Fawzia el-Kurd (63 years of age) and her family lived in the same house in Sheik Jarrah from 1956 until November 2008. Her family were refugees from West Jerusalem and she still remembers living in Talbiyah as a child. She and her ailing husband, Muhammad, (partially paralyzed and suffering from diabetes and heart problems) were expelled from their home at four o’clock in the morning by the Israeli police, accompanied by taunting settlers, on 9^th November, ironically the anniversary of Kristallnacht. From July that year when an eviction order was issued until that day there had still been hope that her home could be saved. Many had participated in protests at their home, which had been partially occupied by armed settlers. Court proceedings over the previous ten years or so had not been convinced of anyone’s definitive claims to the property in question.

 

El-Kurd’s house was part of a building project the Jordanian government built with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) to house 28 Palestinian families who fled their homes in 1948. It was agreed then that the ownership of the houses would be transferred to the families within three years in return for their agreement to no longer receive food assistance from UNRWA.

 

The Jordanian government never registered the properties, but in 1972 a Jewish organization (Sephardi Association, which then sold their “rights” to “Nahalat Shimon”) managed to register the 28 dunams in question with the Israeli land registrar, based on an Ottoman document from the 19^th century. The Palestinians challenged that act and the document on which it was based in court proceedings which dragged on for many years. Large amounts of money were offered to the residents in order to encourage them to move, but they refused, aware of the implications of selling for their own national claims and cause. It is interesting to note that the same settlers, who claimed ownership by right, nevertheless felt the need to attempt purchase. The suspicion that the document might have been doctored or forged, and the existence of other evidence to show that the original owners were Arabs were declared inconclusive or “too late” to be admitted as evidence. A lone judge of the high court issued an eviction order.

 

The Israeli flag was raised in November 2008 above the El-Kurd home in the former UNRWA refugee camp where another 27 families (among them our friends Maher Hanoun and Nasser el-Gawi who have been previously arrested and harassed by the authorities) are threatened with eviction. All this is happening just below the Hebrew University, next to the villas of the middle-class Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

 

The settler organization, Nahalat Shimon, publicized and celebrated this brutal and tragic event (Muhammad died of a heart attack within a week) as the “liberation of Jewish property,” as a stage in a “redemptive” process (sic). What kind of redemption is it that turns people into homeless widows?

 

Um Kamal el-Kurd, now a widow, lives in a tent not far from her home of over 50 years. The windows there have been blocked with Jerusalem stones, the settlers who had invaded part of her home have also been expelled by court order. Um Kamal’s tent has been torn down five times by the police at the urging of the Jerusalem municipality and the settler organization that plans to turn the area into a 200 apartment Jewish complex.

 

Twenty-seven additional families wonder if they will suffer a similar fate. For over thirty years there have been attempts to expel them on the basis of possible but not definitively proven claims that the land their homes are built on belonged to Jews before 1948. Each of these families are themselves refugees from 1948, but there is eifa v’eifa (discriminatory double standards) at work here. Nobody is suggesting that these families be returned to their pre-1948 homes. That is why former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek is reputed to have warned against expelling these families, terming it a Pandora’s Box.

 

Fawzia’s tent has become a focus of Palestinian attention and pilgrimage since. Many foreign diplomats, Israeli Arabs, international activists, and journalists have visited her and heard her story. Very few Israelis or Jews visit her, on the other hand, though many drive by daily on their way to the university. She says she respects and appreciates the few representatives and volunteers of RHR who visit (“I too want peace and believe in non-violence,”) but asks why others don’t come. She asks, and it is hard to hear her question, why Israelis seem not to care about the injustice done to her. “Have they no heart?” she asks me.

 

I feel deep distress, even shame, at the behavior of our society in this case, particularly because we are always so ready to claim the moral high ground, claiming our righteous treatment of minorities in our midst, and of our enemies, to be unequaled amongst the nations.

 

Is this an example of equitable treatment before the law, of justice, of democracy, of Jewish morality in action?

 

Is this how we treat widows in our midst?