The Epiphany of Rev. Thomas Are

Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs."

Martin Gilbert, Israel: a History

I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer's recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees. [United Nations General Assembly Appendix 4, No. 15 ]

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."

On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved "a true Zionist victory" over the UN partition plan "which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel." The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneb proudly declared: "When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent."

Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.

Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians' human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children "documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries."

On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of "punitive beating" of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: "Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area."

According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: "Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones."

On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: " We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander. . . . After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him 'you Nazi,' and the first man shot back: 'You bleeding heart.' When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out."

These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.

In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: "Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock."

Amnesty International concluded that "there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel."

Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: "Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers."

Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime's propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had "detained." Obviously, these "terrorist detainees" had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.

Rev. Are's book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel's finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee's words "are comparable in quality" to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.

The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America--essentially a captive nation--that Israel is the victim.

John F. Mahoney wrote: "Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book."

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.

Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: " This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless."

Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.

The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis, who believe in good will and do not share their government's belief in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the only effective force in history, are deprived, by America's support for their government's policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.

Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, "What Christians Can Do," Rev. Are writes: "We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It's a Christian's duty to know."

Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: "Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge."

More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans' moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.

Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel's bidding, and the media and evangelical "christian" churches have been preparing the American people for the event.

It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin's doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07252008.html

"If I Forget Thee, Umm Touba…"
What's Driving the Jerusalem Attacks
In one of the most beautiful songs in the Bible, the poet vows: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, / Let my right hand forget her cunning. / If I do not remember thee, / Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; / If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy!" (Psalms 137:5)

For some reason, the poet did not write: "If I forget thee, O Umm Touba!" nor "If I forget thee, O Sur Baher!" nor "If I forget thee, O Jabal Mukaber!" nor even "If I forget thee, O Ein Karem!"

A fact that should be remembered in any discussion about Jerusalem: there is no resemblance between the Jerusalem of the Bible and the "Jerusalem" of the current Israeli map. The object of the yearning of the exiles who wept by the rivers of Babylon was the real Jerusalem - more or less within the boundaries of the Old City, whose center is the Temple Mount. One square kilometer, that's all.

The redefined municipality of Jerusalem after the 1967 annexation comprises a vast area, some 126 square kilometers, from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north. This area has been clothed with the name of "Jerusalem" in order to bestow a religious-national-historic aura to what was nothing but an act of land-grabbing and settlement.

The planners of this map, including the late General Rehavam Ze'evi, nicknamed "Gandhi", the most far-right officer in the Israeli army, had a simple purpose: to annex to Jerusalem as many areas as possible that were free of Arabs, in order to set up Jewish settlements there. They were haunted by the demographic phantom that is still terrorizing us today: they aimed to expand the Jewish and to reduce the Arab population - in Jerusalem and throughout the country.

In order to achieve this, the planners were compelled to add some nearby Arab villages. Not only the Arab neighborhoods near the Old City, like the Mount of Olives, Silwan and Ras-al-Amud, but also villages located at some distance - such as Umm Touba, Sur Baher and Jabal Mukaber in the east, Beit Hanina and Kafr Aka in the north, Sharafat and Beit Safafa in the south.

The demographic phantom that haunted "Gandhi" then is now pursuing us through the streets of Jerusalem, riding a deadly bulldozer.


UNTIL THE 1949 war, Jerusalem was indeed a mixed city. Jewish and Arab neighborhoods were interwoven.

The demographic map of Jerusalem became engraved in my memory during a personal experience. A year or so before the war, some of us, young men and women of the Bama'avak group in Tel-Aviv, decided to make a trip to Hebron. At the time, only very few Jews went to the southern town, which was known as a nationalist and religious Muslim stronghold.

We took the Arab bus from Jerusalem and went to the town, walked around its alleyways, bought the blue glass for which Hebron is famous, visited the Gush Etzion kibbutzim on the way and returned to Jerusalem. But in the meantime something had happened: one of the "dissident" underground organizations had carried out an especially serious attack (I think it was the bombing of the officers' club in Jerusalem) and the British had imposed a general curfew on all Jewish neighborhoods throughout the country.

At the entrance of Jerusalem we alighted from the bus and crossed the city on foot from one end to the other, taking care to move only in the Arab neighborhoods. From there we took an Arab bus to Ramle, and another one to Jaffa, and then found our way to our homes in Tel Aviv through backyards and side streets. Not one of us was caught.

Thus I became acquainted with the Arab neighborhoods, among them elegant quarters like Talbieh and Bakaa, which became the centers of Jewish Jerusalem after the 1948 war. In that war, the inhabitants fled/were driven to East Jerusalem and settled there - until these neighborhoods, too, were conquered by the Israeli army and annexed to Israel.



THE ANNEXATION of East Jerusalem created a dilemma. What to do with the Arab population? They could not be expelled. The destruction of the Mugrabi quarter opposite the Western Wall and the brutal expulsion of the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City had already caused much negative comment throughout the world.

If the government had indeed intended to "unite" the city, they would have accompanied the annexation with some immediate measures, such as conferring automatic citizenship on all the Arab inhabitants and returning their "abandoned" properties in West Jerusalem (or, at least, paying compensation.)

But the government did not dream of doing so. The inhabitants were not awarded citizenship, which would have given them the same rights as the Arab citizens of Israel in Galilee and the Triangle. They were only recognized as "residents" in the city in which their forefathers had lived for over a thousand years. That is a fragile status, which accords Israeli identity cards, but not the right to vote for parliament. It can easily be withdrawn.

True, in theory an Arab Jerusalemite can apply for Israeli citizenship, but such an application is subject to the arbitrary decision of hostile bureaucrats. And the government, of course, relies on the Arabs not to do so, since that would mean recognizing the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation.


THE TRUTH is that Jerusalem has never been united. "The city that was reunited, the capital of Israel for all eternity", was and has remained a mantra that has no bearing on reality. For all practical purposes, East Jerusalem remains an occupied territory.

The Arab inhabitants have the right to vote for the municipality. But only a handful - city employees and those dependent on government favors - exercise this right, because this, too, means recognition of the occupation.

In practice, the Jerusalem municipality is a city government by Jews for Jews. Its leaders are chosen by Jews only, and see their main purpose in Judaizing the city. Years ago, Haolam Hazeh magazine disclosed a secret directive to all government and city institutions to make sure that the number of Arabs in the city did not exceed 27.5%, the exact percentage that existed at the time of the annexation.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the elected democratic mayor of West Jerusalem is also the military governor of East Jerusalem.

Since 1967, all mayors have seen their job in this light. Together with all the arms of government, they see to it that Arabs living outside the city do not return to it, and that Arabs living in the city move out of it. A thousand and one tricks, large and small, are employed to this end, from the almost total refusal of building permits for rapidly growing Arab families, to the cancellation of residency rights for people who spend some time abroad or in the West Bank.

The contact between Arab Jerusalemites and the inhabitants of the adjoining West Bank, which had been a closely woven fabric, has been totally severed. Jerusalem, which served as the economic, political, cultural, medical and social center, has been completely cut off from its natural hinterland. The building of the wall, which separated fathers from sons, pupils from their schools, tradesmen from their clients, physicians from patients, mosques from believers, and even cemeteries from the newly deceased, serves this purpose.

In Israel, people say that the Arab residents "enjoy the benefits of social insurance". That is a mendacious argument: after all, the insurance is not a free meal - it is paid for by the insured. Arabs, like Jews, pay for it every month.

Arab residents have to pay all municipal taxes, but receive in return only a fraction of the municipal services, both in quality and in quantity. The schools lack hundreds of classrooms, and their standard is inferior to the private Islamic schools. Trash removal and other services are beneath contempt. Public gardens, youth clubs, gardening - cannot even be mentioned. The inhabitants of Kafr Akab, located beyond the Kalandia checkpoint, pay municipal taxes and receive no services at all - the municipality says that its employees are afraid to go there.


THE JEWISH public is not interested in all this. They don't know - and don't want to know - what is going on in the Arab neighborhoods, some hundreds of meters from their homes.

So they are surprised, surprised and shocked, by the ungratefulness of the Arab inhabitants. A young man from Sur Baher recently shot pupils of a religious seminary in West Jerusalem. A young man from Jabal Mukaber drove a bulldozer and ran over everything that crossed his path. This week, another youngster from Umm Touba repeated exactly the same act. All three of them were shot dead on the spot.

The attackers were ordinary young men, not particularly religious. It seems than none of them was a member of any organization. Apparently, a young man just gets up one fine morning and decides that he has enough. He then carries out an attack all by himself, with any instrument at hand - a pistol bought with his own money, in the first instance, or a bulldozer he drives at work, in the two others.

If this is indeed the case, a question presents itself: why is this being done by Jerusalemites? First, because they have the opportunity. A person who drives a bulldozer at a building site in West Jerusalem can just crash into a passing bus in the next street. The driver of a heavy truck can run over people. It is relatively easy to carry out a shooting attack, like the recent event at the Lion's Gate, the perpetrators of which were not caught. No intelligence service can prevent this, if the attacker has no partners and is not a member of any organization.

From the utterances of the commentators this week, one can gather that they cannot even imagine the anger that accumulates in the mind of a young Arab in Jerusalem throughout the years of humiliation, harassment, discrimination and helplessness. It is easier and more amusing to go into pornographic descriptions of the 72 virgins waiting for the martyrs in the Muslim paradise - what they do with them, how they do it to them, who has enough energy for them all.

One of the main contributing factors for the stirring up of hatred is the demolition of "illegal" homes of Arab residents, who are quite unable to build "legally". The dimension of official stupidity is attested to by the demand of the Shin-Bet chief, voiced this week again, to destroy the homes of the attackers' families, for the sake of "deterrence". Apparently he has not heard about the dozens of studies and the accumulated experience, which prove that every destroyed home becomes an incubator for new hate-driven avengers.

This week's attack is especially instructive. It is quite unclear what actually happened: did Ghassan Abu-Tir plan the attack in advance? Or was this a spontaneous decision in a moment of excitement? Was this an attack at all - or did the bulldozer driver run into a bus by accident and try, in a state of panic, to escape - running over his pursuers, becoming a target for a shooting spree by passersby and soldiers? In the atmosphere of suspicion and fear that pervades Jerusalem now, every road accident involving an Arab becomes an attack, and every Arab driver involved in an accident will in all probability be executed on the spot, without a trial. (It should be remembered that the first intifada broke out because of a road accident, in which a Jewish driver ran over some Arabs.)


AND AGAIN there is the question: what is the solution to this complex problem, which arouses such strong emotions, feeds on deep-rooted myths and causes such moral dilemmas for millions around the world?

This week, a lot of proposals were presented, such as building a Berlin-style wall through the middle of Jerusalem (in addition to the one going around it). To punish whole families for the acts of their children, much like the Nazi "sippenhaft". To expel the families from the city or to cancel their resident status. To demolish their homes. To take away their social insurance benefits, even if they have paid for them.

All these "solutions" have one thing in common - they have been tried in the past, here and in other places, and found wanting.

Except one, clear solution: to turn East Jerusalem into the capital of the State of Palestine, to enable its inhabitants to set up their own municipality, while keeping the whole city as an urban entity united under one super-municipality in which the Arabs will be equal to the Jews. I am glad that during his visit with us this week, Barack Obama repeated almost word for word this plan, which Gush Shalom published some ten years ago in cooperation with Feisal Husseini, the late leader of the Jerusalem Arab community.

The attacks are the result of despair, frustration, hatred and the sense that there is no way out. Only a solution that will remove these feelings can bring security to both parts of Jerusalem.

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery07262008.html

Palestinian Family Denied Even Half a House Settlers Eye Historic Jerusalem Neighborhood


It must be the smallest Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories: just half a house. But Palestinian officials and Israeli human rights groups are concerned that it represents the first stage of a plan to eradicate the historical neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, cutting off one of the main routes by which Palestinians reach the Old City and its holy sites.

The home of Mohammed and Fawziya Khurd has been split in two since 1999 when the Israeli courts evicted their grown-up son Raed from a wing of the property. The elderly couple have been trying to regain possession, but were stymied last week when an Israeli high court backed the petition of a group of settlers and ordered the immediate eviction of the Khurds. The decision paves the way for the takeover of 26 multi-storey houses in the neighbourhood, threatening to make 500 Palestinians homeless.

The verdict has been denounced by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and in the past few days the Khurds have been visited by foreign diplomats, including from the United States.

In a letter to consulates in Jerusalem, including those of the United States, Britain, France and Germany, Rafiq Husseini, Mr Abbas's aide, warned that the takeover of the Khurds' home was part of a wider drive to change the geography of Jerusalem by forcing out Palestinians and replacing them with Israeli settlers. Such a development would deal a death blow to already-strained peace negotiations, he wrote.

Today there are 250,000 Israeli Jews living illegally in East Jerusalem, and the Israeli government has announced that thousands more apartments are to be built – despite promises to the US government to freeze settlement growth.

Israeli human rights groups and Palestinian solidarity activists, meanwhile, have been staging a 24hour vigil at the Khurds' home in the hope of preventing the order's enforcement.

According to Meir Margalit, an analyst on Israeli policies in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah evictions are part of a much bigger goal being pursued by shadowy settler groups, backed by the Israeli government, to establish wedges of Jewish settlement around the Old City and secure it for any future peace agreement.

"The settlers have submitted a plan to the Jerusalem municipality seeking the demolition of Sheikh Jarrah's Palestinian homes to make way for the building of 200 apartments for settlers," he said. "They have chosen one of the most sensitive sites in East Jerusalem: it's full of Palestinian political and cultural institutions. Its takeover would contribute significantly to the encirclement of the Old City."

The Khurds and other Palestinian families have been living in Sheikh Jarrah since the mid-1950s, when the Jordanian government and the United Nations allocated them land as refugees. All had been forced out of areas that became Israel in 1948.

After Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, however, the settler organisations began pressing their claims to former Jewish homes. A religious organisation, the Sephardi Jewry Association, says it purchased Sheikh Jarrah's lands in the 19th century. The families' lawyers, on the other hand, say the land belongs to the Darwish family. The courts have been unable to authenticate the documents, which date to a murky period of land dealings.

Until last week's decision, the courts had decided that the Palestinian residents should be allowed to stay in their homes as "protected tenants" until ownership could be determined. However, the courts insisted that the families pay rent to a trust set up in case they found in favour of the Sephardi Association at a later date.

The families argue that, under the terms of the deal with the Jordanian government and United Nations, they were entitled to ownership of the properties after 30 years. The eviction order against the Khurds is believed to have been issued after Mohammed Khurd, 55 and bedridden, was unable to keep up his payments.

The Khurds say they have faced constant pressure since settlers moved in next door. "At first we were offered a lot of money to leave," said Mrs Khurd, 62. "When we refused, the settlers started making our lives a hell. The family next door changes every few months to make it difficult for us to start legal proceedings.

"Armed Israeli guards have been posted on the path to our house and there are a network of surveillance cameras to watch our every move. Armed settlers have broken into the house, pointing their guns at us.

"The family next door makes noise through the night to disturb us, and brings large parties of settler children to play on our shared balcony as though they were on a school outing. We have even seen them put up posters of Palestinians and encourage their children to shoot at them with toy guns."

Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis for Human Rights, which has taken a keen interest in the case since 2001, says official policy towards the Khurds reveals a double standard. "In claiming back what they say are Jewish properties from before 1948, the settlers are opening up a Pandora's box. Before 1948, Fawziya's family was from Talbieh, now in West Jerusalem, and her husband Mohammed's family lived in Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv. Do the settlers want these refugees making similar claims for the return of their old properties in Israel?"

The Palestinian Authority has pointed out to the foreign consulates that nearly two-thirds of the land in West Jerusalem was owned by Palestinians before 1948. Human rights groups also note that it is against international law to change the legal status of occupied land. None of the consulates has responded officially, although they have made visits to the area.

Behind the settler families is an organisation known as Nakhalat Shimon, founded by Benny Elon, a former cabinet minister and leader of the Moledet Party, which seeks the expulsion of Palestinians. He recently stated: " Building Jewish neighbourhoods next to open areas [in Jerusalem] will prevent invasion and illegal construction by Palestinians who live near the Old City."

The settlers have recruited a large number of religious supporters because they claim a cave in Sheikh Jarrah as the resting place of a famous rabbi from 2,000 year ago.

The Khurds are far from alone in their plight. Twenty-five homes are under similar threat. Maher Hanoun, his three brothers and their families were forced out of their large home in 2002 when settler groups brought an action against them. The courts overturned the order in 2006. "My home was boarded up for four years while the courts decided who owned the land. So far the judges have not reached a decision, but the verdict against the Khurds puts all of us at risk again," he said.

Mr Margalit points out that the Khurd case is just one of several fronts being pursued by extremist Jewish organisations keen to settle Sheikh Jarrah.

Israeli officials have been leasing an olive grove belonging to the Arab Hotels Co. to a settler group called Ateret Cohanim in a deal the local Haaretz newspaper recently termed "underhand". Together with a right-wing US Jewish millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, who has bought the Shepherd's Hotel on nearby Mount Scopus, the settlers hope to build 250 flats on the grove.

"For the settlers, Sheikh Jarrah is the link they need between the western half of the city and neighbouring Mount Scopus. Although they seem to be acting on their own initiative in this case, they are in fact doing the dirty work of the government."

The settlers next to the Khurds refused to comment. However, a friend, Shira Ganz, 32, an immigrant from Ukraine who has been squatting in an empty Palestinian home nearby with her husband and three young children, said the families were committed to living in Sheikh Jarrah. "It's written in the Bible that we have a right to everywhere in this land, and here we are only minutes from the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. We are not frightened of living next to the Palestinians. If we were, we would leave the promised land and move to Britain or the US.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book, "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East", is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

This article originally appeared in The National (http://www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cook07262008.html