Sheikh Jarrah

Sheikh Jarrah lies two kilometres north of the Old City, on the road running out towards Mount Scopus and on north to Ramallah. It takes its name from Husam al-Din al-Jarrahi, a physician in Salah al-Din’s service — jarrah is the Arabic for surgeon — over whose burial place a tomb was raised at the turn of the thirteenth century. The residential quarter is much younger: building began in 1865 under Rabah al-Husayni, and the neighbourhood grew into the address of Jerusalem’s Muslim notability, the Husaynis above all. Around it stand the Orient House, the American Colony Hotel and the Palestinian National Theatre. In 2010 OCHA put its Palestinian population at about 2,800.

After 1948 the quarter sat on the edge of the no-man’s-land dividing the city. In 1956 the Jordanian government, under a housing scheme sponsored by UNRWA, moved twenty-eight Palestinian refugee families into Sheikh Jarrah. Under that agreement, set out in OCHA’s own endnote, the families gave up their UNRWA food assistance and were to pay a nominal rent for three years, after which ownership of the land and the houses would be transferred to them. The transfer was never completed. That unclosed gap — families housed by a Jordanian–UNRWA scheme, holding no title deed — is the opening the settler claims have been litigated into ever since — families who had fled or been expelled in 1948 from places that were now inside Israel. Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and has claimed it since; the refugee families are still there, and still refugees, unable to reclaim what they lost the first time.

The eviction machinery

What has been done to Sheikh Jarrah since is documented in detail rather than alleged. OCHA’s 2010 factsheet sets out the methods settler organisations have used to take land and property in the Palestinian quarters around the Old City: transfer to settler groups of property confiscated from Palestinian or Jordanian owners, including under the Absentee Property Law; designation of land as “public” or “state” land and its transfer to settler control; purchase through intermediaries, in several cases involving what OCHA describes as threats, deception, false depositions or forged documentation; and litigation in Israeli courts under a legal asymmetry OCHA states without softening — Israeli legislation “enables Jewish individuals or associations to lay claim to land and property allegedly owned in the occupied territory prior to 1948, while rejecting equivalent Palestinian rights to land and property in Israel.” That legislation is the Legal and Administrative Matters Law of 1970.

The consequences arrived quarter by quarter. In Karm al-Ja’uni more than sixty Palestinians, twenty-four of them children, were forcibly evicted from late 2008; on the morning of 2 August 2009 Israeli police evicted the Hanoun and al-Ghawi families, fifty-three people including twenty children, and their belongings were loaded onto a truck and dumped in the street near UNRWA’s headquarters. OCHA records that Israeli courts had not ruled conclusively on ownership of the land — the families were evicted for non-compliance with a 1982 lease agreement that their own Israeli lawyer had concluded with settler groups without their consent. Plans submitted to the Jerusalem municipality proposed demolishing the whole area, twenty-eight Palestinian homes, for a new settlement, threatening more than 300 residents. In Kubaniyat Im Haroun the Israeli Supreme Court ruled for a settler group in September 2010, putting some 200 Palestinians, most of them refugees, at risk. The Shepherd Hotel and its land, originally the Husayni family’s, was expropriated in 1967 and sold to a settler organisation in 1985. Karm el-Mufti, the Mufti of Jerusalem’s olive grove, was expropriated and transferred to the Ateret Cohanim association.

By 2021 Al-Haq counted eight families — nineteen households, eighty-seven people — at imminent risk of eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, with a Supreme Court hearing set for 10 May and then postponed. From 7 May 2021 Israeli forces sealed the neighbourhood’s entrances with metal barriers, and from 16 May with concrete blocks, while settlers moved freely. Al-Haq’s legal characterisation is that these acts amount to forcible transfer, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. That is Al-Haq’s submission, not a ruling: no court has so held.

What it is a case of

Sheikh Jarrah is not exceptional; it is legible. OCHA’s East Jerusalem factsheet places it alongside Silwan and the Old City as the neighbourhoods where several hundred Palestinian residents are at risk of forced displacement from settler activity, inside a city where 35 per cent of the land has been taken for settlement use, only 13 per cent is zoned for Palestinian building, at least a third of Palestinian homes lack permits, and some 2,000 houses have been demolished since 1967. Filippo Grandi, then UNRWA’s Commissioner-General, said of the neighbourhood in August 2010 that it was “a matter of deep concern that Palestinians, who have already endured extreme suffering of various kinds, including multiple episodes of large-scale displacement, should remain subject to the humiliation of the kind inflicted by forced evictions and home demolitions.”

Sources

• The Case of Sheikh Jarrah — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory, updated October 2010
• Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan: Ongoing Nakba and Israeli Dispossession of Palestinians — Al-Haq, 27 May 2021
• The Case of Sheikh Jarrah, October 2010 — UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory
• East Jerusalem: Key Humanitarian Concerns — UN OCHA, update August 2014
• Sheikh Jarrah — Wikipedia, for the name, the 1865 founding and the 1956 rehousing