Make no mistake, the few headlines you may have seen regarding the events in Palestine are not an isolated occurrence. Sheikh Jarrah is not the first neighborhood in Palestine where residents face forceful dispossession. The limited articles or reports you may have seen from western media do not accurately portray the realities of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
1948 marks the year the illegal occupation of Palestine began. Contrary to the framing prevalent in western media, this was never a religious matter. Palestinians are religiously diverse. The Palestinian objection to the establishment of Israel is due to the inherently problematic Zionist ideology that was used to establish it. The ideology called for establishing a Jewish majority state in a region that was already inhabited by Palestinians. It is well documented that early founders of the Zionist movement were aware of the Palestinians living in the land. The lives of Palestinians were regarded as inconsequential as the forced expulsion and massacres began. Sheikh Jarrah happens to be a modern example of the continued ethnic cleaning and forced dispossession of Palestinians from their homes.
Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. It is home to about 3,000 residents. It has one of the highest Palestinian Muslim concentrations living outside of the main city. In the 19th century, a small Jewish community lived there among the Muslim majority; these Jewish families left by 1948, when the Zionist state of Israel was established, and resettled to other regions in colonized Palestine. After East Jerusalem came under Jordanian rule in 1956, 28 Palestinian families who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from their lands by the Zionist colonialists from West Jerusalem were settled by the UN there through an agreement reached between Jordan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The 28 Palestinian refugee families agreed to a deal with the Jordanian government that would make them the owners of the land and houses, receiving official land deeds signed in their names after three years. In return, they would renounce their refugee status. The deal was cut short when Israel captured and illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967 and Jordan lost control of the territories. In the years that followed, many other families were forcibly displaced from their homes.
In April, Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi provided the documents proving Palestinian ownership of their properties in Sheikh Jarrah, in a bid to prevent the mass eviction. Israeli courts rejected them. This move sets a political double standard that justifies Jewish claims to property held before 1948 but doesn’t allow Palestinians to make similar claims to properties they were forced to leave in West Jerusalem.
When Palestinians advocate for liberation, they do so while calling for the equal rights and treatment for all living in the land which contrasts with the realities of living under Israeli Occupation. On April 27, the Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report finding Israel guilty of crimes of apartheid and persecution and declared Israel should be held accountable.
Recently Gaza was bombarded relentlessly for 11 days. The Israeli occupation claims that it was in “self-defense” that they targeted residential areas and massacred civilians. For those who aren’t aware, Gaza has no bomb shelters and doesn’t have an iron dome to protect against missiles. Gaza is considered an open-air prison, and countless are now left orphaned and homeless. Per the Palestinian Ministry of Health, entire families were removed from the civil registry following the latest attacks, exterminated. If these transparent lies of “self-defense” are enough for you to dismiss the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, then I encourage you to reflect on how selectively you value humanity.
I want to address the elephant in the room; a ceasefire is not peace. The media is misleadingly quiet as the Israel occupation not only continues to threaten the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah but also brazenly takes steps towards displacing Palestinians in another Jerusalem village named Silwan. Worshippers were still being harassed by the Israeli Occupation forces at the Al-Aqsa mosque hours after the ceasefire took effect. Anyone who is silent in the face of injustice is complicit in it. If you are not using your voice to advocate for peace, you are cosigning the ongoing war crimes with your apathy.
The greatest disappointment I’ve experienced is how controversial it apparently is to take a stand against racism/discrimination when it comes to supporting Palestinians. I write this letter with optimism that this will soon no longer be the case.
