Israeli-Hamas Cease-Fire Threatened by Tensions Over Contested Jerusalem
Neighborhood Dov Lieber | Photographs by Heidi Levine for The Wall Street
Journal 12-15 minutes

JERUSALEM—A decades-old property dispute in the divided Jerusalem
neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah shows the depth of tensions between Jews
and Palestinians over control of the contested city.

The fault lines have deepened in recent years, as a succession of Jewish
associations have tried to secure court orders to evict Palestinian
families they say are living illegally on land that is rightfully theirs
and who haven’t paid rent in decades. Palestinians view the legal
action as a way to alter the demographics of East Jerusalem in favor of
the Jewish population.

This month, clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians protesting
the planned evictions escalated into a broader conflict when Palestinian
militant group Hamas fired rockets into Israel from Gaza, a move, the
group said, aimed at forcing Israel’s government to stop the court
process, among other demands.

Israeli forces detained a young Palestinian woman during clashes in
Sheikh Jarrah on May 8.

Israel responded with a series of air and artillery strikes. The 11-day
conflict took the lives of 242 people in the Gaza Strip, where Hamas
rules, and 12 people in Israel, according to the United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Israeli medical officials.

With Israel’s Supreme Court expected to rule within the next month on
whether some of the evictions should go ahead, tensions could reignite
among the neighborhood’s sandstone villas and tree-lined streets and
threaten a precarious cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

Hamas, which has sought to strengthen its claim as the primary defender
of the Palestinian people, has vowed to renew its attacks on Israel if
the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah go ahead.

Jews on the rooftop of a Palestinian home where giant Israeli flags and
a Star of David overlooked Sheikh Jarrah.

“This has become a highly politicized case which has become a symbol
for who has a better claim for East Jerusalem,” said Yuval Shany, vice
president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry describes the issue as a private land
dispute. The Palestinian Authority, which governs most Palestinians in
the West Bank, says the evictions represent the forced displacement of
Arab residents from what they hope will be the capital of a future state.

A mosque in Sheikh Jarrah.

Palestinians prayed as Israeli border police guarded Jewish settlers in
Sheikh Jarrah on May 7.

Shortly before Hamas began firing rockets, Israel’s attorney general
said he would consider becoming party to the case—a sign, legal
experts said, that the government might intervene to find a solution. A
spokeswoman for the Israeli courts declined to comment on the case.

From the late 19th century until 1948, when the modern state of Israel
was founded, Jews lived in the area alongside Arab residents in East
Jerusalem, which is home to sites sacred for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

When Jordan conquered East Jerusalem during the 1948 war following
Israel’s declaration of independence, the area was emptied of its
Jewish inhabitants. A similar process occurred with many Palestinians
in what became Israel.

Palestinians argued with an Israeli border policeman on May 26.

Both Israel and Jordan settled refugees in the homes and land left vacant
following the 1948 war. But for the 28 Palestinian families that Jordan
settled in Sheikh Jarrah in 1956, the picture is more complicated because
Jordan never transferred them ownership. Jordan says it intended to do
so but the process was cut short after Israel conquered East Jerusalem
in 1967 during the Arab-Israeli war.

In 1970, Israel passed a law allowing anyone to reclaim land that had
been confiscated by Jordan during the 1948 war, as long as the land
hadn’t been given to new owners.

In 1972, the Sephardic Community Committee and the General Council
of the Congregation of Israel—two Jewish organizations that helped
19th-century Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine, particularly in
Jerusalem—reclaimed ownership of the disputed land in Sheikh Jarrah. The
Jewish associations said they were the rightful owners after purchasing
the land in the 1870s.

A Jewish woman with children entering a multi-story home draped in
Israeli flags.

Israeli Arab protesters held Palestinian flags against a building where
Jews have lived for several years.

Some 75 Palestinian families now live on the contested plots in
Sheikh Jarrah, according to Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher for Ir Amim,
a Jerusalem-based nonprofit that focuses on land disputes in the city.

The key precedent in the legal dispute occurred in 1982, when the
Palestinian families agreed to recognize the ownership of the Jewish
associations in a settlement, which was granted the status of a court
ruling. The families later claimed that the agreement was made without
their knowledge, and tried to challenge the original Jewish ownership
claims from 1972.

These challenges were rebuffed several times by Israeli judges, who
upheld the validity of an Ottoman-era land deed that the Jewish trusts
presented as evidence of ownership.

The plaintiff now pursuing the eviction of the Palestinian families living
on the contested land in Sheikh Jarrah is Israeli company Nahalat Shimon
Ltd., which purchased the ownership rights from the original Jewish
trusts in 2003 for $3 million, according to a copy of the contract.

Ilan Shemer, a lawyer representing Nahalat Shimon in the eviction cases,
declined to comment on the dispute. The company has submitted plans to
build more than 200 living units in the area, but the Jerusalem government
hasn’t authorized them.

The U.N. human rights office has said the evictions in East Jerusalem
would violate international law as Israel is considered an occupying
power and can’t apply its laws there. The Biden administration has
also called on Israel to halt the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.

Jewish settlers first began moving there in earnest after 2000, after
some separate eviction cases were resolved, occupying around 10 homes,
according to Mr. Tatarsky. He said around 11 of the Palestinian families
on the land claimed by Nahalat Shimon face eviction in the coming months.

The Palestinian residents’ insistence that they shouldn’t be evicted
has come to embody the broader resistance against Israeli settlers
in other contested areas. “If this happens and we’ll be evicted,
we’ll be refugees for a second time,” said 70-year-old Adel Budeiri,
one of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah. “Jerusalem is always a symbol
for Palestine and for the whole Muslim world. And Sheikh Jarrah is in
the midst of Jerusalem.”

More than 1,000 Palestinians are living under the threat of eviction
across East Jerusalem in a patchwork of property disputes making their
way through the courts, according to Mr. Tatarsky.

The disputes are overwhelmingly located in the Holy Basin, which includes
Jerusalem’s Old City and the ring of communities and land around it that
also contain a number of holy sites, making them especially contentious.

Jewish men pray at a compound that hosts the burial site of Shimon
Hatzadik, a Jewish high priest.

Palestinians under a banner that shows an old photograph of Sheikh Jarrah
and reads in Arabic, ‘We will stay here, we will not leave.’

Sheikh Jarrah’s Jewish community first evolved around what Jews believe
is the burial site of Shimon Hatzadik, a Jewish high priest who, according
to tradition, greeted Alexander the Great as the Macedonian conqueror
marched into ancient Israel. The neighborhood’s Arabic name, however,
is derived from the physician to Saladin, the 12th-century Muslim ruler
who resisted the Crusaders and governed much of the Levant. Palestinians
today view the neighborhood as a symbol of their broader resistance
against the Israeli state.

On one side of a road, a multistory home is draped in Israeli flags;
on the other, the slogan “Here we’ll stay” is daubed in Arabic
along high stone walls.

Israel’s Supreme Court has tried to get the two sides to reach a
compromise, court records of a discussion on May 2 show.

As night falls over the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, Stars of
David are seen illuminated over homes.

Hosni Abu Hussein, a lawyer for the Palestinian families, said his
clients agreed to pay rent, either to the court or a trust, but wouldn’t
recognize the ownership of the plaintiff, Nahalat Shimon. Nahalat Shimon
refused the offer, according to the court records.

He says he thinks the only possible solution is a negotiated one
and hopes Israeli authorities will decide to honor what he says was
Jordan’s intent to pass ownership of the land plots in Sheikh Jarrah
to his clients.

Another option, Mr. Hussein said, is for the state of Israel to confiscate
the land, compensate the Jewish claimants and transfer ownership to his
clients. He also holds out hope that the U.S. will somehow intervene,
but didn’t specify how.

“We can bury this problem through diplomatic or political means,”
Mr. Hussein said.

Israel-Palestinian Violence Latest Twist in Long Biden-Netanyahu
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