Evictions in Jerusalem Become Focus of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - The New York Times

JERUSALEM — In confrontations with Palestinian protesters over the past week in Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the Israeli police sprayed so much skunk water, a noxious liquid used to deter demonstrators, that its stench lingered over nearby streets.

In the space of a week, Sheikh Jarrah has become the centerpiece of spiking tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and has galvanized Palestinians and their advocates across the world, from the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and Gaza, to lawmakers and officials in nearby Jordan and faraway Washington.

Protesters have gathered nightly in Sheikh Jarrah over the past week, clashing with riot police and far-right Israeli groups.

Images of police violence at the Sheikh Jarrah protests have drawn sharp criticism from sympathetic members of Congress as well as the Jordanian government, which controlled East Jerusalem until 1967.

Hundreds of East Jerusalem residents have gathered in Sheikh Jarrah each night for the past week to argue the opposite.

In a statement on Friday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorists were “presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties as a nationalistic cause in order to incite violence in Jerusalem.”.

On Friday, Israeli officials said troops had killed two armed Palestinian militants, and wounded a third, who had attempted to enter Israel from the West Bank and fired on Israeli soldiers.

Israel captured the territory in 1967 and annexed East Jerusalem, later returning ownership of the Sheikh Jarrah homes to the Jewish trusts.

In 1982, the Palestinian residents signed an agreement accepting Jewish ownership of the land and allowing them to live there as protected tenants.

“I want Jerusalem to be Jewish,” said Yonatan Yosef, a Jewish settler in Sheikh Jarrah, and a former spokesman for the area’s settlements.

Palestinians and rights advocates say the evictions are part of a wider strategy of reinforcing Jewish control over East Jerusalem, the area that Palestinians hope will be the capital of a future Palestinian state.

King, the deputy mayor, said “of course” they are part of a wider strategy of installing “layers of Jews” throughout East Jerusalem.

“It’s a land grab,” said Sami Abu Dayyeh, owner of the Ambassador Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah, some of whose land has been confiscated by the Israeli state in a separate case.

Skafi, the Sheikh Jarrah resident, said his family lived in West Jerusalem before 1948, but has no legal recourse to reclaim the property

But Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said the discrepancy was necessary to preserve Israel’s Jewish character