TEL AVIV — Israel's Supreme Court on Monday offered a compromise to delay the eviction of four Palestinian families from a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that was the flash point in the most recent bout of Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip.
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The deal, proposed Monday afternoon, would require the four families to recognize the far-right Jewish settlers seeking their eviction as their legal landlords, in return for a special residency status that would protect them from eviction for an unspecified number of years. The families, some of which initially said they had rejected the offer, are expected to provide a formal response within a week, according to the minutes of the hearing.
In May, clashes in the mostly Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which Jewish settlers refer to as Nahalat Shimon, between Israeli police armed with rubber bullets and stone-throwing Palestinians preceded larger, more violent demonstrations in the nearby Old City. The escalation of the conflict contributed to an 11-day Israeli operation against Gaza militants, fighting that claimed the lives of 12 people in Israel and at least 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. A fragile Egyptian-brokered cease-fire has held since May 21, although both Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, and Israel have repeatedly warned of the possibility of another flare-up.
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On Thursday, the families submitted documents to the courts showing that before the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jordanian government attempted to transfer ownership of contested Sheikh Jarrah properties to Palestinians. As of Monday afternoon, the courts had not yet referred to those documents, which the defense planned to use as a legal basis to prove ownership. Lower courts had approved the evictions, in part because the families had not paid rent to the land’s registered Jewish owners. The families then petitioned the Supreme Court to allow an appeal and to hear their case.
The case related to the fate of about 70 Palestinian residents of the strategically critical neighborhood that connects East Jerusalem with the Old City, in a dispute that has dragged on for several decades. Facing pressure from human rights activists, Israeli judges have been intervening in what the Jewish settlers say is a real estate quarrel and what Palestinian residents call an attempt to “Judaize” the contested city of Jerusalem and carry out ethnic cleansing against its Palestinian residents. Israelis and Palestinians both revere the holy sites within Jerusalem’s Old City walls and claim Jerusalem as their capital.
Scholars say a small Jewish community existed for thousands of years in Sheikh Jarrah around the tomb of Shimon Hatzadik, an ancient Jewish high priest, but fled the area when the city was divided in 1948 between Israel and Jordan. In 1956, Jordan and the United Nations built 28 small homes at Sheikh Jarrah, east of the Green Line marking the de facto border before 1967, to house Palestinian refugee families. They were joined over time by others. The Palestinians paid rent to a “general custodian,” first under Jordan, then, after Israel conquered the land in 1967, under Israel.
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Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher with the left-leaning Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim who has been informally accompanying the Sheikh Jarrah residents throughout the legal proceedings, said the eviction case against the four Palestinian families is among the latest examples of a wave of evictions against Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The trend gained momentum during the administrations of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both of which directly or indirectly provided support to Jewish settlement organizations, Tatarsky said.
“Despite the fact that Israel has a new government and there is a new American administration and you can see that the atmosphere is not the same as it was a year ago,” Tatarsky said, Israeli settler groups still feel they have the “green light” to use the Israeli courts to evict Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Chaim Silberstein, president of the pro-settler advocacy group Keep Jerusalem, which works to replace Palestinian residents with Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem, said he was “optimistic” that the Israeli courts would rule in favor of the Jewish settlers.
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“I do remain hopeful that justice will be done, that Jews who legally purchased property, who have offered solutions to the squatters over the years and were rejected, just like today, will receive justice,” Silberstein said. Establishing “a strong Jewish majority” in neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah, he added, is “important for the sake of democracy and the Jewish homeland.”
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