– Dr. Mubasshir Alig (Ph.D. Zionism)
The recent dispute in Sheikh Jarrah is considered a microcosm of the Israeli– Palestinian conflict. The dispute involves the ownership of certain properties and housing units in Sheikh Jarrah. Israel’s laws allow Jews to file claims over land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem which they have owned before 1948, but reject Palestinian claims over land in Israel which they owned. This led to the current violence between Israel and Palestine. After the creation of Israel, the Zionists made a plan to establish a Totalitarian State in Palestine. For this, crushing Palestinians and to expel them from their home was necessary. Therefore immediately they started an ethnic cleansing operation in Palestine. They made a ‘Plan D’ for the systematic expulsion of the Arab population. Benny Morris in his famous work “The Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949” listed 369 Palestinian localities which were ethnically cleansed during this period. The first Arab-Israel war occurred and the result of the war came in the form of Palestinian refugees and the land alienation by Israel. Between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced between the end of 1947 and early 1949. When armistice agreements were signed in 1949, the state of Israel had captured not only 56 percent of the allocated area but 77 percent (20,400,000 dunum) of former Palestine. Israel also enacted so many measures to keep away the Palestinians from their land and to hold these lands: Defense (Emergency) Regulations, Absentees Property Law, The Transfer of Ownership, and Law of the Limitations – were brought into effect. But today the efforts are done mainly by the use of the Legal and Administrative Matters Law from 1970. This law was legislated to deal with many different issues concerning the areas and people annexed to Jerusalem in 1967. One of those issues was the status of properties owned by Jews before 1948. In the 1948 war, some 20,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee from their homes in West Jerusalem, and about 2,000 Jews fled or were forced to flee out of East Jerusalem. It was the correction of what is considered to be a historical injustice by restoring the property to its original Jewish owners. However, Palestinians who are living a few hundred meters away from their properties in the western part of the city, cannot restore their property. This is the real mistake of the law. A Jewish trust bought the land in Sheikh Jarrah from Arab landowners in the 1870s in Ottoman Palestine. However, this is disputed by some Palestinians who have produced Ottoman-era land titles for part of the land. The land was taken and destroyed by the Jordanian government following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In 1956, the Jordanian government, in cooperation with the United Nations organization for refugees, UNRWA, housed 28 Palestinian refugee families on land owned by Jewish trusts and managed by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. After the Six-Day War (1967) the area fell under Israeli occupation. In 1972, the Israeli Custodian General registered the properties under the Jewish trusts, which in turn demanded that the tenants pay rent. Eviction orders began to occur in the 1990s. The Jewish trusts sold the homes to a right-wing settler organization Lahav Shomron, which has since made repeated attempts to evict the Palestinian residents. The Sheikh Jarrah district houses the descendants of refugees expelled or displaced from their homes in Jaffa and Haifa in the Nakba of 1948. They are hanging in two laws of Israel. One law (1970) tries to evict Sheikh Jarrah and the other law (Absentee Property Law) had already seized their properties. Palestinian families have offered to leave Sheikh Jarrah if they could get their pre-1948 property back but they did not receive a response to their proposal. Palestinians tenants consider that, since the land is outside Israel’s recognized borders, Israeli courts have no jurisdiction there and also that displacing tenants in this context violates the Rome Statute. Israel has been occupying the lands of Palestinians since its establishment for Greater Israel. The 1948 war ended with the Israeli occupation of 78 percent of historic Palestine and approximately 900,000 Palestinians became refugees. The remaining 22 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip fell into the hands of Jordan and Egypt respectively. In the 1967 June war, Israel seized all the remaining Palestinian territory as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Again approximately 430,000 Palestinians were driven out from their houses and Israel captured three and half times territory. Today Israel is claiming that Sheikh Jarrah belongs to the Jews because they owned these properties before 1948. But on the contrary, Israel forgets that at that once they owned only six percent of the land, and today approximately 93 percent of the land is controlled by the Israeli Land Administration, most of it allocated to Jews. Before evicting Sheikh Jarrah, Israel should leave and evict the whole land occupied after 1948.
