1948 Again, in Sheikh Jarrah: Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

CounterPunch - Ellen Cantarow
Disputed” is a word often used about East Jerusalem and homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Would the international community have considered the homes of American blacks attacked by the Ku Klux Klan as “disputed”? Or those of Jews ejected by Brown Shirts in the early 1930s?

...Under the law East Jerusalem and all the Arab homes it contains are part of the occupied West Bank. Despite endless palm-greasing, casuist apologetics, semantic distortions and brute force, Israel’s responsibilities towards the territories it occupies remain articulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Chapter 5 of the 1907 Hague Convention IV. Occupying states are forbidden to seize the land and property of those they occupy, and forbidden to settle their citizens on occupied soil.

...Days after our visit, the settlers danced in triumph in front of their victims while the latter banged pots and pans to make them leave. The Jerusalem municipality has approved plans by Florida billionaire Irving Moskowitz, to build twenty apartments in Sheikh Jarrah. The settler organization, Nahalat Shimon International, also filed plans this past August with the Jerusalem Local Planning Commission to demolish Palestinian homes and build a 200-unit settlement... Full story