The UN Security Council must pressure Israel to halt the pending eviction of 3,000 Palestinians living in east Jerusalem including in Sheikh Jarrah, Ir Amim executive-director Yehudith Oppenheimer urged in a special briefing she delivered to the 15-member body.
“It is therefore essential to hold the Israeli government accountable, and to urge it to prevent the large-scale displacement of these communities,” said Oppenheimer, who heads an Israeli left-wing NGO that focuses almost exclusively on issues relating to east Jerusalem.
Oppenheimer spoke to the UNSC virtually from Jerusalem during its monthly meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She briefly outlined issues relating to the 350,000 Palestinians who are residents of the city, but not citizens of the country.
Since 1967, “Israeli authorities have employed a system of discriminatory policies to weaken the Palestinian hold on the city,” Oppenheimer charged. “These policies have included: land confiscation, settlement [Jewish] building, denial of citizenship and political rights, permanent residency revocation, insufficient service provision and severe restrictions on planning and building in east Jerusalem.”
But Oppenheimer focused specifically on the fate of four small communities in east Jerusalem, where some 3,000 Palestinians are in danger of losing their homes; Sheikh Jarrah, Batan al-Hawa, Bustan and Walaja.
“I am speaking because these measures of Palestinian displacement have recently increased in scope and scale in an unprecedented manner,” Oppenheimer said.
At issue are four legal battles; two involve city plans to build two national parks and the others involve landlord-tenant disputes over land ownership and the legality of the homes.
The most high-profile dispute has been the fate of four families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, also known as the Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood.
The four families have appealed to the High Court of Justice to overrule two lower court rulings, which determined that their homes are owned by the Nahalat Shimon Company that wants to develop the largely Palestinian neighborhood for Jewish housing.
The area had been a Jewish one prior to the 1948 War of Independence when the residents fled. In the aftermath of the war, Palestinians who fled sovereign Israel, including west Jerusalem, moved to that area.
Some 28 families were offered homes there in exchange for relinquishing their refugee status. But the land, previously owned by two Jewish companies, was not registered in their names.
The High Court of Justice is expected to hold a hearing on the appeal on Monday. It had initially delayed the hearing to give Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit time to determine if the government wanted to be a party to the case and to render an option.
Mandelblit told the court earlier this month that he saw no reason for the state to intervene, and threw the matter back to the court.
A source told The Jerusalem Post that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett would not order the eviction of the Sheikh Jarrah families. Police have the option to refuse eviction orders that might cause a danger to security.
Hamas has claimed that Sheikh Jarrah is one of the reasons that it launched a salvo of rockets at Jerusalem and other towns in May, which sparked an 11-day Gaza war.
Bennett’s opposition to the demolitions is likely to delay the matter, possibly for a long time, but it could not ultimately subvert the legal process should the High Court rule against the families.
It is believed that the fate of the petition by the four families will determine the fate of the remaining 24 families in the neighborhood at risk of losing their homes.
Ambassador to the US and the UN Gilad Erdan attacked Oppenheimer when he addressed the council, charging that she had brought “Hamas’s lies about Jerusalem to the Security Council.”
It’s a move, he said, which “strengthens the terrorist organization and weakens the Palestinian Authority,” and that it is an “absurd” and “dangerous” situation.
Erdan warned that the “Hamas narrative” put forward by Oppenheimer could be used to justify terror attacks against Israel.
“Today’s discussion might serve to increase Hamas’ influence in Jerusalem and the Palestinian arena,” Erdan said.
He charged that Ir Amim had a “long history of spreading distorted claims regarding Israel’s legitimacy and presence in Jerusalem, while ignoring inconvenient facts.”
Erdan claimed that more than “half of Jerusalem’s Arab residents would prefer Israeli citizenship to Palestinian citizenship.”
Far from being displaced, Erdan said, “Jerusalem’s Arab population has increased by over 400% since Jerusalem was reunited in 1967.”
An Ir Amim briefing to the council, he said, is “as absurd as bringing a leader of the Yellow Vests protests to give an ‘objective’ briefing on the French Government’s economic policy.”
Neither the NGO nor the Security Council can undermine the “millennia-old connection between the Jewish People and its eternal capital of Jerusalem.” He added, “We will always keep that promise.”
Despite “false claims to the contrary, we will never accept the delegitimization of our legal, historical and national rights in Jerusalem, by the Security Council or any other international body,” Erdan said.
“Successive Israeli governments had framed these cases as standard property disputes,” Oppenheimer explained to the UNSC, but that in reality they were “systematic campaigns” aimed at changing the demographic makeup of east Jerusalem. This is done by uprooting Palestinian families and supplanting them with Jewish enclaves within larger Palestinian neighborhoods, Oppenheimer said, adding that it’s a situation that creates friction and makes normative communal neighborhood life difficult.
The situation is possible because of the discriminatory legal system that allows Jews to reclaim property lost as the result of the 1948 war, but forbids Palestinians from reclaiming property they lost in that war.
The “pretexts for many of the demolitions are the absence of building permits, which are nearly impossible to procure due to the absence of proper zoning plans that the Israeli authorities have failed to advance,” Oppenheimer said.
“Many of the families facing evictions are Palestinian refugees who lost homes in 1948, and who now stand to be displaced for a second time,” she claimed.
Oppenheimer also highlighted the case of Batan al-Hawa in Silwan, noting that the court had asked Mandelblit to provide a response by August 29. The request indicates “a possible understanding that these cases have far-reaching political and moral ramifications and therefore require government involvement,” Oppenheimer said, adding that “the Israeli government is now being compelled to take an explicit position on these eviction proceedings.”
That is why international pressure is so important at this juncture, she said.