Non-Jews Need Not Apply

Gideon Levy is one Israeli journalist with integrity. Over the years he has exposed the discriminatory practices of the Israeli authorities. Below is an article which appeared in Haaretz on Dec.12, 2008. The question is what would have been the reaction if this appeared in the mainstream media in the US--I am not sure about Europe? All hell would break loose and accusations of anti-semitism will start flying diminishing an trivializing Jew hatred which led to the biggest crime in recent human history. What about the helpless people who have lost their homes and land to settlers? Don't they deserve to live a decent life? Don't they deserve to have a home and live in peace? The silence is defeaning.

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor" Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

No you don't have to take the side of a particular party but you do have to take the side of justice.

Yes indeed, Apartheid is alive and well.

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1047895.html
Last update - 13:45 18/12/2008
Twilight Zone / Non-Jews need not apply
By Gideon Levy

The Israeli national flag flies high, defiant and arrogant over the
Palestinian home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This
flag has never looked as repulsive as it does in the heart of this
Palestinian neighborhood, above the home of a Palestinian family that
suddenly lost everything. The head of the house, Mohammed al-Kurd, died 11
days after the eviction. Now his widow lives in a tent. The house is reached
via a narrow alley: Here Moshe and Avital Shoham and Emanuel and Yiska Dagan
live happily. They are the settlers who managed to expel the Palestinian
tenants and take over another outpost, in the heart of East Jerusalem. House
after house, the transfer here is especially quiet: The media barely report
on these houses of contention.

Israeli greed knows no bounds: It sends its tentacles into the homes of
refugees who already experienced, in 1948, the taste of expulsion and
evacuation and being left with nothing. Now they are refugees for a second
time. Another 27 families here can expect a similar fate, and all under the
aegis of the Israeli court system, the lighthouse of justice and the beacon
of law, which approves, whitewashes and purifies deceptive and distorted
ways of evicting these children of refugees from their homes for the second
time. The family keeps, as an eternal souvenir, the keys to the house in
Talbieh that was stolen from them and the banana warehouse in Musrara that
was taken from them. Now they have another key that opens nothing: the key
to the home in Sheikh Jarrah, which they received decades ago from the
Jordanian government and the United Nations as compensation for their lost
home.

The right of return: The original owners of those houses, the Sephardic
Community Committee, has this right forever. There is no judge in Jerusalem
who can explain this double standard, this racist right of return for Jews
only. Why is the Sephardic Community Committee allowed, and the committee of
Palestinians not? What are the tycoons and the politicians who stand behind
this hostile takeover thinking to themselves? What is going through the
minds of the judges who permitted it? And what about the policemen who
violently evicted a sickly man in a wheelchair in the middle of the night,
without even letting him remove the contents of his house? And what are the
Jews now living in these stolen houses feeling?

White smoke rises from several corners of the empty lot a few steps from the
American Colony Hotel. The lot was cleaned this week before Christmas. These
are the twig bonfires on which they are baking pita with za'atar, heating
coffee and preparing tea for the many guests who have come to visit the new
refugee encampment. On Sunday several delegations of Israeli Arabs from the
Galilee came to express identification with Fawziya and the 27 families who
will probably soon join her in this tent. Israel does not like this
encampment, the municipality has already tried to evacuate it. Photographs
of refugee tents in the heart of the unified capital are not good for
Israeli public relations. Such pictures, which have already been splashed
across several international newspapers in recent weeks - of course not in
the Israeli press, which turns a blind eye - remind their readers of similar
tent camps, those of 1948.

The Arabic poster at the edge of the lot leaves no room for compromise:
"Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is Arab, Muslim and Christian." The refreshment tables
are full of the best Palestinian cuisine from the Galilee: labaneh, majadera
of rice, lentils and onions, baked goods and more, including olive oil from
the recent harvest. Guests mill around. Prof. Jamal Amro, former head of the
architecture department at Birzeit University, attracts a crowd. The last
time we met was in 1999, inside the American Colony. Amro told me then about
his torture by Shin Bet security service interrogators, when "Captain Dvir"
came to his home in the middle of the night and told him: "Say goodbye to
your wife and children."

Amro underwent a terrifying, 25-day interrogation, including 15 consecutive
days without sleep and a sack reeking of urine over his head. The Shin Bet
tried to recruit him as a collaborator, and as usual all means were fair:
"Suck, dog, suck," one of the interrogators told him, "many men are now
doing the same thing to your wife." Captain "Martin" placed his foot on
Amro's neck and told this professor and architect: "You're like a dog on the
floor."

Amro, an impressive, refined man whose son died of cancer just a few days
ago, compares Shin Bet scars on his arms with another visitor, a refugee
from Lifta who was also tortured.

Print worker Nasser Ghawi, a native of Sheikh Jarrah, relates the story in
literary Hebrew: He is 46 and was born in the house now scheduled for
eviction. I was born in the house, he emphasizes, not in the hospital.

"The claim of the other side is that they came here 120 years ago, although
our houses were built 52 years ago." Ghawi's family fled to Jerusalem from
Sarafand (Tzrifin). In 1956 the Jordanian government and the UN Relief and
Works Agency built these 28 homes of refuge in Sheikh Jarrah for the
families of the new refugees, in exchange for waiving their refugee cards.
Nobody can compare with Ghawi when it comes to telling their story in
English, especially the events since 1972, five years after the capture of
East Jerusalem, when the Israeli court declared them "protected tenants" in
the houses that according to the court belong to the Sephardic Community
Committee.

Because these families refused to pay rent to the Sephardic Community
Committee and to the Committee of the Knesset of Israel - both religious
bodies - which transferred the property to the Nahalat Shimon settler
association, they were doomed to eviction. Just as with the more famous
"House of Contention" in Hebron, there are suspicions of forged documents
and biased judgments, Jewish tycoons and MKs who encourage disagreement, a
nearby religious site (the grave of the Jewish saint Shimon Hatzadik, which
Palestinians say is in fact the grave of a member of the Hijazi family) and
nationalist motives - to "create a barrier" between Sheikh Jarrah and the
northern Palestinian neighborhoods. But above all, the inequality in the
discussion of the right of return conducted in the Israeli justice system
cries out from afar.

Whatever the case, Ghawi's family was forced to leave its home in 2002 by
court order. In 2006 they won the right to return to it, after drawn-out and
expensive legal deliberations. Now they are once again facing eviction.
Ghawi's father, Abd al-Fatah, 87, could be sent to prison, like the father
of the neighboring Hanun family, who has already spent three months in jail
for contempt of court.

The weather is deceptive, one moment sunny, the next moment the skies darken
above the row of tents and a cold wind whips against your face. On November
9, the Kurds were evacuated from their home of 52 years, since it was built.
Fawziya will never forget that night. "I wish nobody had seen it and nobody
had ever experienced it, what I went through that night."

She is 56, a mother of five and grandmother of 16. She was born in the Old
City, to which her family fled in 1948 from Talbieh, in West Jerusalem. In
1970 she married Mohammed, a refugee from Jaffa, and moved to his home in
Sheikh Jarrah.

Their troubles also began in 1972. Since then she has seen everything. She
says MK Benny Elon came to her house a few years ago, offering an enormous
sum for the house. A pistol was placed in the yard in an effort to frame
her. Dirty diapers were thrown at her doorway. The sewage pipe was blocked
by her uninvited neighbors. She was forced to pay their electricity bills
when they tapped into her meter. The settlers frequently held noisy parties
in what had been her childrens' home. Fawziya says that since their eviction
in 2001 there were new settlers every few months - Jewish immigrants from
Ethiopia, Yemen, America, in her backyard.

The eviction: "Everything I had experienced until then was nothing compared
to that night," Fawziya related. "They knew I had a sick and paralyzed
husband." At 3:30 A.M. they heard knocking. She was holding a bedpan for her
husband. Several dozen local police and Border Police officers burst in.
"What are you doing?" she shouted, and then two police officers grabbed her
arms from behind and dragged her outside. She says her husband slipped and
fell off the bed. They took her by force into the street, far from the
house, and dragged her husband to the neighbor's house.

Everything was left behind, all their belongings. Her husband in pajamas,
she in a nightgown, that's all they had. "I asked a policewoman for water
and she shouted: 'Shut up!' They were so violent, that's why I'll never
forgive them. My husband was crying and they were laughing."

The next night they were already in the white tent. "Had you been in my
husband's place, all his life in this house and suddenly in the street, what
would you have said? What would you have felt? If you lost a cell phone -
how angry you would be, and he lost his home. All his money and his entire
life and suddenly he is thrown out into the street."

Mohammed stayed in the tent, but on the 11th day his strength ran out. He
was rushed to the French Hospital in East Jerusalem, after refusing to be
taken to an Israeli hospital.

"If they don't show any mercy to me in my home, they won't show any mercy in
the hospital," he told his wife. A few hours before he died, Mohammed asked
Fawziya: "If I'm discharged from the hospital, where will I go?" Fawziya
says God took mercy on her husband and took him away. She says she would
like to meet Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert, to look them in the eye and ask:
"Why did you do this to us? Only because we're Palestinians."

"Close your eyes," she tells me quietly. "What do you see? Darkness. That's
what I see." Since the eviction she has not dared to approach her house.