“This is not a human being...”

A few nights ago I visited Sheikh Jarrah, the place in East Jerusalem that I wrote about just after I arrived where several Palestinian families were evicted from their homes and living on the streets. I went to visit the families and sat with them for a few hours.

When I visited, they had spent 27 days living on the street just in front of the house they had lived in for over 55 years. Three brothers lived in the houses – it had been one house originally and turned into three to accommodate all of their families.

At 5am on Monday 3 August 500 soldiers surrounded the houses (as well as others in the same district), exploded open the doors and stormed the houses destroying everything in their path. They broke the doors, the windows, smashed the furniture and threw the rest out in the garden – photos of parents who had passed away, things that their children had made at school, all were thrown away. “Everything we had worked so hard to bring, they destroyed”. The soldiers wouldn’t let a woman in her late 60’s take her medicine for a recent operation on her eye. The soldiers raided the fridge and laughed as they took a child’s chocolate.

The brother I spoke to was in his late sixties. He had lived in the house for 55 years, his brothers had been born there. Two weeks earlier they had received a paper from the court ordering them to be out of the house and giving them 10 days - between 1-10 August to leave. On the second day the army arrived to throw them out.

By 8am the same day, a family of 15 Jewish settlers had moved into the house.

The following day, one of the settlers brought some of the broken glass to a skip in front of the house, right next to where the family are living, watching them smugly as they tipped the rubbish as if to say they are the victorious ones, that they have won. Every day the settlers enter the house from the front in full view of the family they have forced out. The other day one of the settler children, a boy, stood on the roof top of the house praying, holding the Torah in one hand, a gun in the other.

Soon after the family was evicted, the settler family took them to court to try to get them removed. They made claims that they had erected tents in front of the house, were throwing stones, making noise and were too close to the house. There are no stones in the area and they live in the cold open air, not in tents. When they were evicted they were told they mustn’t come within 20 metres of the house. Where they sit, where they lay their mattresses, is at least 40-50 metres from the house. Every day they sit doing nothing except receiving visitors, which are regular and even high profile - the day before Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu had visited them. Otherwise most days there are journalists who come to talk to them and note down their story. But still they live on the streets. The Court didn’t force them to move from where they are living, but told them not to throw the stones they aren’t throwing and not to bother the settlers.

I asked them what they would do. “Even if the Government gives us a house”, they said, “we will stay here to let everyone know this is OUR house. All our memories are here, my father, my mother died in this house. These trees are like my sons”. The lemon trees that they planted in the front garden many years ago are starting to turn brown because they are not being watered or looked after.

Now the men sleep on the street in front of the house. The women and children stay in a nearby hotel – there were 6 children living in the house before they were evicted, one young woman is studying psychology at university so she needs a base to work from.

“Where is your brain, where is your heart, where are your feelings to throw our children outside and put your children inside? This is not a human being. Don’t you have any feelings?” I think I asked the family what they most wanted to say to the settlers.

The only reason they were evicted was because they weren’t Jewish.

The Jewish family is now living in an entirely Palestinian neighbourhood, apart from the other settlers who have also moved in recently to Palestinian homes. The same night – or morning, the soldiers also destroyed a tent which a family was using to shelter in after they were also evicted from their home a while ago. Others are awaiting eviction. The ‘Arabs’ that they most hate (and think most hate them) are their surrounding neighbours and they live not only with security cameras on the outside, but security guards on the inside. They have probably been given a large amount of money by the Government to live in these neighbourhoods, in these homes. But how much money does it take to numb their consciences? What is the price of watching another’s child live on the street while you live in their rooms, sleep in their beds? How is it possible for human beings to be this cruel?