These words open the blog posting from Kairos USA's Mark Braverman after visiting the Al Kurd family in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem in 2009. Anyone who has visited the displaced families of Sheikh Jarrah or participated in the demonstrations that were held weekly for years to protest Israel’s heartless and cynical dispossession of these families in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, in the streets of the Old City, and in the Bedouin pastures to the east can fail to have a heart for the Palestinians of East Jerusalem, robbed of their homes, their communities and their very city in Israel’s relentless project of ethnic cleansing.
The “Judaization” of East Jerusalem has been in process since the military conquest of the West Bank by Israel in June 1967, beginning with the destruction of the historic 600-year-old Moughrabi (“Moroccan”) section of the Old City to make way for the “Western Wall Plaza.” It has involved not only the incremental taking of non-Jewish property within the walls of the Old City but the relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinian neighborhoods and lands surrounding the Old City. The goal has been not only the making of Jerusalem into a totally Jewish city but its encirclement by a ring of Jewish settlements, cutting Jerusalem off from the West Bank and rendering the establishment of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem impossible.
