Thursday March 26, 2009 15:55
by Ghassan Bannoura - IMEMC News Sheikh Jarrah is a sensitive area of East Jerusalem, where settlers have been trying for years to take over properties, with the purpose of preventing a two-state solution and a compromise agreement in Jerusalem.A family from Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, is going to be evicted from it's house because of the realization of "right of return", Peace Now reported on Thursday.
The report says that the eviction comes in the context of a prolonged legal battle between the "Sephardic Community Committee," which authorized the Nahalat Shimon settler association to act on its behalf, and the Palestinian residents. According to the "Sephardic Community Committee," the contested plot was bought by them before 1948.
In 1956, the Jordanian regime leased the land to Palestinian refugees, who built their homes on it with the status of protected tenants.
When Israeli occupied the city of Jerusalem in 1967 settler organizations asked to repossess the property by Jews in order to build a settlement there, and went to court for that purpose. In some of the cases the court recognized the rights of the Sephardic committee to the land, but ordered to continue the protected tenants status of the Palestinian families.
The Palestinian families refused to accept the agreement, they say forged documents were involved, and that the Sephardic community did not have right to the land, and they continued the legal proceedings.
Recently the court ruled that several families, who did not pay their protected tenants' rent to the Sephardic Community Committee, lost the right to live in their homes, and that is the background for the Civil Enforcement order to evict them.
Peace Now says this opens a "Pandora's box" of the "right of return": The use of Jewish-owned property before 1948 is a double-edged sword, which can open a Pandora's Box of Palestinian claims to receive property they owned before 1948.
Mrs. al-Kurd, who was evicted from her home in Sheikh Jarrah in November 2008, said recently that she was willing to return the property to Jews, as long as she too can return to the home of her birth in the neighborhood of Talbiyeh in West Jerusalem, the home that she and her family was forced out of during the creation of Israel.
posted by annie at 3:44 PM
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