World Press Network

The historian Isaac Deutscher once offered an analogy for the creation of the state of Israel. A Jewish man jumps from a burning building, and he lands on a Palestinian, horribly injuring him. Can the jumping man be blamed? Levy’s father really was running for his life: it was Palestine, or a concentration camp. Yet Levy says that the analogy is imperfect – because now the jumping man is still, sixty years later, smashing the head of the man he landed on against the ground, and beating up his children and grandchildren too. “1948 is still here. 1948 is still in the refugee camps. 1948 is still calling for a solution,” he says. “Israel is doing the very same thing now... dehumanising the Palestinians where it can, and ethnic cleansing wherever it’s possible. 1948 is not over. Not by a long way.”

Israeli law blind to real titles

Court disallows appeal while forcing Palestinians in East jerusalem out of homes.

Fabricated documents approved by the Israeli government have allowed colonists to resume construction activity in occupied East Jerusalem.

With the freeze on colony construction having only just come to an end, already 28 Palestinian families from the Shaikh Jarrah Arab neighbourhood have been ordered by the court to evict their homes. Seven of these families are literally on the street even as there is the looming threat of more people being forced out of their homes.

The Israeli colonists had fabricated documents that were subsequently approved by the Israeli Supreme Court, top Palestinian officials said on Tuesday. This has been confirmed by a number of heads of non-governmental organisations in occupied Jerusalem.

The colonists say they own a huge plot of land in the Shaikh Jarrah neighbourhood and stress that a rabbi has also been buried in the area.

They furnished false documents in the court asserting their claim to the land.

Zeyad Al Hamouri, who heads the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights, says the actual owner of the land is Darwish Hijazi, who produced documents from Turkey to back up his claim. However the court refused to recognise the titles, observing it was too late to file an appeal.

Pleas that it had taken time for the documents to arrive from Turkey fell on deaf ears. Hijazi died during the litigation and it was left to his children to produce the actual land deeds.

The 28 evicted Palestinian families have been living in the area since 1948 in houses which they built themselves following an agreement between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government to address the plight of Jordanian refugees. The Jordanian government was supposed to register the land in the names of the families but for some reason it failed to do so and the matter has never been resolved.