Monday, February 18, 2019

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist

Arresting Hatem Abu Asab for living in his house. Photo by Sahl Zighari

Israeli police forcibly expelled a Palestinian family from their home in the occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday and promptly turned it over to right-wing Jewish settlers, who raised the Israeli flag over it as family members wept. The culmination of a long legal fight, the eviction came with no warning after an Israeli Supreme Court ruling based on a deeply racist, convoluted law that declares Jewish residents of any pre-1948 property its “rightful owners” - a privilege pointedly not extended to Palestinians.

The Abu Asab family, which had already been displaced during the Nakba, has lived in the house for 67 years. "They destroyed my life. They took everything,” cried matriarch Rania Abu Asab. "They're in my house, and I'm in the street."

After police threw out the seven adults and three children of the Abu Asab family - and refused to allow any of them to collect their belongings - for good measure they also arrested patriarch Hatem Abu Asab and his son, and assaulted other relatives.

The eviction is one of a growing number of such actions in Jerusalem's Old City, where Israel and settlement organizations are intent on tightening their control under the guise of a tourist-oriented "Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter." In truth, they are determinedly “imposing a nationalistic Israeli character" on a once-multi-cultural city, another step in the Occupation's decades-old ethnic cleansing project aimed at erasing Palestinians. Wrenching video of the eviction destroys the venal lie behind efforts to normalize Israeli crimes: It proves Israel has become a state of sociopaths, and the pitiless Nakba is ongoing.