And off to pray

I was back in Sheikh Jarrah today, and spoke to some of the Hanoun family. They're living in a tent down the road from their house, now the home of a Jewish settler family, apparently from New York. Police evicted them in the middle of the night, 2 August last year, threw them and their furniture out onto the street, and moved the settlers straight in.

In 1948 several such families fled Talbieh, in what became Israel, and the Jordanians who then occupied the West Bank offered the land in question, considered public land, to these Palestinians. The UN helped build their houses, and the families paid rent to the Jordanian government. When the Israelis took over in 1967, they claimed ownership of the land on the basis that it was still technically 'public' and insisted that it had once been owned by a Sephardic organisation.

It's only recently that evictions have begun, this despite residents obtaining evidence that the land was in fact owned before 1948 by a Palestinian. One family we visited are living in a tent on the grounds of their erstwhile home, while a settler lives in the house on their own. An old lady we met, aged 70, was evicted in the early hours of the morning with her husband, who was sick and wheelchair bound, and who died days later.

It occurred to me as I watched the settlers return from post-Pesach prayers at around noon this afternoon, that they must take their god very much for granted. Settlers have private guards, funded by an American multi-millionaire. Daily these people eyeball those who have been displaced for their warped ideology. They see the old lady, they see the absence of her husband, they see the children whose beds now give rest to other children, who are growing up homeless and around heavily armed Zionist militants, and then they go and pray.

[The Gideon Levy article on this is a must. As is the end of Amos 5.]