Sheikh Jarrah

Here is a small blurb I found about the conflicts surrounding the neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem. This was the neighborhood where I stayed for Rosh Hashanah.

“The affluent Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has become, in the words of one observer, the new battleground of the Israeli left. By now, most readers of +972 are familiar with the story of struggle and dispossession which has typified the Sheikh Jarrah protest movement. In early 2009, Jewish settlers, backed by American funded organizations like Ateret Cohanim, won a long court battle over ownership of a number of Palestinian houses in Sheikh Jarrah. Siding with the settlers, the Israeli government decided to evict waves of Palestinian families from their homes claiming that Jews owned the houses before the founding of Israel in 1948. The legal precedents set by the profligacy of Israel’s legal institutions were not extended to the evicted Palestinians, many of whom owned homes in Jaffa and West Jerusalem before 1948. Some Israeli critics decried the decision, claiming that Israel was making a two state solution with East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital impossible because of the high number of Jews living in Palestinian areas of the city.” 972mag