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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-the-goliath-of-the-jerusalem-settler-movement-persuaded-the-world-its-really-david/">http://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-the-goliath-of-the-jerusalem-settler-movement-persuaded-the-world-its-really-david/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">How the Goliath of the Jerusalem
Settler Movement Persuaded the World It’s Really David</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time">July 16, 2019<br>
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<p><strong>By <a
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jonathan-cook"
title="Display all articles for Jonathan Cook">Jonathan
Cook</a></strong></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>However, the settlers of Elad want Silwan
dismembered, not strengthened.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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”.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>And, adding to their woes, Silwan’s residents are
being forced to fight both above and below ground at
the same time.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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”.</span></p>
<p><span>While Israel, backed by the US, smashes Silwan’s
foundations, it is also dominating the sky above it.</span></p>
<p><span>Last month Israel’s highest planning body
approved a cable car from Israeli territory in West
Jerusalem into the center of Silwan.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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”.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>And now, Elad has felled the family of Jawad
Siyam in a bid to crush the community’s spirits and
remaining sense of defiance.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><i><span>(A version of this article first appeared in
the National, Abu Dhabi.)</span></i></p>
<p><i><span>– 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 </span></i></p>
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