Israeli Courts Order More than 50 Palestinians Expelled from Homes in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah

More than 50 Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah are likely to be forcibly expelled from their homes this summer after Israeli courts ruled in favor of settler groups in the cases of two Palestinian families, one in each neighborhood (see Forcible Home Expulsions).

On April 11, 2024, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg dismissed the Shehadeh family’s appeal against the Jerusalem District Court’s 2022 ruling to expel the Palestinian family of approximately 35 members from their home in the Batn al-Hawa area of Silwan.1 Sohlberg ruled the family must vacate the building by June 1 and pay NIS 5,000 ($1,340) in legal fees to Ateret Cohanim, the settler group suing the family over the property’s alleged ownership. The family will file a motion for an additional discussion; however, since it is a Supreme Court ruling, the likelihood of this being accepted is slim. The family has thus exhausted all legal avenues to prevent their expulsion.

In another, separate case, on April 15, the lower Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court ruled to expel the Diab family, which has 23 members, from their home in the Kerem al-Juni section on the eastern side of Sheikh Jarrah by July 15. The family plans to appeal this decision to the Jerusalem District Court.

Both cases stem from expulsion lawsuits filed by settler groups using the Legal and Administrative Matters Law—1970, an amendment to the Absentees’ Property Law—1950 that allows Jews to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem that they allegedly owned before 1948, even if Palestinians are currently in residence there, yet doesn’t grant the same restitution rights to Palestinians. On the other hand, the Absentees’ Property Law—1950 allows the state to confiscate properties belonging to Palestinians who forcibly fled or were expelled from their homes in what became the State of Israel and transfer them irretrievably to Jewish ownership so Palestinians can never recover them (see How Israel Applies the Absentees’ Property Law to Confiscate Palestinian Property in Jerusalem).2 Between the two laws, Palestinians—whether absent or present—lose their properties to Jews with the blessing of the state.

The Shehadeh family bought the land in Batn al-Hawa and began building their home in 1966, when East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule, so their ownership documents are Jordanian and predate Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. But the Jewish Benvenisti Trust, established in 1899, claims it owned property there before 1948 to house Jewish immigrants from Yemen, who then left the area during the 1936–39 Great Palestinian Revolt. Ateret Cohanim took over the trust in 2001 and has been working to expel the Palestinians who have lived there for decades, replacing them with Jewish settlers through the aforementioned Legal and Administrative Matters Law—1970. Thus far, 14 Palestinian families have been expelled from Batn al-Hawa, and more than 700 Palestinians are under threat of forcible expulsion.3

In 2016, Ateret Cohanim filed a lawsuit in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court against the Shehadeh family over claims the land where their home sits belonged to the Benvenisti Trust. The court accepted the lawsuit, and the family then appealed to the Jerusalem District Court in 2022, but the court rejected the appeal that same year.

In 2023, the family filed a leave to appeal with the Supreme Court, but Justice Sohlberg decided to delay his decision until Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, under Supreme Court order, gave her opinion on the land’s status as it relates to Ottoman law (see The Complex and Unresolved Status of Land in East Jerusalem).4 Baharav-Miara has repeatedly delayed submitting her opinion and requested several extensions, with a current deadline of May 30, 2024.5 Given that Justice Sohlberg made his decision without the attorney general’s input, Ibrahim Shehadeh, one of the family members, has requested the family’s lawyer file a motion to revoke the judge’s license, citing that he is unfit to do his job.

“The racist judge has taken a very racist decision based on ideology, not based on the legal papers that he has in his hands,” Shehadeh told Jerusalem Story.6

Justice Sohlberg resides in the Israeli settlement of Alon Shvut in the occupied West Bank and has been sympathetic to settlers based on his previous rulings.7

In a similar verdict, the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court ruled in favor of the settler organization Nahalat Shimon to expel the Diab family from their Sheikh Jarrah home using the 1970 law to claim prior Jewish ownership of the land. Some 30 Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah are at risk of expulsion due to Nahalat Shimon’s lawsuits, despite the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) having built these homes for the families in the 1950s in exchange for them renouncing their refugee status.8 According to this arrangement, the families would be allowed to live in the homes as protected tenants for three years, paying nominal rent, after which they would receive ownership.9 The registration of ownership was in process when the 1967 War broke out. Thus the final ownership documents were never issued, despite the residents having fulfilled all their obligations under this arrangement.

The residents believe that they are nonetheless entitled to ownership as they were promised.

“Now, nobody’s safe in Jerusalem and the West Bank. There is no law since the emergency government was formed in October. The settlers just do whatever they want,” Saleh Diab, an affected family member and a known Palestinian activist facing expulsion in Jerusalem, told Jerusalem Story.10

Analysts have noted these recent expulsion orders don’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, the rulings highlight the wave of settlement expansion sweeping Jerusalem (see Judaizing Jerusalem: Jewish Settlements Are Soaring in and around the City).

“This all fits into the overarching policy that we are seeing being played out across the occupied territories, including in Gaza,” Amy Cohen, international relations and advocacy director at Jerusalem-focused activist organization Ir Amim, told Jerusalem Story.11

According to a new report12 by Ir Amim and planning rights group Bimkom, Israel is exploiting its war on Gaza to simultaneously fast-track settlement building and accelerate home demolitions in East Jerusalem (see Under Cover of War, Israel Charges Ahead with Severing East Jerusalem from the West Bank through Settlements). Since the war began over six months ago, five of eight new settlement plans have been advanced, with two being approved, while the rate of home demolitions has nearly doubled per month.

“In East Jerusalem, this policy plays out in the form of settlement expansion, home demolitions, and now evictions,” Cohen said. “It predetermines the final status of Jerusalem to ensure that it remains a completely exclusive Israeli capital that is under full Israeli control.”

In December 2023, the Israeli government allocated NIS 72 million ($19 million) for the “Jerusalem and Heritage” program (see Israeli Government Pumping Millions into Rebranding the Holy Basin, Erasing Palestinian Heritage), which experts say aims to rebrand Jerusalem as a solely Jewish historical site, erasing the city’s multicultural and especially Palestinian identity.

Daniel Seidemann, executive director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli nonprofit tracking political developments in Jerusalem, said on the social media platform X that the latest developments are part of the “initiative to encircle the religious, cultural and historical core of Jerusalem with biblically motivated settlements and settlement projects”13 (see Israel’s Disneyfication of Jerusalem Seeks to Erase Palestinians’ Historic Presence).