WATCH: Sheikh Jarrah & the Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem & Beyond
In this week’s show, Mark Seddon speaks with Deep Dive regular, Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and legal researcher at the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC), for the latest news on what's really happening on the ground in Sheikh Jarrah.
Examining the recent attempts to displace the Salem family of 12 from their home of 70 years in Sheikh Jarrah, Hassan also exposes the systematic regime of ethnic cleansing Israel wields against Palestinians to facilitate its wider demographic ambitions across Jerusalem and beyond.
The show shines a light on recent events including: Israeli Knesset Member, Itamar Ben-Gvir, provocatively setting up office on the Salem’s front lawn; Israeli soldiers aggressively manhandling Muhammad al-Ajlouni, a young Palestinian man with Down syndrome; The New York Times’ continued media blackout against Amnesty’s apartheid report; greenwashing in the Naqab and more!
Kicking off the show, Seddon draws attention to recent events between Russia and Ukraine, questioning the lack of consistency from Western leaders, policymakers and commentators in demanding sanctions against Israel as they have done so quickly and uniformly against Russia.
“The Syrian-Golan had been occupied in 1967. Israel ethnically cleansed the Syrian-Golan, depopulating 95% of its original Syrian citizens, turning them into refugees”
(Twitter 22nd February 2022)
“We are seeing before us, a major crisis between Russia and Ukraine, between Russia and the West, and we have seen in the past couple of days, the decision by the Russian president and by the Russian parliament to recognize two breakaway regions of Eastern Ukraine…” Seddon said.
“We are seeing reports that military equipment has being moved into these same areas. This annexation effectively has been described and condemned by the UN Secretary General, but interestingly enough, many of these people who are making quite strong statements about this issue, and fair enough, don't seem to be saying the same things about another occupation, that has been going on for 50 years in the Golan Heights… Why this inconsistency?”
Budour Hassan responds by outlining Israel’s decades-long ethic cleansing of the Golan Heights’ native population, replacing them with Israeli colonies and settlers.
“The Syrian-Golan had been occupied in 1967. Israel ethnically cleansed the Syrian-Golan, depopulating 95% of its original Syrian citizens, turning them into refugees. Of the 138,000 Syrians who had lived in the Golan in 1967, only some 6,000 remained, and of course, Israel destroyed most of the villages and farms in the Golan and confiscated its land,” Hassan said.
“The other reason why your question is so timely is because last December on the 40th anniversary of Israel's unilateral annexation of the Golan, the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to double the number of Israeli Jewish colonists in the Golan. It is a $300 million plan according to which by 2030, the number of Israeli colonists living in the Golan would be doubled from some 25,000 to 50,000.”
Rather than call for sanctions, former US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2019 recognising Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, a move widely denounced as a violation of international law that prohibits states from acquiring land by force.
And instead of reversing Trump’s order upon his election last year, Biden has been reluctant to address Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of the Golan Heights. Instead, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN in an interview last February, “Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security.”
Turning to the situation on the ground in the Sheikh Jarrah and Jerusalem more generally, Hassan gave her analysis on the latest news that an Israeli court suspended the decision around the forcible displacement of the Salem family, citing police concerns around reigniting violence in the city:
“Israeli Magistrate Court delayed or froze the eviction of the Salem family, the displacement of the Salem family, in order to buy time.
“Israeli Magistrate Court delayed or froze the eviction of the Salem family, the displacement of the Salem family, in order to buy time. In order to see that there is a movement brewing in the street and they're trying to pacify it. To end it… to wait for a more appropriate time to carry out the displacement in the dark without making so much fuss,” Hassan said.
Israel illegally annexed East Jerusalem in June 1967 and to this day the city remains occupied territory under international law, undermining Israel’s claimed legal jurisdiction over Palestinians there.
(Twitter 22nd February 2022)
Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, such as Mohammed El-Kurd, who is also The Nation’s Palestine correspondent, hailed the delay against the displacement of the Salem family a victory testament to family’s resilience, especially family matriarch Fatima Salem, as well as giving credit to the mobilisation on the ground.
But like Hassan, El-Kurd emphasises Israel’s displacement ambitions for the Salems being far from over, seeing delay as just another method in Israel’s arsenal of tools used to exhaust both solidarity and media attention.
Similarly, Hassan reports how Israel attempts to obscure the realities of its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem instead by presenting it as a series of individual “real estate disputes”.
“There was, it was known as, the 2020 plan… they failed to implement it by 2020, whose aim was to reduce Palestinians in Jerusalem to less that 30%. Right now Palestinians constitute 38% of the population in Jerusalem.
“What Israel tries to do is try to portray it as some sort of a dispute of property, of real estate, when it's not, when the whole objective of this is actually to displace all of the Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah especially in those two areas and to plant in their place these Israeli colonists.”
However, Hassan was keen to show Israel’s bigger agenda revealed through its own “Jerusalem 2020 Masterplan” which was prepared by a national planning committee and first published in 2004:
“There was, it was known as, the 2020 plan… they failed to implement it by 2020, whose aim was to reduce Palestinians in Jerusalem to less that 30%. Right now Palestinians constitute 38% of the population in Jerusalem. So the objective was to reduce that percentage to less than 30% through the use of several methods, including forcible eviction, forcible displacement, demolitions, refusal to grant building permits,” said Hassan.
According to UN monitoring group, OCHA, The Salem family is just one of 218 Palestinian families, comprising 970 individuals, including 424 children, living in East Jerusalem, mainly in the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, that are currently faced with the threat of forced eviction by the Israeli authorities.
So far this year OCHA reports that Israel has demolished 22 Palestinian structures in East Jerusalem, displacing 69 people. While a recent Al Jazeera report highlighted how the Jerusalem Municipality denies at least 93% of all Palestinian building permit requests in the city.
Skip Ahead:
0:00 – Intro
3:13 – Russian occupation of Ukraine vs. Israel’s occupation of the Golan heights
4:52 – 1982 strike in Golan
10:13 – NYT failure to report Amnesty’s apartheid report
11:28 – Sheikh Jarrah and the Salem family
15:19 – Absentee Property Law & project to displace Palestinians
20:22 – Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Jerusalem & “less checkpoints”
21:51 – Israel’s policy of forcing out Palestinians from Jerusalem
25:43 – Israel’s ‘multi-layered’ system to remove Palestinians in Jerusalem
27:51 – Palestinian resistance to Israel’s project
29:28 – Sheikh Jarrah under siege
30:37 – The case of Muhammad al-Ajlouni
34:04 – Protests creating a ‘space’ for community in Palestine
35:04 – There is no difference between ‘settlers’ and ‘police’ in Israel
37:23 – 99.1% of Palestinian building permits rejected
42:32 – The Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab and “greenwashing”
46:00 – The “National Park” in Jerusalem
48:36 – International community’s reactions – Golan Heights vs. Ukraine
55:16 – End
