More Eviction Orders in Sheikh Jarrah
And this in the same week that 700-800 students and professors marched from Hebrew U to Sheikh Jarrah in protest of the families who have already been evicted from their homes.
Haaretz reports:
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington in a much-feted effort to restore damaged ties with the United States, new tensions in East Jerusalem threaten to rekindle a diplomatic row over Jewish building beyond the Green Line in the city.
On Saturday lawyers served eviction notices to two Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a focus of clashes between Arab residents and settlers.
The families were ordered to vacate their properties within 45 days.
Full story.
Noam at Promised Land comments:
Personally, I find the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah to be the best thing that happened to the Israeli left in years. The number of the people present there doesn’t seem that impressive, but the crowd grows each week, and it is clear that the police and the municipality will find new evacuations very hard to carry out.
More importantly, this struggle is becoming an inspiration to many who all but gave up on political activism – and not just in Israel. And it’s happening without any political party or a leftwing organization supporting it, and under some very radical massages. For the first time I can remember in years, the left doesn’t try to “move to the center” in order to win the support of the more conservative public, or engage in all sort of competitions in patriotism with the rightwing – ones that we obviously will never win – but rather sticks to its principles without apologizing or justifying itself.
There is no common platform in Sheikh Jarrah except for this very specific struggle. Nobody asks if you support one or two states, if you are a Zionist, Post Zionist or anti-Zionist. People just come each Friday to Jerusalem and stand for what they think is right – and so far, it works well enough. Sometimes even I get the sense that if this thing wasn’t happening in here, it would have happened somewhere else. The energy feels bigger than this specific incident, as if there are finally enough Israelis who say that things have been going in the wrong direction for far too long – that a line had to be drawn, and it happened to be drawn in Sheikh Jarrah.
If you want to help, come on Fridays, and if you live in the states, you can donate to the defense of arrested activists here.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that Israeli security forces have a great deal of experience evicting people from their homes. They threw 8,000 on their butts out of Gaza. You think one family in Sheikh Jarah, violating is a court order, is going to be a problem?! Ha! This is dreamland.
It’s interesting, though, that the leftist activists could solve this situation by just paying the rent the families owe. The court orders being handed down are for eviction of non-payment of rent. All they have to do is pay rent, and they won’t be evicted. Why haven’t the activists put their money where their mouth is?