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Sheikh Jarrah and Beyond with Muna Dajani
114 Plays3 years ago
Muna Dajani joins host Yara Hawari to discuss how the #SaveSheikhJarrah campaign in support of her family and others in the Jerusalem neighborhood has acted as a catalyst for the ongoing uprising across historic Palestine against decades of Israeli settler-colonialism.
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Transcript
Refugees' Struggle in Palestine
00:00:00
Speaker
Sichsager symbolizes how refugees manage to exercise some form of return by establishing roots again in a place in Palestine and calling it home only to be under the threat of losing that refuge and that place only a few years after moving into it and feeling like, oh, you know, we can actually build our lives again.
Introduction to Rethinking Palestine
00:00:28
Speaker
This is Rethinking Palestine, a podcast from Ashabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, a virtual think tank that aims to foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination. We draw upon the vast knowledge and experience of the Palestinian people, whether in Palestine or in exile, to put forward strong and diverse Palestinian policy voices. In this podcast, we will be bringing these voices to you so that you can listen to Palestinians sharing their analysis wherever you are in the world.
Sheikh Jarrah: Catalyst of Uprising
00:01:04
Speaker
The ongoing Palestinian uprising against Israeli settler Colonial Raw across Palestine is being described as having begun in Sheikh Sharrah, the now well-known Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem facing ethnic cleansing. Now, it's a bit reductive to say that this is entirely the case because it ignores decades of attempts to mobilize and unify the Palestinian grassroots.
00:01:28
Speaker
Nonetheless, the Sheikh Sharad campaign certainly has acted as a catalyst and it has since captured and it continues to capture the hearts and minds of Palestinians because it really encapsulates the Palestinian experience which is largely characterized by dispossession.
00:01:45
Speaker
Now, social media and the media in general has played a huge role in this mobilization, as we discussed in our last podcast episode. But in this episode, we want to focus on Sheikh Jarrah as the catalyst for this mobilizing, and also discuss how it's become so emblematic for Palestinians everywhere.
Historical Context of Sheikh Jarrah
00:02:05
Speaker
We are joined by Dr. Mona Dajani, an environmental researcher and an Ashabaka policy member, who's also from Shefshirah in Jerusalem. Mona, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Yara, for having me. Let's start with an introduction. What is happening in Shefshirah and why is it now that it has received so much attention?
00:02:27
Speaker
Well, yeah, let's start with the basics. Sheikh Zargah is a Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. And East Jerusalem, of course, was occupied in 1967. Specifically, the Sheikh Zargah that is making headlines in the news is a certain area of the neighborhood in
00:02:46
Speaker
Jaoni, in Khagme Jaoni. And Khagme Jaoni hosts the Sheikh Zargarh housing compound, where that is Sheikh Zargarh, as we know them, where my grandparents' house is. And this specific neighborhood, this specific housing complex was the home for 28 Palestinian families. These Palestinian families are refugee families that have found refuge in Sheikh Zargarh
00:03:12
Speaker
in 1956. While Israel at that time was under the Hashemite Kingdom rule and in collaboration with the Honor Law, the Relief Works Agency, these 28 families were given lots of land and a house in exchange of their refugee status where they'll be kind of settled there.
00:03:34
Speaker
After, you know, years of being refugees, my grandparents' family, for example, were refugees from Baka neighborhood in what came to be known as West Jerusalem. They had to travel to Jordan and Syria, ending up back in Jerusalem in 1953 and being housed in Sichtegras.
00:03:52
Speaker
So this is the case for all the families. They come from different places in Palestine and they have been made refugees and expelled during the 1948 The Nakba, as is the story of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. So what's happening in Sheikh Zara? As you've mentioned in the introduction, what's happening in Sheikh Zara is not recent. It's not a decision made by a court just today. This has been court case that has been filed against the residents and the family is living in those houses
00:04:22
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since the 1970s.
Legal Battles and Judicial Bias
00:04:24
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So after Israel occupied the rest of Palestine, in the 1970s the residents of those houses started getting notices of lawsuits being filed against them by settler organizations claiming Jewish ownership of the land and wanting to basically expel all of these families to reclaim that land.
00:04:46
Speaker
And since the 70s, and we can imagine in the 1970s how Palestinians just overcoming the Nakba in 1948, then the Naksa in 1967. So you come to a very kind of disenfranchised, very weakened society that is facing a new lexicon, a new language, new regulations and policies by the Israeli settler state. Of course, you know, where laws are as equally important as infrastructures of violence as
00:05:14
Speaker
the actual destruction and depopulation of Palestinian villages. So they're facing a legal system here that they have no knowledge of, they have no understanding of how it works or how to actually confront it. And this is where the case began in the 1970s, where this legal battle started.
00:05:32
Speaker
And as we know now that the Israeli judicial system is so unjust and unfair, it's very far from being a court of justice. But anyways, against the Palestinians especially, these families have been undergoing appeal after appeal where the Israeli court is not taking into account the Palestinian
00:05:52
Speaker
proof of ownership of those houses based on the agreement that was signed between them and the Jordanian government at the time, even evidence that the attorney that works with the families have been presenting from the Ottoman archives, from the Jordanian governments and so on, to prove ownership of the Palestinians. But this type of evidence has been dismissed for years now, for decades, strengthening and standing also all the time with the side of the Israeli settlers.
00:06:20
Speaker
So what's happening today in Sheikh Jarrah is basically the last stage of this legal battle that the families have been going through where the Israeli court has decided to rule, of course, for the settler organization on the halachim own.
00:06:35
Speaker
and to start the process of expelling families. Started with four families in May. That was when the decision was to take place. And then through this great campaigning that happened on the ground, in addition to the relentless work of the lawyers, this case has been raised to the High Court or the Supreme Court of Israel to be seen by the general attorney.
Youth, Social Media, and Global Attention
00:06:59
Speaker
And this is the case where we've seen only a few days ago where the general attorney has refused to actually get involved in studying the case again and looking at the evidence again, which really leaves the families against the threat of expulsion that is more imminent.
00:07:15
Speaker
And of course, one of the reasons that the general attorney didn't want to get involved is because it would politicize and issue what the Israelis are calling a real estate case, which of course just completely whitewashes over the fact that this is colonial ethnic cleansing.
00:07:32
Speaker
And I think it's very important to note as well that the campaign against this ethnic cleansing in Shoshundra has been also ongoing for many years, but it was only recently that it attracted so much international attention. And I think one of the reasons for that is because of the youth involvement and the utilization of social media in such a new way in this case.
00:07:53
Speaker
Mona, I wanted to ask you a bit more about the other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing similar struggles, because Sher-Shirah, of course, is not an exceptional case. This is also happening in neighborhoods like Silwan. So what does this tell us about the Israeli regime's plan for greater Jerusalem?
Israeli Agenda in Jerusalem
00:08:15
Speaker
I think every Jerusalemite lives with this burden of an existential burden and existential threat to their presence in their own city on a daily basis. Since, of course, Israel's occupation in 1967, the fact that Jerusalem, the east part of Jerusalem where the Palestinian neighborhoods are today, are under a reality of ongoing and continuing dispossession through different laws and regulations and mechanisms.
00:08:41
Speaker
So whether through these type of expulsions that are being orchestrated by the Israeli government through the help and support and the sanctioning of such settler organizations to take over Palestinian properties and homes, or whether through all of the different mechanisms and
00:08:58
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laws and regulations that Israel enacts in East Jerusalem of not allowing urban development and planning, the zoning limitations where Palestinians are not allowed to expand their built-up areas, moving and forcing Palestinians to move outside of the limits and outside of the borders of the Jerusalem municipality, therefore risking
00:09:19
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revocation of their residencies and this is really important to highlight here that Jerusalemites are mere residents in their own city. This also has a legal ramification where Israel also devises laws and and regulations to ensure Palestinian presence in Jerusalem is very precarious in itself. You know you have the center of life policy where Palestinians are forced
00:09:42
Speaker
to prove that they belong to the city, that their center of life is within those borders of East Jerusalem. So any attempt of any normal human being to look further than their birthplace for jobs, for education, to marry someone, all of these things are off limits to Jerusalemites. So we can really imagine this kind of reality where Palestinians are living.
00:10:05
Speaker
So, as you mentioned, this is not only Sheikh Zargah. As we are hearing also on the news, it's also the case of Qatnil Hawa in Silwan. And there also have been, in this legal battle with the Israeli settler Koyoniel State and the settler organization known there as At-Eret-Kohanim, which is another one of those state-sanctioned and US-funded entities.
00:10:26
Speaker
So they're also facing another threat of expulsion there on the premise again of a real estate dispute and the fact that it's Jewish ownership of the land. However, we add to that another layer that it also is part of all of these settler organizations. Their main objective is to intensify its Jewish settler presence
00:10:49
Speaker
in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods. It comes aligned with the Jewish and municipality objective as well, is to ensure a demographic majority of Jews versus Palestinians in the city, to ensure a Jewish character of the
Comparative Threats in Jerusalem
00:11:04
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city. These are all racist and, you know, supremacist way of controlling the space and controlling Palestinian spaces of existence that are, you know, of course, as we see it, they're all sanctions, they're all funded and supported by the Israeli state.
00:11:18
Speaker
So Silwan again continues on with eminent threat of expulsion only and also because they want to ensure a biblical character of the area where they are intending to also develop the city of David biblical park on the rubble of those Palestinian homes. We've also seen how you know Palestinians have been getting notices for home demolitions in the Silwan as well and this is also part and parcel of policy of dispossession that Israel carries out
00:11:48
Speaker
and the fact that your existence on the land is in itself seen as a threat. What we can also say here, these also have very material implications on Palestinians' lives within the city. Palestinians have no other place to go if we think of Palestinians' families in Sheikh Jarrah.
00:12:05
Speaker
or still went. The threat of expulsion is so real, but what happens also the day after? Do we also understand that this is a systematic reality for Palestinians where we have nowhere else to go? And I think this is really important to understand, especially for people who kind of think of it or frame it as a real estate issue.
00:12:25
Speaker
is that sidetracks the very inclusionary nature and the systematic dispossession that Palestinians have been going through in Jerusalem for decades. And the whole objective of it is to empty Jerusalem from its Palestinian residents, to really destroy the social fabric, the cultural and political institutions and infrastructures that Palestinians in Jerusalem have built and developed for decades. And we've seen that how just quickly the Israeli forces brutally
00:12:54
Speaker
attack Palestinian protesters, whether in Sheikh Jarrah, in Al-Aqsa Mosque, whether people also just sitting in Damascus Gate, we've seen like only recently, two days ago, how the skunk water machines were spraying neighborhoods in Silwan, they were spraying the Damascus Gate sitting area.
Symbolism of Sheikh Jarrah
00:13:12
Speaker
So in addition, of course, of all the brutal attacks that happened against the Palestinians.
00:13:16
Speaker
protesters as we've seen through the skunk truck or the grenades or the brutal attacks that we've seen against Palestinians. If you're enjoying this podcast, please visit our website www.al-shabaka.org where you will find more Palestinian policy analysis and where you can join our mailing list and donate to support our work.
00:13:41
Speaker
And of course in Jerusalem, this maintaining of Israeli-Jewish dominance is incredibly intense and aggressive. But it also happens across colonised Palestine. And so, you know, what happens in Cheikh Shadrach has to be framed within this wider context of Israeli settler colonisation of Palestine. And so
00:14:06
Speaker
I think this is why Shashidra has become so emblematic for Palestinians, for all Palestinians, because displacement is a key part of Palestinian experience, whether you are in Haifa, Nazareth, Yaffa, Beitah, in the West Bank, or anywhere else for that matter.
00:14:27
Speaker
It is definitely a case where Palestinians all across Palestine, as you've mentioned, are experiencing the same apparatus and the same mechanisms of dispossession. If we talk only about expulsions from homes based on these false claims of ownership and these false claims of Palestinians being mere tenants in their own homes,
00:14:51
Speaker
We've seen that happening in different cities. We've seen that once the Sheikh Jarrah movement and the safe Sheikh Jarrah mobilisation started taking shape, that lots of Palestinians said, this is happening in Yaffa, this is happening in Lid, this is happening in Akko.
00:15:06
Speaker
The same mechanisms have been used by the settler colonial state against Palestinians, wherever they are, whatever the political realities are for those Palestinians. And whether these Palestinians have Israeli citizenship or whether you are a mere resident in Jerusalem or whether you're a Palestinian ID holder in the West Bank in Gaza, we are all Palestinians facing the same methods of dispossession everywhere. And this is why I think the Sheikh Zargarh
00:15:32
Speaker
Kaysh has been so unifying for Palestinians everywhere because I think a lot of commentators and a lot of people and the residents themselves describe it as an ongoing Nakba. And I think this is why all Palestinians have witnessed through their live feeds what the youth of Sheikh Zagrah, especially Hamad and Muna and many others who were on the ground sharing live footage of what type of brutality they're facing from the settlers and from the Israeli soldiers and police. And everybody saw in it
00:16:00
Speaker
kind of their own dispossession, their own stories of Nakba, of their parents and grandparents. So Sher Zagach actually, in a way, describes and symbolizes that experience. So I think this is why we see it being also shared so widely.
00:16:17
Speaker
And the fact that Palestinians from all over the spectrum, even Palestinians in the Diaspora, as we've seen, are saying no
Engaging with Israeli Legal System
00:16:24
Speaker
more. We are going to act this time around because this is another existential threat to not only our existence on the land, but our memory of the place and our future in this place. So I think it really is such a strong case. And I think what's really interesting is that how it links so easily and so smoothly to what's happening.
00:16:46
Speaker
in Silwan, what Palestinians in Nokob, in the Galilee, in the West Bank, and in Gaza. We're all in this together, so this is, I think, what kind of unified more and more the Palestinian case and the Palestinian experience. I always say, like, you know, my grandparents' house in Sheikh Zargar,
00:17:04
Speaker
It's not the most beautiful house or property in the world, but I think, of course, it's the symbolism of those places and what they mean. And the fact that they all symbolize, like Sichs-Lagach symbolizes how refugees managed to exercise some form of return by establishing roots again in a place in Palestine and calling it home only to be under the threat of losing that refuge and that place.
00:17:29
Speaker
only a few years after moving into it and feeling like, oh, you know, we can actually build our lives again. And this is, I think, also what makes the Shikr Zagar story so, so powerful and how it resonates with all Palestinians. Of course, Palestinians are not passive.
00:17:46
Speaker
amidst settler colonial erasure and this kind of ethnic cleansing. And they resist in multiple ways, which we'll touch up on in a little bit. But I want to ask a question that a lot of people outside of Palestine ask, and that is why do Palestinians use Israeli legal courts at all, especially considering that they are illegitimate, even by international law.
Pursuing New Justice Avenues
00:18:09
Speaker
And as you yourself mentioned, the entire system is inherently in just
00:18:15
Speaker
I think this is such an important question. We need to clarify why and how Palestinians engage with Israeli institutions. Just to highlight that, Palestinians have been forced to engage with Israeli institutions since 1948, since the Nakba. There have also been cases where Palestinians have refused to engage with Israeli institutions. In Jerusalem specifically, I'll give two quick examples.
00:18:37
Speaker
Jerusalemites have collectively refused to participate in Israeli municipal elections and another form of disengagement or refusal has been to collectively refuse as well to apply for Israeli citizenship. However, you know, Palestinians engaged with the Israeli court system.
00:18:55
Speaker
And simply, I think because they had no other choice, other alternative, but to engage. If we take the case of Sheikh Zargar, the families, only a few years after the Israeli occupation in 1967, were handed these letters stating that lawsuits have been filed against them by the settler organization. At that moment in time, they had no choice but to go to court to present their case.
00:19:18
Speaker
knowing on one hand that their case is just that they have ample evidence to prove their rightful ownership of the land and houses that they live in. But on the other hand, of course, Palestinian Jerusalemites and the families knew that this Israeli court system is inherently biased, is inherently racist and exclusionary of Palestinians, and it's part and parcel of an Israeli system
00:19:43
Speaker
that aims to dispossess them of their land, of their homes, and to eliminate their presence from the city. So this has been, you know, the greatest dilemma of engaging with these systems. However, today we see that there are new tools and avenues that are opening up for Palestinians to use to fight and seek justice against their dispossession. One of which is what the Sheikh Jarrah families did was to submit a letter in April 2021
00:20:12
Speaker
to the office of the persecutor of the ICC, of the International Criminal Court, calling for the inclusion of their case, of the Sheikh Jarrah expulsion case, as part of the open investigation that's happening on the situation in in Palestine. I think this is also a new avenue that Palestinians are seeking to overcome this very racist and exclusionary avenues that have been used for decades.
00:20:38
Speaker
So what I think is that for a lot of Palestinians who do engage with the Israeli legal system in these cases, is that they view it as one tool in a toolbox of many tools. And it's not that they expect justice from this system, but really it's a way to slow down what a lot of people fear is the inevitable, which in this case is the total Judaisation of Jerusalem.
Legacy of Legal Navigation
00:21:03
Speaker
So, I don't think Palestinians in Shachirah or elsewhere really expect much from these courts, but it is, you know, a way or a path that some people choose in a hope that it buys them time whilst they engage in other forms of resistance. And I really think overall the expectations from Palestinians is very, very low when it comes to Israeli courts.
00:21:27
Speaker
You're right. And I think also the fact that after 1948, what happened throughout Palestine, especially with Palestinians inside Israel learning the hard way about Israeli law and how Israel uses it to dispossess and to do the dies and all of that, there has been kind of some legal advice that has been passed around between Palestinians occupied in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
00:21:50
Speaker
And also the occupied Golden Heights where legal advice was shared about how can you actually access those legal ways and legal methods and how do you actually use them to protect your land, to protect your houses from being demolished or protect your land from being confiscated and so on.
00:22:07
Speaker
So I think there's also been like a very long legacy of Palestinians supporting each other legally to kind of really understand those institutions and try to find entry points through which to seek justice. But I do agree that these institutions and these mechanisms will not bring justice for Palestinians.
00:22:26
Speaker
But under conditions of a belligerent occupation, a decades-long occupation and settler colonialism, it's really difficult to break away from engaging with and confronting the Israeli institutions and to try to seek justice through that.
Creative Palestinian Resistance
00:22:44
Speaker
But as you mentioned, it's also in addition to solidifying and making sure that there are other ways of resisting and other ways of bringing justice against the cases of ongoing settlement expansion or house demolitions or house expulsions. So this is the reality. This is a decades long occupation we needed to kind of engage with those institutions. And this kind of really opens up that there are so many other ways of resisting that Palestinians in Jerusalem have attempted to do.
00:23:14
Speaker
And I think we've seen some really creative ways much Palestinians resist being dispossessed of their lands and their homes over the many years from Baba Shams, which was a protest village essentially that was set up in 2014 by Palestinians who tried to reclaim land to what is happening right now in the West Bank in the village of Beitha, which is using destruction techniques to try and disrupt
00:23:38
Speaker
a new settlement that is being built on the mountain overlooking their village. I think it's always important to point out these creative and ongoing ways that Palestinians resist because we are not a passive people. We are not lying down and taking this ethnic cleansing and dispossession.
00:24:00
Speaker
I do agree completely and the fact that it's a multifaceted and multi-layered type of mobilization that sometimes kind of maybe to the outside viewer can seem to be counterproductive or contradictory. You know a lot of cases where you're saying oh well Palestinians in Jerusalem maybe should lie for Israeli citizenship or they should vote for
00:24:21
Speaker
the municipality in order to claim more rights and I think these are the cases where people have made a collective decision not to engage with those sort of engagements with the state while in terms of facing as I mentioned before you know a heavily funded state sanctioned and supported and even a superpower of supported entity with an objective to eliminate you from your presence in your city then you also need to seek other ways of confronting it through the legal
00:24:50
Speaker
mechanisms and through going to Israeli court was one way to do it. But I think Palestinians in Jerusalem have shown that they refuse to do so in other cases where they understand that this is more will actually be actually be counterproductive to their cause and to their right to self-determination. So we need also to trust, you know, how Palestinian themselves decide the tools of
00:25:12
Speaker
of their own fight. And also to understand that this comes out of a historical and collective experience that they have built in dealing with the settler colonial project. And I think just also about what's happening in beta, like how also it's coming up, you know, as an event that's happening right now. Again, there is a long history of a resistance in beta village, like many other villages in the West Bank against settlement encroachment.
00:25:37
Speaker
and against land confiscation, against livelihood destruction. And I think this all, again, takes it back to the fact that we live under these settler colonial conditions, where we're always in a constant struggle over our natural resources, over our lands, to protect our houses and to protect our way of life. So this is kind of one struggle that takes different forms. This is what I wanted to say. In Beta village, we've seen how fast encroachment can happen on Palestinian land.
00:26:04
Speaker
And as we see how fast it was with the law that Israel and Israeli settler groups can claim rights to Palestinian homes and neighborhoods. So this is how blatant the settler colonial rule is. But I think the pool of resources and the pools of mobilization strategies and tactics, these ingenious ways of resisting are really great. And I think
Continued Resistance and Call to Action
00:26:29
Speaker
Beta is teaching us another lesson in that type of very smooth
00:26:33
Speaker
and land-based type of resistance. So it's all again in this collective knowledge and collective traditional and political knowledge we have gained throughout the decades.
00:26:46
Speaker
Mona, thank you so much for that. Just a final note to remind the listeners that your family and other families, even though the international tension has died down, they're still facing imminent ethnic cleansing and settler colonial Eurasia. But also at the same time, Mona, as you mentioned in your final comment that we at Palestinians are continuing to resist enigmatic and vibrant ways. Mona, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Yara. Thank you so much.
00:27:20
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Rethinking Palestine. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. For more policy analysis and to donate to support our work, please visit our website www.al-shabakar.org. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.