[News] How the Goliath of the Jerusalem Settler Movement Persuaded the World It’s Really David

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-the-goliath-of-the-jerusalem-settler-movement-persuaded-the-world-its-really-david/ 



  How the Goliath of the Jerusalem Settler Movement Persuaded the World
  It’s Really David

July 16, 2019
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*By Jonathan Cook <http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jonathan-cook>*

Israeli police forced out the Siyam family from their home in the heart 
of occupied East Jerusalem last week, the final chapter in their 25-year 
legal battle against a powerful settler organization.

The family’s defeat represented much more than just another eviction. It 
was intended to land a crushing blow against the hopes of some 20,000 
Palestinians living in the shadow of the Old City walls and Al Aqsa mosque.

Dozens of families in the Silwan neighborhood have endured the same fate 
as the Siyams, and the Israeli courts have approved the imminent 
eviction of many hundreds more Palestinians from the area.

But, unlike those families, the Siyams’ predicament briefly caught 
public attention. That was because one of them, Jawad Siyam, has become 
a figurehead of Silwan’s resistance efforts.

Mr. Siyam, a social worker, has led the fight against Elad, a wealthy 
settler group that since the early 1990s has been slowly erasing 
Silwan’s Palestinian identity, in order to remake it as the City of 
David archeological park.

Mr. Siyam has served as a spokesman, drawing attention to Silwan’s 
plight. He has also helped to organize the community, setting up youth 
and cultural centers to fortify Silwan’s identity and sense of purpose 
in the face of Israel’s relentless oppression.

However, the settlers of Elad want Silwan dismembered, not strengthened.

Elad’s mission is to strip away the Palestinian community to reveal 
crumbling relics beneath, which it claims are proof that King David 
founded his Israelite kingdom there 3,000 years ago.

The history and archeological rationalizations may be murky, but the 
political vision is clear. The Palestinians of Silwan are to be forced 
out like unwelcome squatters.

An Israeli human rights group, Peace Now, refers to plans for the City 
of David as “the transformation of Silwan into a Disneyland of the 
messianic extreme right-wing”.

It is the most unequal fight imaginable – a story of David and Goliath, 
in which the giant fools the world into believing he is the underdog.

It has pitted Mr. Siyam and other residents against not only the 
settlers but the US and Israeli governments, the police and courts, 
archaeologists, planning authorities, national parks officials and 
unwitting tourists.

And, adding to their woes, Silwan’s residents are being forced to fight 
both above and below ground at the same time.

The walls and foundations of dozens of houses are cracking and sinking 
because the Israeli authorities have licensed Elad to flout normal 
safety regulations and excavate immediately below the community’s homes. 
Several families have had to be evacuated.

Late last month Elad flexed its muscles again, this time as it put the 
finishing touches to its latest touristic project: a tunnel under Silwan 
that reaches to the foot of Al Aqsa.

On Elad’s behalf, the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and 
Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, wielded a 
sledgehammer to smash down a symbolic wall inaugurating the tunnel, 
which has been renamed the Pilgrimage Road.

Elad claims – though many archaeologists doubt it – that in Roman times 
the tunnel was a street used by Jews to ascend to a temple on the site 
where today stands the Islamic holy site of Al Aqsa.

The participation of the two US envoys in the ceremony offered further 
proof that Washington is tearing up the peacemaking rulebook, destroying 
any hope the Palestinians might once have had of an independent state 
with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Mr. Friedman called the City of David complex – at the core of occupied 
Palestinian Jerusalem – “an essential component of the national heritage 
of the State of Israel”. Ending the occupation there would be “akin to 
America returning the Statue of Liberty”.

While Israel, backed by the US, smashes Silwan’s foundations, it is also 
dominating the sky above it.

Last month Israel’s highest planning body approved a cable car from 
Israeli territory in West Jerusalem into the center of Silwan.

It will connect with the City of David and a network of boardwalks, 
coffee shops and touristic tunnels, such as like the Pilgrimage Road, 
all run by Elad settlers, to slice apart Silwan.

And to signal how the neighborhood is being reinvented, the Israeli 
municipality enforcing the occupation in East Jerusalem recently named 
several of Silwan’s main streets after famous Jewish rabbis.

Former mayor Nir Barkat has said the goal of all this development is to 
bring 10 million tourists a year to Silwan so that they “understand who 
is really the landlord in this city”.

Few outsiders appear to object. This month, the tourism website 
TripAdvisor was taken to task by Amnesty International for recommending 
the City of David as a top attraction in Jerusalem.

And now, Elad has felled the family of Jawad Siyam in a bid to crush the 
community’s spirits and remaining sense of defiance.

As it has with so many of Silwan’s homeowners, Elad waged a decades-long 
legal battle against the family to drain them of funds and stamina.

The Siyams’ fate was finally sealed last month when the Israeli courts 
extended the use of a 70-year-old, draconian piece of legislation, the 
Absentee Property Law, to Silwan.

The law was crafted specifically to steal the lands and homes of 750,000 
Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 by the new state of Israel.

Ownership of the Siyams’ home is shared between Jawad’s uncles and 
aunts, some of them classified by Israel as “absentees” because they now 
live abroad.

As a result, an Israeli official with the title Custodian of Absentee 
Property claimed ownership of sections of the house belonging to these 
relatives, and then, in violation of his obligations under international 
law, sold them on to Elad. Police strong-armed the family out last week.

To add insult to injury, the court also approved Elad seizing money 
raised via crowdfunding by more than 200 Israeli peace activists, with 
the aim of helping the Siyams with their legal costs.

Palestinians such as Jawad Siyam exist all over the occupied territories 
– men and women who have given Palestinians a sense of hope, commitment, 
and steadfastness in the face of Israel’s machinery of dispossession.

When Israel targets Jawad Siyam, crushes his spirits, it sends an 
unmistakable message not only to other Palestinians but to the 
international community itself, that peace is not on its agenda.

/(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)/

/– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. 
His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and 
the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He 
contributed this /

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