(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Sheikh Jarrah: Reporting on US empire [1] [] Date: 2024-10 In a small house in the hills of East Jerusalem, I witnessed a microcosm of the slow-burn murder of a people. No American who reads the mainstream newspapers or watches the corporate TV news would have had any idea this was happening. But seeing it upfront there was no way to dispute the huge crime that was being perpetrated with American taxpayers’ dollars and diplomatic support. In May 2009, I spent a week sleeping on the floor in the home of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children, all Palestinian. I was there with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – a brave collection of international activists who attempt to help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. East Jerusalem was, by international law and basic morality, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel illegally occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law, and has never left. In fact, by 2009, Israel was working to take it all. At the time of writing, in August 2014, the Israelis have killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority civilians. There is talk in the mainstream Israeli media about depopulating Gaza and turning it into an Israeli tourist attraction. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now But during the time I was there the most pressing of the many issues were the attempts by an Israeli settler company to slowly cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which sits in a beautiful valley looking out toward Bethlehem. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document what everyone expected would be an imminent eviction. A few months later, at 5.30am, the Israeli border police did come and forcibly evict the Hanouns (so forcibly that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross. It was the culmination of a decade-long program of intimidation and harassment of the Sheikh Jarrah community that had seen lives destroyed to appease the most rancid kind of religious zealotry. Sheikh Jarrah is situated in a valley down from the American Colony Hotel where Tony Blair, former British prime minister and possibly the most willing servant of the American racket in the world, was staying in a luxury suite in May 2009, when he graced Jerusalem with his presence as the racket’s “Peace Envoy”. When you looked out of the Hanouns’ window, Blair’s hotel was 30 meters away; Blair, I had no doubt, could see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. Before I contacted his spokesperson, Blair had nothing to say about the evictions, and he said nothing publicly in the aftermath. That was one side of the valley. On the other, the British consulate peered down from its high-security peak. The British consulate had been only slightly better, calling the latest eviction “appalling”, but had done nothing tangible to halt this obscenity. The US silence was even louder. The Hanoun family, like so many Palestinians, had been the victims of terror for decades as they fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun, who continued to lead the resistance, spoke to me with eloquence and calm as he chain-smoked his way through the evenings and recounted what had befallen his family. Maher’s father was a refugee from the Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948 when gangs of Jewish paramilitaries expelled 800,000 Palestinians violently from their homes. Maher’s father was forced out of Nablus; his grandfather was forced out of Haifa at the same time. The Jordanian government gave them the houses in East Jerusalem in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so had spent his whole life, and brought up all his children, in his home. The Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, used a forged century-old Ottoman-era contract to claim ownership. Like all over East Jerusalem, the Israelis also tried to bribe Maher with an open check, if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he told me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.” In the end, they succeeded. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/sheikh-jarrah-jerusalem-ethnic-cleansing-reporting-matt-kennard/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/