To build a school for special-needs children, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished a compound whose occupants lacked title to the property. Some ‘outrage.’
To build a school for special-needs children, the Jerusalem Municipality demolished a compound whose occupants lacked title to the property. Some ‘outrage.’
T he Palestinian Authority (PA) rarely misses an opportunity to market a perfectly ordinary and legitimate Israeli endeavor as a war crime. The lawful eviction of squatters this week from a compound in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah is no exception.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Israeli police forces removed Mahmoud Salihye and members of his extended family after they refused to leave following a court order. In response to their removal, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded an increase in “all forms of resistance,” while the PA swiftly labeled the move a “war crime” and asked the United States and other Western nations to intervene. But a little-known fact is that the Jerusalem Municipality is seeking the eviction of the squatters from public land in order to build a school for special-needs children.
For starters, the evicted tenants have no legal claim to the land. The eviction represents nothing more than the Jerusalem Municipality exercising its legal authority over the land, yet you wouldn’t know that from reading the current Palestinian rhetoric or the various commentaries peddled by congressional Democrats last spring, which labeled the evictions “inhumane,” “abhorrent,” and “unacceptable.”
As I wrote previously during the Sheikh Jarrah protests, after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Jordan illegally occupied Judea and Samaria (which it dubbed the “West Bank”), as well as the Old City and surrounding areas of Jerusalem.
Many properties within the occupied territories, including the ones presently at issue, were sequestered under the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. During the Jordanian occupation, Jews were completely ethnically cleansed from the territories. As part of its broader anti-Jewish campaign, Jordan prohibited Jews from exercising any property rights within the occupied territories.
A report published last May by law professor Avi Bell — at the height of the Sheikh Jarrah unrest — details what happened next. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 eventually brought an end to Jordan’s occupation. The Knesset’s response to the liberated lands was a logical one. Individuals of any ethnicity who lost their property to Jordan’s sequestration measures would have the opportunity to have their property rights reinstated.
If the Jordanian government had granted title to a piece of sequestered land to a Palestinian Arab, even though the land was stolen in an illegal war of aggression, the title would be recognized. If the Jordanian government had merely held the sequestered property for public use, it would be returned to its former owner by the Israeli administrator general and office receiver.
The property from which the Salihye family has been evicted, in particular, is land that was returned to its lawful Jewish owners following the Jordanian occupation. It was then owned by a Palestinian hotelier, who similarly attempted to evict the tenants, to no avail. The land was eventually expropriated by the Jerusalem Municipality, a local arm of the Israeli government, to build schools for the local community.
What the Jerusalem Municipality seeks to do with the land is a noble initiative — it intends to build an educational complex for children with special needs who reside in East Jerusalem. The school will specifically serve the Arab community, and, more importantly, a portion of the community that is currently deeply underserved.
A joint statement from the police and municipality underscored the connection between the squatters in question and the education plans for the community. “Members of the family living in the illegal buildings were given countless opportunities to hand over the land with consent, but unfortunately they refused to do so, even after meetings and repeated dialog attempts by the Jerusalem municipality,” the statement read.
“The family’s illegal takeover of public space prevented hundreds of children with special needs from East Jerusalem from receiving an educational service that the municipality seeks to provide,” it continued. This — a school for special-needs children to be built in an Arab neighborhood on public lands — is allegedly the grand war crime.
Those groups lambasting the evictions, such as the Israeli group Peace Now, insist that the plans to build a yeshiva down the road (also on public lands) should be scrapped in order to place the school there. However, the yeshiva site is farther from the residential areas of the Arab neighborhood, and, furthermore, not one argument has been made as to why the yeshiva project is unworthy of completion. In short, Peace Now wants to hold the education of Palestinian special-needs children hostage in hopes of possibly derailing a Jewish seminary at a different location.
Peace Now also argues that demolishing the home of the Mahmoud Salihye family is not necessary to build the school. However, one glance at the proposed building plan reveals how fatuous this argument is. The compound touches the anticipated school building. There is no physical space for a squatter (or any individual, for that matter) to essentially reside on the property of a school. Schools have various forms of infrastructure — playgrounds, fencing, and gates — designed to keep children safely on the property and to provide them with recreational space. It would also stand to reason that a school of this nature may require even more recreational space.
The manufactured outrage at the eviction, when considered in conjunction with the yeshiva, shows that progressives embrace the goal of a Jew-free eastern Jerusalem to such a degree that they would be willing to block a special-needs school for Palestinians in the hopes that it would keep Jews from studying Torah there. It is worth noting that none of these groups claim that the evicted tenants have any legal claim to the land — only that Jewish property rights should be ignored, that the needs of Jerusalem’s most vulnerable population be ignored, and that the areas purged of Jews by Jordan in 1948 remain essentially Jew-free forever.
A war crime, indeed.