After Gaza: Jerusalem? »
Posted By bruhaha 8 months ago in NewsJerusalem's recently elected mayor, Nir Barkat, is traveling to the United States on a six-city fundraising tour this week, amid signs his city is becoming the next big focus of Palestinian-Israeli tensions. While Barkat's pitch, as prominently previewed in the New York Times, is one of simple urban renewal in a context in which Israel's control over the whole city remains unquestioned, the city's 270,000 Palestinian residents and their compatriots, co-believers and supporters around the world see things very differently.
On a vacant lot in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood I recently met Um Kamel al-Kurd, a woman in her early 60s who's been braving the foul winter weather in a tent since late November. On the night of November 21, at 3:30 am, a large force of armed police came to the house she and her invalid husband had lived in since 1956 and threw them out on the street so that a group of Jewish settlers could move in.
She and her husband erected and moved into the tent on their neighbor's property. Shortly thereafter, her husband died.
Um Kamel is a mild-mannered woman with sixteen grandchildren and a steely core. "We don't need donations of tents or clothing from the international community," she told me, referring to the growing numbers of Palestinian evictees in Jerusalem as well as those whose homes have been destroyed by the IDF in Gaza. "All we need is our rights. No one can simply overthrow the rights of others.... We need all the three groups here--Jews, Christians and Muslims--to live in peace and equality together."
Um Kamel's tent has become a focus for the protests that Palestinians and their Israeli supporters have organized against the escalating campaign that Barkat's municipality has mounted to demolish Palestinian housing in East Jerusalem and repopulate the area with Jews from Israel or elsewhere.
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bruhaha
Geologist at an environmental consulting and engineering company here in the Chicago suburbs.
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hyperbola8 months ago
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We should never forget that zionist "control" of jerusalem is based on racism, ethnic cleansing and fraud.
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Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Theft by Settlers
A legal battle being waged by Palestinian families to stop the takeover of their neighbourhood in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers has received a major fillip from the recent souring of relations between Israel and Turkey. After the Israeli army’s assault on the Gaza Strip in January, lawyers for the families were given access to Ottoman land registry archives in Ankara for the first time, providing what they say is proof that title deeds produced by the settlers are forged.
...The problems facing Mrs Khurd and the other residents derive from legal claims by the Sephardi Jewry Association that it purchased Sheikh Jarrah’s land in the 19th century. Settler groups hope to evict all the residents, demolish their homes and build 200 apartments in their place.... Officials in Turkey traced the documents the lawyers requested and provided affidavits that the settlers’ land claims were forged. The search of the Ottoman archives, Mr Abu Ahmad said, had failed to locate any title deeds belonging to a Jewish group for the land in Sheikh Jarrah.
“Turkish officials have also told us that in future they will assist us whenever we need help and that they are ready to trace similar documents relating to other cases,” Mr Abu Ahmad said. “They even asked us if there were other documents we were looking for.”
.... Late last year the Associated Press news agency exposed a scam by settlers regarding land on which they have built the Migron outpost, near Ramallah, home to more than 40 Jewish families. The settlers’ documents were supposedly signed by the Palestinian owner, Abdel Latif Sumarin, in California in 2004, even though he died in 1961.
The families in Sheikh Jarrah ended up living in their current homes after they were forced to flee from territory that became Israel during the 1948 war. Jordan, which controlled East Jerusalem until Israel’s occupation in 1967, and the United Nations gave the refugees plots on which to build homes.
Mrs Khurd said she would stay in her tent until she received justice.
“My family is originally from Talbiyeh,” she said, referring to what has become today one of the wealthiest districts of West Jerusalem. “I am not allowed to go back to the property that is rightfully mine, but these settlers are given my home, which never belonged to them.”
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/03/25/turkey39...-
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hyperbola8 months ago
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We should also never forget that jerusalem had a christian majority until the zionists ethnic cleansed them.
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Palestinian Christians: An Historic Community at Risk
... over 50 percent of Jerusalem's Christians were expelled from their West Jerusalem homes, the largest single numerical decline of Christians in Palestine in history. Hadawi's study concluded that in Jerusalem a higher proportion of Palestinian Christians became refugees after 1949, a ratio of 37 percent of Christians to 17 percent of the Muslims. The higher ratio of Christians was due in part to the fact that the majority lived in the wealthier western Jerusalem districts seized by Israel during 1948-49. Further, approximately 34 percent of the lands seized by Israel were owned by Palestinian Christian churches, and they were simply taken by force with no compensation given to the previous owners. ...
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/index.php?ht=displ...
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Mutainia8 months ago
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"Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling to all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it."
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StevieGee8 months ago
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Thinker228 months ago
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There can not be any "conflicting viewpoints" on this. No one has the right to destroy homes and throw people to the streets without reason just like no one has the right to simply pull a gun and start shooting in a street killing people.
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When we're told a story about a police officer who pulled a gun in a street and shot a young man to death a normal reaction is "the police officer is a bloody murderer". Then we may learn that the young man actually attacked the policeman first and refused to drop his gun and stop shooting... something the original story did not tell us.
We see hundreds if not thousands of stories about the brutality of Israeli army and Israeli state against innocent peaceful Palestinians. This stories only tell us one side at best.
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