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This week, the Israeli Supreme Court continued its efforts to save the Sheikh Jala community in occupied East Jerusalem from ethnic cleansing by a state-backed Israeli settler organization.
At the court hearing, the judges proposed what they called a “compromise”: Palestinian residents would get a protected form of lease, but they had to pay a small rent to Nahalat Shimon-this is the international settlement behind the aggressive race者organization. Clean movement. This will mean formally waiving any ownership requirements for nearby houses and land. As expected, the residents did not accept the compromise. They must now return to the court in less than a week, waiting for the end of the legal proceedings.
Although the media reported on the struggle to save Sheikh Jala and focused mainly on the street protests and the subsequent international social media movement, the Palestinian residents in the neighborhood have also been opposed to the Israeli court’s attempts to expel them from their homes. For ten years.
In the early 1970s, Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah began to be threatened with expulsion by Israeli settler organizations, which falsely claimed that they were occupying Jewish property. The settlers filed a claim with the Israeli Land Registry, and as expected, the registry issued a ruling in their favor. Since then, the Israeli regime has designated the Sheikh Jala issue as a “real estate dispute.”
International law does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Israeli courts over Sheikh Jarrah because it is a Palestinian residential area in the occupied territories, and this fact is not taken into consideration. There is no such fact that the Jordanian government granted Palestinian land titles to Sheikh Jarrah in the 1950s. Since then, settler organizations have filed dozens of cases of expelling Palestinians from the neighborhood.
The Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah have been responding to these court cases through legal appeals. The lawsuit culminated in April this year, when the Jerusalem District Court rejected the appeals of eight Sheikh Jarrah families and ordered them to evacuate their homes no later than May 2. The families rejected the order and referred the case to the Supreme Court. The case is not yet closed.
The participation of Palestinians in Israel’s legal system in this way is not new. Many Palestinians, including those living in Khan al-Ahmar village in Area C of the West Bank and the Palestinian community in Naqab, used this strategy to stay on their land during their fighting.
They did this not because they believed they could find justice within the system, but because it provided the possibility of delaying deportation and gaining time to mobilize popular resistance and gain international support.
In fact, the Palestinians know that the Israeli court system is inherently racist and colonial. In the years after its establishment, the Zionist regime enacted a series of laws to facilitate the theft of Palestinian land and the removal of Palestinian corpses from the land. After 1967, the Zionist regime violated international law and extended its legal jurisdiction to East Jerusalem. Then it created a completely different legal system based on martial law to deal with newly occupied territories. This is the same system where more than 99% of Palestinians (including children) are convicted in military courts.
As Mohammed al-Kurd, an activist from Sheikh Jarrah, said: “Judges are colonists… The whole regime is based on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the rubble of our stolen land. On.” It’s important to understand this background because it shows that no result of an Israeli court can be considered fair or lawful.
Therefore, it must be understood that when Palestinians go to Israeli courts, they are not trying to recognize their legitimacy or their desire for justice. On the contrary, for them, this is just one tactic in many tactical toolboxes. It is used in the hope that popular struggles and international pressure will prevail and lead the Israeli regime to accountability for its continued crimes against the Palestinian people.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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