2009

I concur.

[Johnny2Bad]

07:13 PM on 11/04/2009

And then so many Hebrews wonder "Why's everybody always pickin' on me?"

[rudolph]

03:43 PM on 11/04/2009

The USA should declare its independence from Israel.

[riff4u]

02:56 PM on 11/04/2009

Why is there suicide bombers? Aleksander Solzenhitsyn sums it up:

" When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again."

Despair is the root cause of "terrorism". When you don't care any more because you see no solution no chance at life.........you blow yourself up and take as many of the oppressors as you can.

I don't agree with it but Israel is often it's own worst enemy by treating the Palestinians as some no-human race that sometimes gets in the way.

[who38]

06:13 AM on 11/05/2009

Solzenhitsyn was right.........and Janis Joplin too.

OTOH, Israel obviously wants the Palestinians to continue bombing. It provides cover for their continuing land grab as well as the monetary support from wealthy Zionists which pays for the Israeli welfare system and settler expansion. And, most importantly, it fuels the continuing need for military weapons. If Israel was at peace in the ME, the weapons industry would be in real trouble.

[StCuthbert]

07:59 AM on 11/05/2009

You are simply wrong. The tactics may have changed, but the desire to fight the Jews has always been there.

How does your "despair" explanation account for the 1948 war? The Palestinians were about to get everything they wanted, an independent state of their own. But they turned it down to engage in an aggressive war.

[Garioch]

03:37 PM on 11/05/2009

In the main the Palestinians had of course no say in anything that happened in 1948 or the means to fight any war. What they did have a healthy distrust of their own neighbors, the colonial power and the Zionists who have been working them over for decades by that point.

[riff4u]

05:47 PM on 11/05/2009

The 1948 War meant that the Palestinians were about to lose EVERYTHING. Nice try at revisionist history.

[TaxFree101]

02:39 PM on 11/04/2009

I think most of the people here who are throwing stones live in glass houses.
There is no doubt in my mind that if you had rockets streaming from New Jersey towards NYC directly at your homes you would do anything in your power to make it stop...

As a democrat it really sickens me to see the idiocy that resides on the far reaches of my party....

[who38]

06:14 AM on 11/05/2009

Given the population of New Jersey, that may happen soon.

[TLV]

01:43 PM on 11/04/2009

I love the picture of the old Palestinian woman on the cell phone.

[topguide]

01:12 PM on 11/04/2009

They're doing the same thing to Christian Arabs. Karma .....

[TLV]

01:44 PM on 11/04/2009

Same thing happened to the Christians in Iraq.

[LatteLiberals]

05:02 PM on 11/04/2009

Karma against Christian Arabs either implies that the Christian Arabs are complicit or that Christians in general targeted the Palenstians for religious reasons. Neither is true.

Many Palenstines are Christian. They have been uprooted from their homes, just as the Muslim have been. This has been going on for decades. Christian Palenstines are just as angry at Israel as the Muslim ones.

Uprooting the Palenstines has never been about attacking the Muslims or religion. The creation of Israel was done out of shame and guilt by the West for allowing the Holocaust to happen.

Unfortunately the Palenstines of all religions were an afterthought. The conflict between Israel and Palenstine is not an issue of religion, but rather shame, guilt and insensitvity by the West.

[jwcmass]

02:12 AM on 11/06/2009

In terms of religion and the Palestinians, the fact is that until recently the Palestinians were the most secular and educated of the Arab world.

But when people are oppressed, they often turn to religion. And often to the more apocalyptic aspects of their religion.

The Palestinians are hardly the first people to do this. In Ireland, even as Catholics were persecuted, the Irish clung to it all the fiercer.

The same is true of the vicitms of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. Made up of largely unarmed civilians, this group left the reservaton to go and practice the Ghost Dance, which they thought would bring back the world and life that had been taken from them.