The British decide that Israeli law is 'unacceptable'

Reaction to the evictions of Arab families from where they were living in the Sheikh Jarrah district of east Jerusalem has universally given the impression that the Israelis threw out Palestinian families from their homes in order to colonise a traditionally Arab area for further ‘illegal’ Jewish ‘settlement’ (see for example reports by the BBC and the Times).

The response by the British government was particularly aggressive. The British consulate said:

We are appalled by the evictions in East Jerusalem. Israel’s claim that the imposition of extremist Jewish settlers into this ancient Arab neighbourhood is a matter for the courts or the municipality is unacceptable. Their actions are incompatible with Israel’s desire for peace. We urge Israel not to allow extremists to set the agenda.

The US and the UN also condemned the evictions:

State Department spokeswoman Megan Mattson said such actions in east Jerusalem constitute violations of Israel’s obligations under US-backed ‘road map’ peace plan. ...Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, called Sunday’s evictions ‘totally unacceptable.’

The hysteria has unleashed yet more vile anti-Israel bigotry – and not just on the left. On Conservative Home’s Centre Right blog, this post featuring video coverage of the evictions provoked vicious attacks on Israel in the readers’ thread, including calls for Israel to be ‘dismantled’, suggestions that Israelis were less than human and comparing their treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazis.

Yet the belief that Israel has turfed out the rightful Arab inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrah could not be further from the truth. What actually happened here was that, after a protracted series of legal battles over a long disputed claim to properties in this area, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the titles properly belonged to Jewish families  and that the Arabs living there were illegal squatters. Moreover, although the Arabs claimed the Jewish families had forged their ownership documents, the Supreme Court ruled that it was in fact the Arab documents which had been forged while the Jewish deeds were legitimate.  The Jews who moved in were not ‘illegal settlers’. They were finally reclaiming property that was legally theirs, but which had been effectively stolen from them during the illegal annexation of this area by Jordan between 1948 and 1967.

The Jerusalem Post reported some of the details of this complicated story:

The Jewish families and the organization that supported their legal efforts, Nahalat Shimon International, have not made themselves available for comment, but have maintained in previous court hearings that the homes were owned by Jews dating back to the late 19th century, and were abandoned during a spate of Arab attacks in the area in the 1920s and ‘30s.

According to a report issued in May by Ir Amim, a non-profit group that engages Israeli-Palestinian issues in the capital, the Jordanian government took control of these plots under the Enemy Property Law during its rule from 1948 to 1967.

In 1956, 28 Palestinian families that had been receiving refugee assistance from UNRWA were selected to benefit from a relief project, in which they forfeited their refugee aid and moved into homes built on ‘formerly Jewish property leased by the Custodian of Enemy Property to the Ministry of Development,’ the Ir Amim report states. The agreement stipulated that the ownership of the homes was to be put in the families’ names - a step that never took place.

In 1972, two Israeli organizations - the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Yisrael Committee - began notifying the residents that they owed rent, and initiated a process with the Israel Lands Administration to register the land in their names, also based on 19th-century Ottoman-era documents.

In 1982, the two committees brought a lawsuit against 23 families for rent delinquency. Itzhak Toussia-Cohen, the lawyer representing the Palestinians, did not contest the legitimacy of the committees’ ownership claims, and instead arrived at a court-ordered settlement - a binding agreement that can be appealed only if proven to be based on false grounds - that secured ‘protected tenancy’ status for the residents. The families claim Toussia-Cohen did not have their authorization to make this agreement, but it has served as the precedent for rulings on subsequent appeals, including the present-day cases.

While it remains unclear when Nachalat Shimon entered the picture, it became part of the legal proceedings in 2003 when it filed a joint case with the committees against the state and the Kurd family - one of the original families to be sued for rent delinquency and eviction, and which was eventually evicted from their home as well. The years since have resulted in a slew of legal battles between the two sides, now culminating in the eviction.

In this article for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Nadav Shragai provides the wider background to the ancient Jewish ownership of this area  -- which predates the founding of both Christianity and Islam -- and the way this was interrupted by the illegal Jordanian annexation and the legal battles that followed over Arab residents who had been installed in Jewish-owned properties.

In the light of all this, the malevolent moral inversion of the western reaction, which has simply parroted Arab propaganda without even bothering to look at the true history of this dispute, is egregious. But once again it is the extreme malice of the British reaction which takes the breath away. The British consulate says it is ‘unacceptable’ that Israel should act in accordance with the law as laid down by its own Supreme Court. The British thus ignore law and justice, history and truth to support instead illegal Arab actions which deny the Jewish ownership of the land in question. And what in heaven’s name has this property dispute between Israel and the Arabs in Jerusalem got to do with the British anyway? As I remarked here the other day, they appear to think they are still administering the Palestine Mandate – where they exhibited similar partisanship in the interests of injustice, illegality and the Arab cause against Jewish rights.

This blog post aptly remarked upon the western world’s sickening double standards over the real history of evictions and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East:

It is also a little known fact that hundreds of thousands of Arab squatters in ‘Arab east Jerusalem’ live on land still owned by the Jewish National Fund. The JNF purchased hundreds of individual parcels of land in and around Jerusalem during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Some ended up under Jordanian control. In 1948, on one of these parcels the UN built the Kalandia refugee camp, seizing the land without permission from the owners, the JNF. As Gil Zohar explained in his 2007 Jerusalem Post piece other parcels of land in ‘Arab’ east Jerusalem were cut off from their Iraqi and Iranian Jewish owners after they came under Jordanian rule. In total 145,976 dunams of Jewish land is said to have come under Jordanian control.

... The international community gets into a huff when Jerusalem property once owned by Arabs is legally bought by Jews. Across the Arab world, Jewish property has been abandoned, sequestered or sold well below market value as Jews left in haste or were driven out. The West is sanctioning the principle that the Arab world must be Jew-free (Arab states have almost succeeded in this task, having banished 97 percent of their Jewish population). The takeover of millions of dollars’ worth of Jewish homes, shops, offices and communal property by Arabs has never been considered provocative or an ‘obstacle to peace’.

Through the wilful blindness, historical amnesia, double standards, moral inversion and rank injustice of the reaction to these evictions, Sheikh Jarrah stands as an emblem of the British, American and European truth-denying attitude to the Arab war against Israel – the real cause of the whole Middle East impasse.