#Subject: Sheikh Jarrah...one honest man 27.6.2021

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Subject: Sheikh Jarrah...one honest man

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  And the corona is back and so are masks   26.6.2021  The article which explains Sheikh Jarrah is at the bottom.   Nir Hasson from Ha’aretz phone me to ask if I was willing to be interviewed for an article has was writing for the paper about people who had taken part in the demonstrations and how they feel now. So I did and then he said that they would come to photograph me the next day. When they did not contact me, I thought that’s that as had happened with other interviews. But the next morning I started getting sms  from friends…you are a star, you are famous……I thought it was only about facebook but then one friend sent me this picture and I understood. I hoped it would appear in  the English edition but translated it and am sending it on also with this letter seperately  

I think that I will miss the feeling of being together with thousands. I realise now how along we were all the years in Machsom and when I went out with Arik or the rabbis. Now at Sheikh Jarrah I also feel the alone where we are only one or two hundred standing against the police and with the public so uninterested in what is happening there. They will feel it when the police act against  the ordinary citizen and then they will open their eyes in suprise     Well yesterday At Sheikh Jarrah the euphoria of last week at Balfour and the Knesset disappeared. What was it Kahll Jibran said….the height of your sorrow is the height of the joy you once felt and vice versa. I went with Varda and at first it was all so quiet that we thought we would be home early. Also there were fewer people than usual as in Tel Aviv there was an enormous gay demonstration. But then we moved forward to the police barrier which has now been added to so that they cannot be photographed so easily having a little party at the post. A bus of settlers came along and we did not let it past us. Why the hell should they go in when Palestinian visitors and family member can’t. Then the police started getting themselves ready with their helmets and batons which they are now provided with swinging. Besides as in the photo which I am putting on the stun grenades ….only about 20 of them are waiting for  the bodies of two of the police.

  This  young woman is amazing. She has come up dressed up as a policeman to every demonstration. She often imitates them but this time she was so funny I told her Charlie Chaplin would be proud of her and her walk. She mocked the police in every way she could also acting as traffic director once or twice when cars stopped to watch what was happening. Strutting along, pretending to give out tickets. She really pissed off this idiot who was in charge.  

So much so that he can into the crowd to arrest her. They pushed her off down the road and this blond policewoman went behind her pushing her along and not gently. I was so tempted to tell her who she reminded me of. Much as I try to push thoughts like this away I find it harder and harder

The Palestinian flag is like a red rag to a bull ….the police see it. Their hair stands on end. Their nostril distend. Their eyes blur and then go red. What remains of the brain goes into automatic attack zone.

Zadi was arrested…I am not sure if I am remembering correctly but I think that the sequence was that he had a Palestinian flag…..and as far as I know there is no law of holding a flag of another organization at a demonstration….if that of Lahava is allowed ….but there was a pulling match between him and the commander of the idiots and, only with the help of another police man did the latter manage to get it away from him and afterwards he was pulled out from the throng and arrested.   Then two of the men who went to wait for him at the police station. The one had on a scarf with the Palestinian flag and, though other policemen evidently spoke to him and took no notice, one of the more stupid came up and demanded he take it off. Which he refused. I wish I could send you the videos where you can see the amount of violence and how many policeman are necessary to take back one scarf. Like the Israeli joke of how many…………. Are required to put in a light bulb.  This is what interests the police today.   I had a feeling that the commander did not really know what he was doing. Every time he would barge into the group and then go back and stand as if thinking……or maybe like that man who said, “Sometimes I stands and thinks and sometimes I just stands.” And about twice they came all the way across the road to arrest someone who, as in most cases, is kept for a couple of hours and then released without even appearing in court          

The flag

No borders

One feels the desire to attack. 

Zaid

                  Former Attorney General Discovers Settler Group Took Over His Family’s Sheikh Jarrah Home

Michael Ben-Yair was surprised to find that a religious nonprofit group had charged Palestinians living in his grandmother’s East Jerusalem house hundreds of thousands of shekels in rent, with the approval of a rabbinical court. His legal journey to reclaim the home reveals the settlers’ modus operandi in their drive to ‘Judaize’ Sheikh Jarrah

 Ben-Yair with his sister Naama Bartal in Sheikh Jarrah in 2019. Credit: Hagit Ofran / Peace Now

Nir Hasson

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Jun. 15, 2021

A nonprofit settler group took over a building in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood that belongs to the family of Michael Ben-Yair, a former attorney general and retired District Court judge. The group controlled the building for years, collecting rent totaling hundreds of thousands of shekels from Palestinian residents, without the knowledge of the legal heirs of the building’s original owner.

Ben-Yair discovered two years ago that his grandmother’s house had been taken over by the group. No one from the Justice Ministry’s Administrator General and Official Receiver Division, rabbinical courts or a settler group had tried to find her legal heirs. Since then, he’s been waging a legal battle to wrest the building from the settlers, and to allow its Palestinians residents to remain there. On his journey, Ben-Yair discovered the settlers’ contorted and legally dubious methods to “Judaize” Sheikh Jarrah.

‘They could have easily found us.’

Nahalat Shimon was a small Jewish neighborhood in the Western part of Sheikh Jarrah in the late 19th century. Michael Ben-Yair, who was attorney general under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, was born there in 1942. In 1948, the residents fled after the neighborhood was conquered by Jordan’s Arab Legion. Like most Jewish residents who fled from East Jerusalem to the western side of the city, the family was compensated for the loss of their house, and received an alternative house and store in the Romema neighborhood.

Open gallery view

 In the 1990s, settler organizations began a drive to replace the Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah with Jewish ones, based on a law that allows Jews to reclaim property they held in 1948, even if they were compensated for its loss. Nahalat Shimon was divided into an eastern section called Karm al-Jaouni, where land was owned by the councils of the Jewish Ashkenazi and Mizrahi communities. Land in the western section, called Umm Haroun, where Ben-Yair’s family lived, was privately owned by Jewish families.

Land in the eastern section was subsequently purchased by a nonprofit group called Nahalat Shimon, which is controlled by a foreign company and run by a settler activist named Yitzhak Mamo. In the western section, Mamo and settler groups needed the cooperation of Jewish families who had inherited the properties. In some cases, they received cooperation and purchased the buildings, evicting Palestinian families living there. In the case of Ben-Yair’s family, they took a different method.

The house and an attached store are listed in a “trust document,” a type of will drafted by Ben-Yair’s grandmother, Sarah Jannah, daughter of Menashe Shvili. In 1927, she declared before a rabbinical court in Jerusalem that the house and store would pass to her heirs and then the heirs’ heirs. She added that if, God forbid, no family member remained alive after the original heirs, the property would be transferred to a neighborhood Georgian synagogue. This was common in those days, in cases of families with no living descendants.

‘We will never     leave our land’: The Palestinian families facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah

Israel won't     intervene in Sheikh Jarrah case, making eviction of Palestinian families     more likely

Israel is shirking     its responsibility for residents of Sheikh Jarrah

Israel’s policies     in East Jerusalem are outrageous, idiotic and unjust

Based on this last phrase, a right-wing nonprofit group called Meyashvei Zion (settlers of Zion), managed by Mamo, appealed in 2002 to a rabbinical court, asking that Mamo and another person named Oren Sheffer be appointed as court delegates to determine who the property belonged to. The court approved their request. Shortly thereafter, the two informed the court that they had not found any heirs, and the court quickly appointed the two as trustees of this building, without any significant effort by the court to locate the heirs.

Sheikh Jarah, Jerusalem

The decision was based on the presumption that no heirs could be found, even though Sarah Jannah appears in the Population Registry, since she died in 1955, after the state was established. Anyone wanting to could have easily found her heirs through a simple search at the interior ministry. “The identity numbers of the whole family were consecutive,” says Ben-Yair. “My brother’s ends in 03, mine ends in 04, my grandparents’ ID numbers ended in 05 and 06, respectively.”

In 2004, the Administrator General and Official State Receiver, which had managed the property since 1967, objected to the appointment of the new trustees, arguing that an effort should be made to locate living family members, but the court denied this request. A year later, the receiver handed the building over to Mamo and Sheffer, even reimbursing the nonprofit 250,000 shekels ($77,000) for rent the state had collected from Palestinian residents up to that time. Over the next nine years, the group received 600,000 shekels in revenues from the property.

In 2011, another nonprofit group, the Georgian community council, managed to take control of the property with the support of a rabbinical court. This group also failed to search for the real heirs. Minutes from rabbinical court sessions in 2016 show that the Georgian council knew that the property had legal heirs who were not benefiting from it. The council even knew their names. “They told me it belonged to Professor Yair somebody … Prof. Michael Ben-Yair; we’re trying to find him,” said the Georgian trustee David Bandar, in one of the sessions.

Open gallery view

 Ben-Yair in Sheikh Jarrah in 2019. Credit: Hagit Ofran / Peace Now

‘Lack of basic decency’

When Sheikh Jarrah stared making headlines following the eviction of Palestinian families from their houses a decade ago, Ben-Yair joined demonstrations organized by a solidarity movement against Jewish settlers. He even drafted a pamphlet stating that Jewish families who had fled homes there had received compensation for their houses, making the demand to reclaim their old houses illegal and immoral.

Two years ago, Ben-Yair discovered that settlers had begun evicting Palestinians from a store which he believed was part of his grandmother’s house. He subsequently appealed to the official receiver, attorney Sigal Yakobi, who is also the acting director-general of the Justice Ministry. “Up to that time I thought the property was still registered in my grandmother’s name and I assumed it was occupied by Palestinian refugees, living there untroubled. Since we’d received compensation in 1948, I didn’t bother checking the current ownership in the land registry office,” he says.

Ben-Yair says that when he met with the official receiver, she did a review and discovered that the property had been released.

“I told her that we are the heirs, so she asked to see the trust document and she was stunned. She saw that it was a private and not a public trust,” he recounts. At the meeting, the family members learned of their grandmother’s will for the first time. Ben-Yair and his sister, Na’ama Bartal, subsequently asked the court to look at the trust file. The court rejected the request, saying they did not have sufficient documentation to prove their family relation to their grandmother.

Ben-Yair appealed the decision to the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court, asking that the Interior Ministry be directed to give him the documents confirming that he is his grandmother’s grandson. Ben-Yair won the appeal, and the Interior Ministry is due to hand over the documents next week.

At the same time, attorneys Michael Sfard and Alon Sapir, with the assistance of Peace Now, submitted a request to the rabbinical court to appoint the family members as the trustees. “Michael Ben-Yair did not go into hiding and was not abducted to an enemy country; he did not change his name or hide in his bedroom. Not only is this a person who is easy to find, he is a public figure who makes public statements and even published a book about Sheik Jarrah three years earlier,” Sfard and Sapir wrote in their request to the court.

A ruling on their request has yet to be handed down, but meanwhile the rabbinical judges ordered that all activity in the trust be suspended. Ben-Yair and his sister said they hope that they will soon get their house back and that afterward they intend to sue the trustees from Meyashvei Zion and the Georgian council for the money they collected from the Palestinians over the years.

Since the trust document prohibits the sale of the house, Ben-Yair hopes to convince his family to lease the property to the Palestinian family living there for a token fee for an extended period. “It’s not just a matter of ‘what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.’ It’s a basic lack of decency and inconceivable under any legal system that I should receive both compensation as well as the property for which I received the compensation,” Ben-Yair says. “It would also involve eviction of Palestinians who would become refugees for the second time, while they are not entitled to seek to reclaim their property from before 1948. Justice requires that they not be evicted and that their custody of the house be ensured.”

Open gallery view

 Attorney Sigal Yakobi, the official state receiver and Justice Ministry acting director-general.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg

“It’s a crazy story,” says attorney Sfard, who is representing Ben-Yair. “The person they were supposed to look for was sitting right there in his office on the floor above the Official State Receiver in the Justice Ministry. It just shows the intensity of the concealment and of the connection between the Judaizing elements and the rabbinical court. The court is supposed to ascertain that the trustees are not doing anything to distort the wishes of the person who left the bequest or created the trust.”

“Ben-Yair’s story gives us an opportunity to peek into the system of dispossession in East Jerusalem,” says Hagit Ofran of Peace Now. “The state authorities, the Official State Receiver and the rabbinical court are enabling and even promoting the Palestinians’ eviction and replacement with settlers. The government can no longer argue that Sheikh Jarrah is just a real estate matter. It is a political matter that is the state’s responsibility, and the state is also responsible for preventing the injustice.”

‘There may have been some confusion’

The administration of the rabbinical courts says: “In 2011, several people came before the court and claimed no heirs were found. Therefore, the court ordered that in keeping with the trust document, the property be used for a public purpose. The Georgian council is also among the current custodians. The material in the file shows that the name of the woman who established the trust – Sarah bat Menashe Hannah/Jannah/Shvili is spelled in different ways, which may have caused confusion.

“It is most important to note that those who claim to be the deceased’s heirs have to date not proven that they are indeed her descendants, and they conducted a legal proceeding on this matter before other forums. Despite this, and out of caution, when the applicant first contacted Rachel Shakarji, the supervisor of religious properties earmarked for charitable purposes, she wrote to the court and requested that a temporary injunction be given instructing the receivers of the trust not to take any actions that would alter the condition of the trust from a legal or economic standpoint.

“An injunction was immediately granted by the court and it remains valid, even though those who claim to be the heirs of the person who established the trust have not proven their relation to her and even though half a year has passed since the temporary injunction was issued. Considering the time that has passed since the trust’s establishment, the location of the property and the upheavals that occurred there, it is possible that mistakes occurred. However, as noted, to date the claim of the familial relationship between the applicants and the originator of the trust has not been proven.”

Open gallery view

 Ben-Yair with his sister Bartal in Sheikh Jarrah in 2019.Credit: Hagit Ofran / Peace Now

Attorney Shlomo Toussia-Cohen, who is representing the Georgian council, declined to comment for this article. In their response to the rabbinical court, the Georgians claimed that Ben-Yair and his sister had not proven their blood relation to Sarah Jannah and that Ben-Yair’s public pronouncements about the rights of the Palestinians there indicate that he seeks to act counter to the principles of the trust and therefore is not entitled to a part of it.

The office of the Official State Receiver responded: “This is a trust property that was managed by the Official State Receiver and regarding which a release request was submitted by the appointed trustees in the early 2000s. In light of the fact that this is a trust for private purposes, the Official State Receiver opened an inquiry to the court, which appointed the trustees, and expresses its position that the relatives of the deceased should be appointed as the trustees. However, this position was not accepted by the court and therefore in 2006 the property was released to the trustees. It goes without saying that it is the duty of the appointed trustees to act in accordance with the purposes of the trust as set down by the deceased.”

Yitzhak Mamo and Meyashvei Zion declined to comment.

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