After a court battle that lasted many years of, police on Tuesday morning evacuated an Arab family that invaded a Jewish property in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, Hakol Hayehudi reported. The neighborhood has been renamed Shimon Hatzadik by its returning Jewish families.
The land and the home belonged to Jews who lived there before the 1948 War of Independence, but as is the case in many other eastern Jerusalem homes, Arabs took control of the Jewish properties after harming the Jewish owners who fled in invading Jordanian Legion. Jordan then occupied the area for 19 years, until Israeli forces liberated it in 1967.
In recent years, Jerusalem Councilman Aryeh King’s Israel Land Fund has been working on locating Jewish heirs whose parents or grandparents owned these homes, while conducting legal proceedings to evict the illegal squatters.
Incidentally, on Friday Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat took away Councilman King’s portfolio – chairing the emergency, security, and environmental protection committees in the city’s ruling coalition – after King had filed a petition asking the Administrative Court to force the city’s building and planning committee to present the results of a building survey for the Arab Arav al-Swahara neighborhood, and to prevent the committee from debating a plan to build new homes for Arabs in Jerusalem without releasing the survey results.
The legal battle over the Shimon Hatzadik property that was finally redeemed Tuesday morning lasted about 8 years. It is a three-room house on Kunder Street.
The family of Arab squatters lost their case in the courts, including an appeal to the Supreme Court, but the justices allowed them a year and a half before the evacuation, for “humanitarian reasons.” The original Jewish owners received a lot less from their neighbors back in 1948.
Even after those 18 months had passed, the court set yet another time for the evacuation, which finally ended, and so on Tuesday morning police and bailiffs arrived to evacuate the illegal residents.
The new residents told Hakol Hayehudi that they are inviting the public to visit them to express support for the revival of Jewish presence in the neighborhood. As of today there are several dozen Jewish families living in Shimon Hatzadik, and additional families are expected to enter any property that will be restored to its original owners.