Why the world is gripped by Sheikh Jarrah, while Israelis aren’t really interested

Read More

Israel’s Supreme Court is routinely portrayed by right wingers as a bunch of out-of-touch, post-Zionist leftists. But at least this week, in its latest hearing on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, the justices proved themselves to be fully in sync with the national mood.

“Let’s bring this down from the level of principle to a pragmatic level,” suggested presiding Justice Isaac Amit, as he and his two colleagues on the bench went way beyond the court’s traditional remit by trying to impose an agreed outcome on the two sides. The justices were prepared to do almost anything – including drafting a compromise themselves.

One thing they refused to do during Monday’s long hearing was allow the sides to discuss the proposal outside of the courtroom. “We know what happens when you go out for five minutes,” Amit said. “The media jumps all over you and you get all kinds of advice. Decide. Someone needs to, and if there has to be consultation it will take place inside, behind closed doors.”

Amit joked: “You’re under arrest until the end of proceedings.”

The justices knew exactly what they were dealing with. The court hearing was just a sideshow for a much larger media circus outside. An international media circus, because global attention on the Sheikh Jarrah case has been in sharp contrast to that within Israel, where most of the local media has given the case scant coverage.

Israelis aren’t really interested in the potential eviction of 13 Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood. Not that they’re necessarily on the side of the settler organizations that are trying to evict them. It just doesn’t feature.

Certainly not on a sweltering August day when Israelis finally got a new state budget (for the first time in over three years) which may impact on their finances, with COVID-19 making a comeback and some rare sporting satisfaction in the Tokyo Olympics. A squabble over a few houses in East Jerusalem really seems so inconsequential – as long as it’s not used by Hamas again as a pretext for launching rockets at Israeli cities.

In Sheikh Jarrah, Israel’s Supreme Court seeks to avoid ruling on who’s right

Sheikh Jarrah eviction case: Court offers Palestinians ‘protected residents’ status

Israel’s standing in America is now far weaker than it seems

The court feels the same way. Just like Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which said in May that Sheikh Jarrah was merely a “real-estate dispute.” The justices were trying the “pragmatic” approach, because that’s how you solve real-estate disputes. But they knew only too well that outside their courtroom, on social media and the international news networks, it was being treated as anything but.

You can learn a lot about the current status of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and especially about the perceptions of it, from the Sheikh Jarrah case. After years during which the conflict received major attention only when there was a death toll in the double- or triple digits, the eviction of a handful of families has created headlines and a volume of coverage that harks back to the old days, before the Arab Spring and the civil wars of the previous decade, when the Palestinian struggle was still seen as a central issue in the Middle East by the mainstream Western media.

It’s instructive that what has redirected the media’s focus isn’t the deaths of Palestinian children or the fate of larger and much more vulnerable Palestinian communities deep in the West Bank, but Sheikh Jarrah.

Pro-Palestinian protesters outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem yesterday.RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS

Part of that selective attention can be explained by the young and media-savvy activists residing in Sheikh Jarrah, who on Instagram and other platforms have created a global campaign that translates easily into English. But it’s not just that.

Sheikh Jarrah is the easily accessible story of the conflict. Both in the geographical sense – it’s literally a five-minute drive from central Jerusalem and around the corner from the American Colony Hotel – and in a presentational sense. Nowhere else can the century-old conflict be so easily boiled down into a black-and-white parable. It practically writes itself in a few short sentences: The Palestinian refugees who lost their pre-1948 homes in Mandatory Palestine and are prevented by Israeli law from reclaiming their lost property, are now about to lose the homes they’ve known for the past 70 years because, unlike them, Israeli Jews are allowed to reclaim property. Neat and simple. And, essentially, true.

What makes it even more convenient for international consumption is that it’s happening in a place everyone has heard of, Jerusalem, and not some unpronounceable village like Khan al-Ahmar. Furthermore, since in Jerusalem there is only one jurisdiction, Israel, there’s no ambiguity about the Palestinians being victims. If the story was happening in the West Bank, where you also have to contend with the corrupt Palestinian Authority, or in Gaza, where militant, Islamist Hamas holds sway, you’ve got “bad Palestinians” in the story as well.

Sheikh Jarrah is the perfect story because the injustice is so clear and easily explained, and there are no inconvenient facts to muddy the waters. You don’t even have to bother your audience by getting bogged down in wider diplomatic questions like the future of the two-state solution. This isn’t about abstract, utopian concepts but real things – picturesque houses where wizened patriarchs and their cool grandkids live under threat of fat, American-accented usurpers and the brutal police.

It sounds like a cliche, because in many ways it is. The perfect cliche is one that also happens to be the truth and is easily reached. And it fits in so well with a media Zeitgeist which is trying to apply the fault lines of the current toxic culture wars of the United States to other countries, no matter the difference in their circumstances and histories. Sheikh Jarrah and its avatars are simply made for the stark certainties of racial justice that can be abbreviated into a hashtag acronym.

Three months ago, 256 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, but Sheikh Jarrah – where no one has died – has remained in the news much longer. Earlier this year, two major human rights organizations published reports explaining why Israel is an apartheid state, but they failed to achieve anything close to the impact like the story of the families of Sheikh Jarrah.

Supporters of the Palestinian families fighting eviction from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah during the hearing in the Supreme Court yesterday.RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS

Of course, this is what the media is about: the stories of individuals always resonate more than a faceless multitude. To paraphrase the quote widely attributed to Stalin: One Palestinian on Instagram goes viral. A million Palestinians remain a statistic in a Human Rights Watch report few will ever read.

Is it a PR disaster and hasbara nightmare for Israel? For now, perhaps. But the thing about real-estate disputes – even those that are coupled with historic conflicts and injustices, and compelling media narratives – is that ultimately people need somewhere to live when they’re not making online videos, and that’s where judges with pragmatic compromises come in.

As Haaretz’s Nir Hasson, one of the tiny handful of Israeli journalists covering the case seriously, noted this week, Sheikh Jarrah is nearing the point where the Palestinian families will be faced with their own dilemma: Whether to accept the compromise that will grant them the status of protected tenants while acknowledging the settlers’ claim to the property – in principle, allowing them and future generations of their families to continue living there. Or will they continue to fight for their principles, leading to likely eviction?

Compromises make for meager headlines, if any, and certainly don’t work as a hashtag.