Jerusalem / Jérôme Anconina - While the US administration and the main EU Foreign Ministries seem to be in favor of slowing down the colonization process of occupied or annexed territories, the Israeli government is still responding to those efforts with a flat refusal.

"We were asleep. I didn’t hear them come in the house. I opened my eyes, they were wearing hoods and black clothes, and they shouted : 'Get up, this is Israel here, not Palestine.' I just had enough time to grab my two children. Within a few minutes we were on the sidewalk. In front of our house. It was over."
 
A few months after the Al Kurd family, the same thing happens to the Al Ghawy and Hannoun families, evicted from their houses in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem Arab district, on Sunday, 2 August, at 5 a.m.
 
The brutal eviction threw the people living in that neighborhood into hopeless disarray, as they knew that 25 houses, each with several families living in them, were soon to follow the same procedure. On that Sunday, they witnessed what would happen to them, at any time of day or night, within days or weeks.
 
At the heart of these daily evictions of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem lies the Israeli policy for the colonization and judaïzation of Jerusalem, set up by the city and supported by all governement officials since the Oslo Agreement in 1993.
 
The settling of zionists on the land which now makes up the state of Israel lead to a massive exodus of about 800,000 Palestinians. To this day, most of them are still stuck in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq or the West bank. On that same year, Jordan seized control of the eastern part of Jerusalem. Some houses, as happened in Sheikh Jarrah, were then given by the Hashemite Kingdom to the UNRWA, the United Nations organization in charge of Palestinian refugees, in order to relocate the Palestinian families who had been removed from West Jerusalem.
 
Since Israel annexed the Arab part of Jerusalem in 1967, the colonization process steadily continues to isolate Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, cutting off any continuum between the land under Palestinian authority and the eastern part of the city. Israeli authorities are open about their goal : to impede any partition of the city and thus to prevent Palestinians from claiming East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian State.
 
The first undertaking of construction and Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory around East Jerusalem had already cut the West Bank in two, making it nearly impossible for Palestinian Jerusalemites to go North (to Ramallah) and South (to Bethlehem and Hebron). In the North, a tramway made in France (by Véolia and Alsthom) connects Jerusalem to this belt line of about thirty colonies, thus creating a real divide between the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
 
In the eastern part of the city, the Ma’ale Adumin settlement with its demographic potential of one and a half times Tel Aviv is close to finish its surrounding and choking up of the Arab part of Jerusalem. All those territorial annexions are also physically reinforced by the separation wall, which not only despoils Palestinian lands but also paralyzes Palestinian towns and villages by cutting them off from their natural space.
 
Sheikh Jarrah in the North and Silwan in the South are the last pawns for this systematic game annihilating all Arab neighborhoods adjoining the old part of East Jerusalem. By inverting the demographics, Israel is creating a line of homogeneous settlement zones connecting the western part of the city to the surrounding colonies in Palestinian territory.
 
The method is always the same.

Behind the claim of archeological pretexts, holy places, or the real or hypothesized roots of Jewish history, every reason becomes a validation for the eviction, expulsion and destruction of Palestinian settlements to be replaced with Jewish people. In order to accomplish this mission, the first step is to bring in fanatics, Orthodox Jews and ultra-nationalists : they hold the newly colonized land until the Israeli State deploys and brings in less religious people who are attracted by substantial economic benefits and cheaper housing and facilities than in the rest of the country.

It took only a half-day for the Sheik Jarrah population  to see the evacuation of two residential buildings holding nine families, a total of 53 people who had been living in that neighborhood since 1958. In only four hours, the Israeli police and the Magav (the Border Police unit, infamous for its brutal treatment of Palestinian civilians) kicked women, children and elders out of their homes. Only half a day to grab all their belongings, their furniture, their clothes, shove them in trucks and dump it all on the street two kilometers away, right in front of the UNRWA office. It is a way for Israel to remind this United Nations organization of its sovereignty on that part of the Palestinian territory, and to make it clear to the UN that its only prerogative is to take care of the economic, social and health-related consequences of Palestinian evictions. Such an act echoes back to the deliberate bombing of  the UN headquarters in Gaza last winter, right after the UNRWA condemned the Israeli army for the killings of civilians in the Gaza strip.
 
It took only a half-day before the people of Sheikh Jarrah watched, helpless, the first Jewish family settle in the Hannoun’s home, and then a second in the al-Ghawy’s home, before Mayssoun al-Ghawy and his two children’s eyes. A woman from Sheikh Jarrah says, "Despite the great tension and the huge number of policemen and soldiers, everybody around was dead-silent. The silence was sometimes broken by a woman crying or children screaming. Then suddenly, they busted every door of the house with huge chain saws. A few seconds later, there were new doors with new locks." During the day, a heap of debris and trash appeared in front of the house as the new settling family was reorganizing a home originally designed for 6 Palestinian families. Six with the al-Ghawy, four with the Hannoun, because it is forbidden for Palestinians living in Jerusalem to build additions to their homes.
 
While being filmed by the cameras of the Homeland security service who records and threatens any one who would attempt to help Palestinian families, 37 year-old Salah, who lives in Sheikh Jarrah, says, "We are helplessly witnessing a daily Nakbah. Once they’re kicked off, Palestinians know they will never get their homes back. They’ve being going through this for 60 years now. The Israelis want to change this neighborhood like they did in Hebron, where a handful of Jewish fundamentalists protected by the army use terror to control the deserted city center to establish a safe continuum (which means devoid of Palestinians) between the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the old Arabic part of the town and the Kiryat Arba settlement."
 
 
280,000 Palestinians still live in East Jerusalem.

Nearly one thousand Palestinian houses were destroyed since the Oslo Agreement.

Nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers are now living there.

The Israeli organization Peace Now announced in March 2009 that the colonization plan of East Jerusalem is to build 5,700 homes.

Very soon, the Jewish population will be in the majority in the Arab part of Jerusalem.