Land Research Center

Eight members of a Palestinian family spanning three generations wait to be evicted from their East Jerusalem home after it battled over with Israeli settlement organization and colonists for too long.

Noteworthy, an 83-year-old member of the family uses a wheelchair.

The Shamasneh family had lived in the home for more than half a century. Reportedly, perpetrators claim that the  property was allegedly owned by Jews before the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the western side of the city in 1948.

Jewish colonists have taken over many residences, as they have occupied several others in the city’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim properties they were forced to abandon after the 1948 war. The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the rest of East Jerusalem were under Jordanian control after the 1948 war, until Israel occupied it in 1967.

By contrast, Israel prohibits Palestinian refugees from returning to the hundreds of villages and cities from which they were expelled before, during and after the declaration of the state in 1948. Many Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed by the Israeli army shortly thereafter.

West Jerusalem contains thousands of properties taken from ethnically cleansed Palestinian families, to which Israel grants the rightful owners no possibility of return.

Court battle

The Shamasneh family had rented the home from the Jordanian government until 1967, and then from the Israeli government, which refused to renew their lease in 2009, stating that Jewish heirs had made a claim to the property.

Legal proceedings to evict the family began after a right-wing settler group sought out an individual who they say is the heir to the original owners of the property.

Several other Palestinian families in the neighborhood are also waging court battles against eviction as colonists claim ownership of their homes.

The Shamasneh family says it has paid 250 shekels ($70) a month to Israel's general custodian since 1967, an arrangement used by Israeli colonists as proof that the family recognized their status as tenants.

In 2009, the alleged original Jewish owners along with the general custodian launched a legal process to force the family out, but the claimants later sold their rights to a US-registered company, which later turned out to be owned by Arye King. Such companies act as middle men and are often used to make it unclear exactly who is behind the push to evict Palestinians, a highly-charged political act.

Arye King, director at the Israel Land Fund and a de facto spokesman for much Jewish settlement growth in Jerusalem, denied any legal misconduct.

In 2013, Israel's high court rejected an appeal by the Palestinian family in favour of the Jewish claimants, concluding the family were not protected tenants.

It should be noted the house is part of a "larger process the government is undertaking of establishing colonies in Sheikh Jarrah

This case study is part of Kan'aan Project