Taking Over jerusalem

Author: Matt Kennard
Date of Publishing: 5th August, 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document their inevitable eviction. Well, last Saturday at 5.30am the Israeli border police did come and forceably evict them (so forceably that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross.

Sheikh Jarrah is in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when visiting Jerusalem as the Quartet's "Peace Envoy". When you look out of the Hanouns' window, you can see Blair's hotel 30 metres away; Blair can probably see the Hanouns' house during his morning swim. He has said nothing.

The most disturbing fact about Israel's eviction programme is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to build new illegal settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could do so. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem.

The Hanoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel's attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun's father was a refugee from the nakba (or "the catastophe", as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948). The Jordanian government gave them the property in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home.

As in other parts of East Jerusalem, Maher was offered payment if he would go quietly. He refused. "This is my home," he said to me. "I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams."

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Deconstruction:

This is one of the simpler, less subtle hate-filled articles directed against Israel for us at the JNI deconstruction, but unfortunately, no less pervasive on the European street. The fact that this vitriol is given any platform in a nationally syndicated paper speaks of the massive disinformation campaign currently underway against Israel, in Europe. The UK has become increasingly antagonistic toward Israel, so it should be no surprise that the Guardian would provide a pseudo-journalist like Matt Kennard ample space on its pages for the dissemination of his pro-Palestinian propaganda.

His ‘fact-finding’ mission was accomplished through the patronage of a rabid anti-Israel group, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). This group of guerilla activists are infamous for its terror apologia, its partisan hackery and a complete disregard for Israeli considerations and security needs within this assymetrical conflict. Kennard, from his opening sentence to closing paragraph, perfectly fits within the typically doctored ISM narrative.

Kennard performs a contrived micro-macro perspective in narrating the recent Jerusalem eviction at Sheikh Jarrah. This contrived movement from specific events to an arching perspective only serves to superficially provide the piece a false sense of depth, but the manipulation is apparent for all to see.

First, on the micro level, Kennard refuses to supply all the facts to the Sheikh Jarrah case. There is no mention, that the land was previously owned by Jews, before the Jordanian occupation, and thus never relinquished by the original Jewish owners. He conveniently ignores a 10 year court case that has finally decided that  such action be taken in accords with Israeli law. Lastly, that the Arabs living illegally on the property, despite its illegality were offered a compensation package, and that they didn’t pay their bills for decades, also had previously acceded they were not the original owners. These facts provide a clear context to this eviction, but seems to be an obstacle to those like Kennard who are purely interested in concocting human drama pieces that are supposed to inflame rather then inform.

Second, Kennard wishes to add to his Palestinian sympathy piece a general arching narrative to the emotional snapshot so the piece has a notion of cogency to it. This is accomplished through a pernicious and insipid accusation, popular in the fringe anti-Zionist movements, that the big bad Zionists are attempting a Jewish homogeny, Kennard writes, “The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification.”

The actuality on the street, is that Arabs live all over Israel, and their approximately is 1.4 million Israeli-Arabs, that are the wealthiest and educated in the entire Middle East. This is completely whitewashed in Kennard's negligent reporting, but when a Jew redeems his legal right to live in a home that happens to be in a Arab neighborhood, the vociferous accusations abounds of "Israeli oppression." The reverse discrimination is clear, because it is perfectly acceptable to Kennard that Gaza be ethnically cleansed of all Jews (10,000 to be accurate), and the capital of the Jewish state must also be partly Jew free. Kennard’s refusal to deal with the simple issues of legality, but peddle a false logic based on sympathy is indicative of the Palestinian style of argumentation. It is an argument of emotion over truth, of falsely defining the victim and utilizing this victimhood to blur the lines of right and wrong in general. Thus, Kennard uses the Nakba as the reason for a Jordanian land-grant that was never theirs to give to begin with, and then pawning this as a quasi-legal transaction, which is clearly not applicable in Israeli Law. When the original owner can and does still bare witness to their forced expulsion 20 years previously then the Jordanian claim is nullified. Not to mention that the Nakba was a tragedy that the Palestinian-Arabs instigated, whereas the Jews accepted partition, the Arabs rejected it.

In conclusion, the preconceived notions held by the author are glaring, coupled with the authors collusion with an ultra Israeli-hate group (ISM) makes this above article, nothing short of a propaganda piece. It is hack journalism at its finest, which only serves to distort and skew an already misunderstood conflict. The lack of a clear description to the actual legality of the real-estate and the reverse discrimination pronounced against Jewish inhabitance in any part of Jerusalem, even ones that have legitimate owner rights, reveals a disregard for basic journalistic norms and a disregard for the legal rulings of a fellow democratic country.