Jerusalem Riots Over “Sheikh Jarrah” Rental Dispute Were Just A Pretext For Hamas War Plans
International media complicit in the manipulation of public opinion, and the Palestininan Authority is eager to join, but Hamas is driving the war plans.
Since early May, a new spate of violence has plagued Jerusalem and Israel’s southern communities. This latest escalation – replete with riots, rocket fire and incendiary balloons – finds its roots in a property dispute in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where four Arab families are slated for eviction over failure to pay rent. Yet, the narrative being sold to the international community is one of illegal expulsions and war crimes.
In reality, this escalation has been completely manufactured by activists hellbent on demonizing Israel and Palestinian leaders aiming to manipulate the ensuing conflict to their advantage. Indeed, the Palestinians have taught us a masterclass in conjuring false narratives and garnering international support.
The eviction from Sheikh Jarrah is undeniably legal and legitimate. Contrary to the misinformation promulgated by the mainstream media, these families are not the owners of the property in which they reside – repeated court cases affirmed this. Although Israel allowed the residents to remain as long as they paid rent, they have failed to do so. As a result, Israel, as any functioning government does, ruled in favor of their eviction. And as Professor Avi Bell of the Kohelet Policy Forum writes, there is nothing in the Geneva Conventions or other laws concerning belligerent occupation that forbids Israel from evicting overstaying tenants.
However, this hasn’t stopped major media outlets and members of Congress from painting the dispute as one of inhumane violence. The UN Human Rights Council chimed in as well, but failed to mention the Palestinians’ role in the fighting.
How did we get to this point? How did the legal evacuation of four Arab families for not paying their rent become an international scandal?
A concerted effort is underway to create a round of violence out of thin air. The not-so-spontaneous eruption of Palestinian riots on the Temple Mount, where they have prepared piles of stones and firebombs to injure police, make this abundantly clear.
Of course, to an extent, all flare ups between Israel and the Palestinians are artificial.
The Second Intifada, for example, in which over one thousand Israelis were killed, was deliberately instigated by then-Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, after the failure of the peace talks at Camp David. According to Hani al-Hassan, at the time an adviser to Arafat and a member of the PLO Central Committee, this was done in order to change the rules of the game and shift the blame for the stalled peace process onto Israel.
More recently, the “stabbing intifada” of 2015-2016 was incited by Palestinian leaders misleading their people about supposed Israeli intentions to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount, perhaps the most contentious issue in the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Even before the creation of the State of Israel, the local Arab leader during the British Mandate for Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, provoked violent riots in 1929 and 1936 that took the lives of hundreds of Jews.
But the sheer intentionality of this latest escalation, evident through months of quiet campaigning on social media, has seldom been seen. The hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah first appeared in February 2021, tweeted by some minor accounts. By March, it had been tweeted countless times by NGO’s, prominent regional media outlets, social movements, and the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister himself. The hashtag and variations of it continued to gain traction in April. Which brings us to today, when #SheikhJarrah, #SavePalestine and #AlAqsaUnderAttack are all trending, despite Israel suffering indiscriminate rocket fire and murderous violence in its capital.
Radical NGO’s like Samidoun – a proxy of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – have been spreading misinformation for months to rile up the Palestinians. The same group is organizing dozens of events around the world to show solidarity with Palestinian rioters.
The Palestinian Authority, unsurprisingly, has been coaxing a violent outbreak for over a month, since before Ramadan. Tensions were further exacerbated when Israel restricted access to the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City, and Arab youths uploaded videos of themselves attacking Jews on TikTok. There is also the distinct, even likely possibility, that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is fomenting the conflict to distract the international community from his cancelling of the Palestinian elections for the umpteenth time in a desperate bid to prevent an ever popular Hamas from wrestling control of the PA from his Fatah party.
Hamas, clearly cognizant of Abbas’s attempt to amass support, has retaliated by promoting its own brand of violence. According to Israeli police, the riots on the Temple Mount are led by Hamas operatives. Unsurprising, considering Palestinians have been waving the terror group’s flags and reciting chants of support since last week. Likewise, on May 10th, Hamas began launching hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing two innocent people thus far.
Make no mistake, this potential third intifada has nothing to do with the legal eviction of overstaying tenants. It is a carefully orchestrated campaign by activists who saw a golden opportunity to cast Israel as an evil aggressor, and by the Palestinian elite who have no qualms about using their people as tools in their power struggle.
The leaders of this campaign know full well they will not be held accountable for their actions, and foolish journalists and public officials will adopt their narrative without hesitation.
Based on what we have seen, their intuition was correct.
So, how will this round of violence end? Will it develop into a full-scale intifada? It’s difficult to say. While Palestinian leaders do not bear sole responsibility for these hostilities, only they can quell the flame. If they are led to believe that this intransigence produces results, things will escalate further. Israel, the international community, and especially the Biden administration, must ensure that no such perception take hold.
Eitan Fischberger is a former Staff Sergeant in the Israeli Air Force currently pursuing his MA at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His writing has appeared in Real Clear Politics, the New York Daily News, and more. Find him on Twitter @EFischberger.
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Comments
Iran controls Hamas. Attacks on Israel by Hamas are attacks on Israel by Iran. And the Israelis know it.
Looks like Iran has decided its time for a war with Israel. They know Comrade Biden is weak and won’t back Israel. There may never be a better time.
Good Job President Asterisk!
Had they wished to stay, all they needed was to pay the rent.
I can’t imagine that there could not have been a GoFundMe campaign that would have helped them out with rent plus a few groceries.
I wonder how it will work out when all those not paying the rent in the USA run out of runway, weighed down by all their bags of government money.
And about 50 years of back rent. They haven’t paid a penny of rent on the property, ever. The real scandal is that the Israeli courts managed to drag it out over 40 years until they have finally reached the point where the High Court will have no choice but to authorize the evictions.
As for those who object to the evictions, they admit that had the landlord been an Arab they would have no objection; therefore their position is that Jews and Jews alone have no property rights, and must allow squatters to occupy their property rent-free forever. How is that not classical antisemitism?
A deal was actually reached with the residents but their lawyers convinced them to turn it down. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lawyers were working for Hamas
When? Just recently, or decades ago? Because as I understand it decades ago their lawyers signed an agreement on their behalf, under which they would pay rent and have life tenancy, and then the clients repudiated it and claimed they had never hired the lawyers in the first place.
“It is a carefully orchestrated campaign by activists who saw a golden opportunity to _______.”
Fill in the blank with almost anything nowadays, including George Floyd.
Wokeness is a National Security Risk.
Propaganda and manipulation of people to undermine society.
Israel and USA are both under attack by those who uses social issues to divide and confuse people.
When Harris and Pelosi get into catfights over who gets the key to the football, you think anyone in DC is genuinely interested any longer in real National Security?
The vile Dhimmi-crats’ spreading fallacious and contrived Muslim terrorist propaganda, and, blaming Israel for Arab Muslims’ continued supremacism, belligerence, totalitarianism and hate, is indefensible, despicable and evil.
This is so contemptible — Arab Muslim terrorists attack Israel and we’re supposed to believe that it’s the fault of Israeli Jews? How incredibly stupid, ignorant and morally bankrupt do you have to be to swallow this fallacious narrative?
BENNY LAYS DOWN AN ULTIMATUM, BOMBING STOPS FOREVER IN 24hrs OR WE WILL DESTROY YOU….
BREAKING: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just made the following speech in front of the Knesset:
—-
To Ismail Haniya, and the leaders and operatives of Hamas:
We, the people of Israel, owe you a huge debt of gratitude. You have succeeded where we have failed. Because never before, in the history of the modern State of Israel, has the Jewish people been so united, like one person with one heart. Everyone in Israel, from Left to Right, secular and religious, in united in the knowledge that there is no accommodating an enemy that is sworn to the genocide of our people.
And now, as you continue to launch deadly missiles indiscriminately, intended to maim and murder as many civilians as possible, while you take cowardly refuge behind your own civilians – you continue to inspire us to hold strongly onto our unity. Whatever disputes we Jews may have with each other, we now know that we have one common goal: we will defeat you.
But we are offering you now one last chance. Within 24 hours, all rocket fire – and I mean all rocket fire – will cease. Completely. Forever.
I give you formal notice that our tanks are massed at the Gaza border, with artillery and air support at the ready. We have already dropped leaflets over the northern parts of the Gaza strip, warning civilians of our impending arrival, and that they should evacuate southward, forthwith. If you fail to meet our ultimatum, we are coming in, and, with God’s help, this time we will not leave. Every centimeter of land that we conquer will be annexed to Israel, so that there will *never* be another attack launched at our civilians from there.
Even so, we will continue to keep the door open to allow you to surrender gracefully. The moment you announce that you are laying down arms, we will halt our advance, and there we will draw our new borders. If you continue to attack our citizens, we will continue to roll southwards, driving you out of territory that you will never again contaminate with your evil presence.
It pains me deeply that your civilians will be made homeless. But we did not choose this war; you did. And if our choice is between allowing our citizens to be targeted mercilessly by your genocidal savagery, versus turning your civilians into refugees, I regret that we must choose the latter. If only you loved your people as much as you hate ours, this war would never have happened.
To the rest of the world: Israel has tired of your ceaseless chidings that we should “show restraint”. When you have your entire population under constant missile fire from an implacable enemy whose stated goal is the murder of every man, woman and child in your land, then you may come and talk to us about “restraint”. Until then, we respectfully suggest that you keep your double standards to yourselves. This time, Hamas has gone too far, and we will do whatever we have to in order to protect our population.
Hamas, once again, I thank you for bringing our people together with such clarity of mind and unity of purpose. The people of Israel do not fear the long road ahead. *Am Yisrael Chai.*
Is that real? Do you have a link?
I do not
Then where did it come from? Did you watch the speech on TV while taking it down with shorthand? Who did the transcription?
This is BOGUS.
That having been said, if only it were true. Time for a decision. No nation can allow indiscriminate bombardment of its population without a fight. No more appeasement.
Yes, if only it were true, and it is time.
This is not real. It’s someone’s fantasy of what he should say. We all wish some Israeli government would finally say and do something like this, but there is no prospect of it ever happening.
Even if Netanyahu wanted to make a speech like this, he would never dare. And if he dared he would not be allowed to act on it.
Time for Israel to retake Gaza, remove all Palestinians, relocate them to the Sinai/Jordan, and tell Palestinians left in Israel that their relocation to Jordan is dependent upon their actions!