ReportageThe neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan are at the heart of Israel’s strategy to expand its grip on East Jerusalem, which it has occupied since 1967, by pushing Palestinian residents out of the walls and attempting to dissolve Arab identity. from the city.
The light evening breeze carries a few hints of a pungent odor, similar to that of rotting animal corpses or that of sewers. The putrid water was sprayed a week ago already, but it permeates the walls and the tar, seeps into the interstices of the portals of Sheikh Jarrah, below the Old City of Jerusalem. The neighborhood has been sullied for months: the Israeli police use the “Kharara”, the “shit truck,” as the Palestinians have called it, to disperse the protesters. A collective punishment also for the inhabitants who resist their possible eviction for the benefit of Israeli settlers.
“Since April, we haven’t been sleeping”, sighs Aref Hammad in his small apartment in the middle of the street. Israeli settlers covet his home and those of 27 other families – around 300 Palestinians – arguing that it is built on land that belonged to Jews before the creation of Israel in 1948. On August 2, the Supreme Court Israel, who was to rule on the fate of four of these families, postponed the decision. Too sensitive: in May, what the Jewish state presents as a simple land dispute became a global affair, symbol of Israeli policies of expelling Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem – thanks in particular to the non-violent mobilization of Palestinians and to social networks. The Israeli repression of this solidarity movement is one of the causes of the outbreak of the war that lasted eleven days in Gaza.
The house of Arref Hammad has been under threat since 1972, but everything has accelerated over the past ten years. “The files have piled up in the courts. They want to go fast, evict us, destroy the houses and build housing for the settlers ”, sums up the 70-year-old Palestinian, who moved into the accommodation in 1952, after his family left Haifa when Israel was established. He does not have the right to return to his ancestral lands – the law only applies to Jews. “It’s not just Sheikh Jarrah, (…) more and more communities are displaced, notes Aviv Tatarsky, from the Israeli NGO Ir Amim. It’s a much more aggressive policy than before. “
Negotiations stalled
Since the 1967 war, Israel has set itself three goals in the Holy City, which it considers its capital “Eternal and indivisible” : “Keep control over all of Jerusalem, and East Jerusalem in particular, limit the Palestinian demography and implement a very offensive colonization in the Old City and its basin, which are overwhelmingly Palestinian, in order to Jewishize these areas”, summarizes the researcher. In recent years, negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel have stalled; the Palestinians of Jerusalem are on their own to resist these policies, exacerbated by the Trump years.
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