In May, Hamas used a pending eviction case in the Jerusalem neighborhood known in Arabic as Sheikh Jarrah as its pretext for launching a war against Israel. The fighting has ended, but the legal case drags on. Contrary to what one might assume from reports in the Western media or from those tweeting #SaveSheikhJarrah, the Israeli government has no plans to expel anyone from his home. Rather, a corporation has brought a few Palestinians families to court over nonpayment of rent. But the case is a complex one, as Haviv Rettig Gur explains:
The Sheikh Jarrah homes at the center of the controversy lie in what were once the Jewish neighborhoods of Shimon ha-Tsadik and Naḥalat Shimon, built on plots of land near the traditional tomb of the 3rd-century-BCE priest Simon the Righteous. The plots, including the tomb, were purchased in 1876 by two Jewish religious organizations representing the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Jerusalem. In the ensuing years, the two communal trusts built homes at the sites that would come to house some 100 Jewish households.
Seventy-two years after that initial purchase, in the throes of the 1948 war, the Jews at the site were forced to flee their homes out of fear of Jordanian and Palestinian violence. (Sheikh Jarrah was the site of the April 14, 1948 massacre of a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses headed to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.) By war’s end, Sheikh Jarrah, including its Jewish enclaves, was under the control of Jordan’s new military occupation of the West Bank.
In 1950, the Jordanian governor of the West Bank issued Proclamation 55, which declared all Israelis to be “enemies,” allowing the state to confiscate systematically all Jewish-owned sites and properties in the West Bank. . . . In 1970, three years after Israel won control over the area from Jordan in the Six-Day War, Israel’s Knesset passed a law that formally recognized every transfer of ownership from Jew to Palestinian carried out by Jordanian [officials].
But what seems to have been a Jordanian oversight left the status of this particular property in question. It was then bought up by a shell company, which seems to be connected to far-right Israel activists. And here, Gur writes, the situation becomes more complex still:
[T]he fact that homes are being claimed by unknown actors . . . should concern Israeli policymakers more than the Palestinian residents. . . . And the Israeli government’s dogged indifference has granted private and often unknown ideologues the power to determine the timing and scale of any fallout.