That is why the cause of the new attack on Israel is a pretext: the legal dispute over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood
Imagine having a defaulting tenant, not only does he not pay you, but he hates you publicly. After years of not paying your rent, you win the case, but he refuses to be evicted and calls his friends together. He is not the owner, the judiciary has given him wrong, but he insists, because he has lived in that house for decades and because he believes it is important. Then when the lawsuit reaches the last hearing, his friends come to shoot you and all your fellow citizens at home. No, we are not talking about the future of Italy, when they unlock the suspension of evictions, but about the war that broke out this week in Israel. All comments, especially political but also journalistic, appeal to universal values. Yet the question is simple: it broke out on the right of ownership of a group of houses in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in Jerusalem, between those who want to defend it in the courtrooms (Israel) and those who want to deny it, favoring the use of force (Hamas).
For all those who "the situation is complex", it must be said: the cause of Sheikh Jarrah's eviction is certainly a spark that has sparked something much bigger that had long been smoldering under the ashes. For the political and strategic implications of the war in progress, I refer to the exhaustive article by Federico Punzi , published in these columns. As it cannot be said that the "cause" of the Great War was the attack in Sarajevo, also the trial for the eviction of Palestinian tenants in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is a pretext for starting a conflict (hopefully small and short, not a new world war) already latent for years. But pretexts are also important for understanding the nature of a conflict and why it is being fought.
Sheikh Jarrah is an eastern neighborhood of Jerusalem that stands on Jewish-owned land. An old orchard, which took its name from Saladin's personal physician (who seems to be buried there) was bought in 1875 by two rabbis, Avraham Ashkenazi and Meir Orbach. Note the date: 1875, when all of Jerusalem was still a city of the Ottoman Empire. The purchase was motivated by the religious importance of that land: there is the tomb of Simeon the Just, the rabbi who welcomed Alexander the Great, a pilgrimage destination, to Jerusalem. Since then, the property has always been indisputably Jewish. In 1946, when Jerusalem, after the Ottoman Empire ended, was still part of the British Mandate of Palestine, ownership was transferred to two Jewish non-profit associations: Va'ad Eidat HaSfaradim and Va'ad HaKlali L'Knesset Yisrael . When Israel declared independence at the end of the British mandate in 1948, Jerusalem was invaded by Jordan, one of the Arab states that had not recognized the legitimacy of the new Jewish state and wanted to annihilate it in the bud. Jews were driven out of Sheikh Jarrah, as well as all other occupied eastern districts and the old city, including the Wailing Wall. The Jordanian military conquest of Jerusalem and all the territories that today are called the West Bank, was never legally recognized.
Yet it is from the Jordanian occupation that the Palestinian question of Sheikh Jarrah arises. In 1956, the kingdom of Amman decided to move families of displaced Palestinians there, offering them homes in exchange for the renunciation of refugee status. Those who went to live there were the ancestors of those who live there now. But no transfer of ownership ever took place. Jordan promised to own those houses and lands for the future. But the "future" held another war, that of the Six Days, which ended, as everyone knows, with a quick Israeli victory and the reunification of all of Jerusalem under the Jewish state. Even this was not recognized internationally, since with resolution 262 the UN asked Israel to withdraw within the armistice line of the previous war, which still divided Jerusalem in two. But no one has ever questioned the private ownership of the two Jewish associations in Sheikh Jarrah. In 1973 they formally registered their land with the Jerusalem government. And in 1982 a sentence (which is the basis of the current sentences) confirmed it: even the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood recognized the Jewish property. And they are therefore to be considered in all respects as tenants.
In 2003, the property passed to another Jewish non-profit association, Nahalat Shimon, which came into conflict with the tenants, guilty of not paying and carrying out unauthorized building work. The new owner wanted to bring an eviction suit and reserve that property for Jewish citizens ("settlers" according to the most widespread term in the media). In October 2020, a sentence by the Jerusalem Magistrates' Court, later confirmed on February 10 by another district court sentence, sentenced six Palestinian families to eviction. This is the object of the dispute. The case for the Palestinians is not yet lost, in fact the Supreme Court must rule. But in the meantime Hamas has decided to resort to the use of force, without waiting for the trial.
On Israel's side, the motivation is clear: its citizens own and defend their rights. On the Palestinian side? Failing to produce evidence demonstrating their right to property, they appeal to a series of moral and religious principles: the fact that this was Islamic land and therefore not transferable to non-Muslims, the right of return of Palestinian refugees (throughout the former British Palestine), the more generic right to housing and an even more generic claim of people persecuted by a state considered occupying and oppressing. But it is not an occupier: they are still disputed territories; not even the previous Jordanian occupation was ever recognized and a Palestinian state has never existed in the past.
Without generalizing too much, most of the causes of the Middle East conflict are linked precisely to the defense of private property rights, with Jewish organizations that, over the course of a century, have bought land (often sold off by Arab and Ottoman notables as not very profitable) for realize, peacefully, the Zionist dream. With all due respect to those who see in Israel a warmongering regime based on conquest and usurpation, the core of the Jewish state is instead based on land purchased and made to bear fruit. If anything, it is the Arabs who, with Israel's independence already achieved, want those lands in the name of collectivist values. Not surprisingly, it is above all the Communists who defend the Palestinians, as well as the Muslims.
The post This is why the cause of the new attack against Israel is a pretext: the legal dispute over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/ecco-perche-la-causa-del-nuovo-attacco-contro-israele-e-un-pretesto-la-disputa-legale-sul-quartiere-di-sheikh-jarrah/ on Sat, 15 May 2021 03:56:00 +0000.