From Sheikh Jarrah to Shake, Rattle and Roll

[Stavros]

From one perspective, the latest Rattling' and Rollin' between Israel and Hamas looks much like the last one. Something happens, tempers are lost, rockets are launched from Gaza, Israel retaliates, the grisly dance of death takes over the stage. There have bee enough threads on this in HA to exhaust the most patient observer, however objective or partisan they may be.

This time, the violence in the streets across Israel and the illegally occupied territories worries people because in the past this was limited to settler violence against Palestinians in those parts of the West Bank where land disputes have been a runnng sore since 1967. In other words it was happening 'over there' where the militants involved are as hostile to Israel's Jews as they are to Palestinian Arabs.

At the root of the current violence, other than the clashes at the al-Aqsa mosque (a chronic source of conflict anyway), has been the property disputes in Sheikh Jarrah, two hills and a Wadi which house some of the most palatial mansions in historic Jerusalem, built in the 19th century -and until 1947 owned and occupied by Jews and Arabs -in the latter case the mansions of the well-known Palestinian Notable families -the Husseini, Nashashibi, Nuseibi, Rashidi et al. In terms of class, if it is not too cruel to say so, the rich lived on the hill, the peasants in the Wadi (where there are shrines to historic figures including an ancient Rabbi, though the tomb of 'Simon the Just' is actually of a Roman woman, but hey in this part of the world let's not allow facts to spoil a good story).

I know Sheikh Jarrah because I have used the library in the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, as it was when it opened in the 1920s, these days known as the 'Kenyon Institute'. It is a splendid building, and if you have reason to do so, I do recommend applying to use its library which contains a wealth of books and other reading materials on Palestine/Israel and not just on its much vexed and vexatious archaeology, which I am often relieved is not my subject though it is of occasional interest. I even got lost once and had to ask a Jewish woman how to get to Sheikh Jarrah and she instantly recoiled in horror -'But there are Arabs living there!' --but she did guide me in the right direction.

The property disputes are in their small way a microcosm of the Arab-Israeli conflict in this very, very small part of the world. When the Jordanians took over the West Bank including East Jerusalem, they reached an agreement with the UNRWA to house Palestinian refugees from newly created Israel as tenants on property confiscated by the Jordanian Govt, who nevertheless did not abolish the rights of the original -mostly Jewish- owners. Some but not all of the Arabs who live in these properties were/are 'protected tenants' but in recent years their leases have expired and Israeli courts asked to rule in favour of the original Jewish owners, and it seems, if they are dead or nowhere to be found, to transfer ownership to Jewish settler groups or some equivalent. On the face of it, this appears to be a strightforward resolution of the legal ownershp of land which goes from Jew to Jordan to Jew from the 19th century via the 1950s to 2021.

Property rights are never simple, and when you throw into this mix the absent owners, the tenants who have lived there for 50 years or more, the tenants who are tenants of the tenants, and the miliant settler groups who don't think any Arab has the right to live in Jerusalem, the opportunity for mischief, constant trips to Court, and violent confrontations on the streets is too hard to resist. The Jews have a clear legal right to own the land that is registered in their name -but are they still alive, and if not, who gets the land? Maybe offer it for sale to the highest bidder? And what of the Palestinians who were refugees -why doesn't Israel give them the right to return to the property they once owned that may be somewhere between Tel-Aviv and Haifa? Double-standards? Hmmm...

Rights, as usual in this part of the world, are not distributed equally, just as the Israeli Govt is aggressive in this matter where the Palestinian authority is weak and ineffective.

Spare a thought for another tenant of Sheikh Jarrah, down there in the Wadi-

"the rubble cemetery of my first landlord in the neighborhood finally got a building permit. Just completed, the four-story building has been rented for $1.5 million a year by Tony Blair in his role as representative of the “middle East Quartet.” he spends four days a month here and has never met with the families losing their homes in the neighborhood, nor ever made a statement about the plight facing the Palestinians of Sheikh Jarrah or of Jerusalem."
https://www.palestine-studies.org/si...Jarrah_1_0.pdf

For an aggressive, pro-Israeli view (via San Diego)
https://www.jns.org/opinion/understa...perty-dispute/

For another Israeli view, see-
https://forward.com/opinion/469304/t...ting-who-owns/

As for the Jarrah the Sheikh, well, he was Physician to that most famous of Crusaders -Saladin (the Kurd known as Salahuddin al-Ayubbi)- proving that in Jerusalem you are never too far away from ancient history and its grudges.

[Stavros]

The ceasefire, though welcome, changes nothing. In five years HAMAS will have rebuilt the tunnels, buildings demolished will be rebuilt, the stockpile of missiles will be replenished -where do they come from, and who is paying for them?

It is said that the difference this time was that for once even the most devoted supporter of Israel had to admit that the 'inter-communal' violence inside Israel itself, as in Lod/Lydda, marked a new moment. This, however is what has happened to the Appeasement of Netanyahu and before him, Ariel Sharon, who rejected the Peace Treaty with the PLO before the ink was dry on the document, and who shed no tears when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. What is new is the extent to which Settler Fanatics, as they are politely called, have left their homes in the illegally Occupied Territories, to enter Israel and attack Jews and Arabs there, but this is merely a replay of the Fascist violence their predecessors engaged in when their target was Arabs and the British in 1920s and 1930s Palestine.

Just as the Betar Youth Movement was given permission by their hero Mussolini to open a naval academy at Civitavecchia on the coast outside Rome, so that Fascist/Nationalist movement later merged into the Herut and later the Likud, so that in a real sense, Netanyahu has inherited the kind of Fascism which is at the core of his party's stated aim to create Eretz Israel, which it does not define geographically but which one of his predecessors stated includes present-day Israel and those parts of Jordan which in the Bible were known as Moab, Gilead and Ammon. The present day Fascists beieve even Netanyahu is sellig them out, they have called for the complete expulsion of Arabs from their land, but have also gone further to demand the dissolution of the Supreme Court and don't seem to have much respect for the Knesset either. It was always a tough ask to support such people, but it happened.

Because Netanyahu succeeded for a while in making support for Israel an existential issue, so any criticism of Israel was taken to mean support for its enemies, yet now more people can see that it is Netanyahu who has driven Israel into a cul-de-sac of violence and hate, because neither he nor his supporters accepted that compromises on land for peace, fundamental to the 1993 Treaty could be allowed as it ruined their definition of Israel.

Yet as Israel has peace Treaties with Egypt, Jordan and the PLO, and recognition treaties with the Gulf, it is hard to claim the existential argument has any value, while it is hardly surprising if Syria rejects peace when Israel remains in illegal occupation of the Jabal al-Jawlan and has been bombing targets in Syria on a regular basis for two years or more.

As for the solutions, no, a 'two state' solution is no longer viable, but my proposal, for a Confederation in which every citizen is equal, must now be considered, indeed, Biden hinted at it yesterday. But to make a step forward from here, it seems Israel and the PLO must take a step back and revive the purpose of the 1993 Treaty. In its present form, the Palestinian Authority is of no use, which suggests elections, and a new generation have the opportunity to try something new.

But so too in Israel it is surely time that Netanyahu, who has never won more than 30% of the vote and is widely viewed as the most corrupt politician in a country famous for its corruption (how many President have been sent to prison?) must go. But Israel is as divided as the Palestinians, and the Fascist core who reject peace, and claim all of the land is theirs, have nowhere else to go and a lot of support, as does Hamas in Gaza. But unless the revival of a meaningful peace with fundamental change is on the agenda, Israel will not change, and neither will the Palestinians. Settlements will continue to grow, violence will not stop, and in five years we will be reading about the missiles here and there, the casualties, and all of the routine accusations from both sides.

Too early to say if these new perspectives will change US policy but the real change must happen where it matters most. And right now, the two sides are as far apart as they have ever been.