28 extended refugee families of displaced Palestinians were rehoused in Sheikh Jarrar in East Jerusalem in 1956. They are now being evicted in a process which a visiting delegation of lawyers, in a measured report, finds illegal and discriminatory, ‘are the consequence of inbuilt and structural discrimination against the Palestinian population’.

In two articles from Mondoweiss, Paul Mutter derides and deplores Netanyahu’s ability to manipulate US money and protesters’ gullibility with house-building projects which amount to a shift from occupation to annexation of the West Bank

Arab protests at being de-housed are dismissed as subverting the Jewish character of the state says Seraj Assi, while the Israeli housing protesters strain to prevent their cause being widened to include any factor which questions the character of their state. 2nd post here from blogger Fatma Emam who is saddened by the hostile Arab reaction to the Israeli protesters

After 2 news items charting the growth of the current protest movement in Israel, Prof Michal Shamir argues that this is a new politics which has escaped the ‘black hole’ of the hawk/dove division on Palestine. Commentator Carlo Strenger attacks a croney system in which there is no discernible connection between what politicians say and what they do – except there are no ethics in either.

Arabs in Israel have enjoyed more civic rights than elsewhere in the region, though their socio-economic status has always been inferior. But now they fear new laws and state action are limiting the rights they have enjoyed

Roi Maor writes: “The Knesset passed a segregation bill today. Palestinian Israelis are not allowed to live in Jewish localities built on land confiscated from them.” It is apartheid in all but name, but building on a racial segregation that has long existed in Israel’s unequal and unholy allocation of land to it citizens.
Update: Ben White’s Open Democracy article Land, citizenship and exclusion in Israel, has been added to this post

In December 2010, a delegation of UK lawyers visited occupied East Jerusalem to report on violations of housing rights occurring under the Israeli authorities. Forced evictions and house demolitions result in housing instability and deteriorating living conditions for Palestinian families, whilst restrictive planning policies limit the possibilities to recover, leading to detrimental economic and psychological effects. This seminar discusses the findings of the report and how these violations can be addressed in the context of international law.
Of interest to all activists, not just lawyers! All welcome.

Richard Silverstein writes about Moshe Ben Zikri, recently elected “community adminstrator” for the neighborhood Pisgat Ze’ev (“It would be as if David Duke actually won that election when he ran for governor of Louisiana”). Zikri believes “there is an Arab ‘fire’ (yes, it appears the Carmel fire has become the reference du jour in the Israeli press) consuming Pisgat Ze’ev. His goal? To keep the neighborhood Jewish. That means, Arabs raus…”

The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling (WCLAC) has issued a report highlighting the gender-specific impact that Israeli policies in East Jerusalem have on the lives of Palestinian women. WCLAC calls upon Israel to end forced evictions and home demolitions and makes recommendations to the international community and other actors to alleviate the situation of affected Palestinians.

A Haaretz investigation shows the state used a controversial law to transfer East Jerusalem assets to the rightist organizations Elad and Ateret Cohanim without a tender, and at very low prices. Nir Hasson reports…

A Supreme Court ruling Sunday may allow settler groups to move into dozens more homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
We trust that on the same basis Palestinians will soon find their former homes in Israel restored to them…

The Guardian has published an unusually firm editorial following the cloning of twelve UK passports and Israel’s intransigence on house construction in Jerusalem[...]

A week after the arrest of high profile non violent protesters in the weekly Sheikh Jarrah protest, the remnants of the Israeli left joined the Friday afternoon display of direct action. Amongst the protesters on Friday were leftist leaders such as Hadash chairman MK Mohammed Barakeh, former Meretz chairman Yossi Sarid and former MK Avraham Burg. The demonstration was again attacked by the police and 22 arrested…
Gush Shalom’s report on the demo is also included here.

Daphna Golan writes: “We sang to a samba beat; the drums set the beat and made us merry. And then, dozens of police arrived in huge vehicles, along with others riding horses, and forcibly dragged away my son and his drummer friends. The police did not explain; they refused to identify themselves; they gave us no reason for the arrest. Two hours later, at Sheikh Jarrah, police attacked the clowns and the drummers and arrested 20 of the Israelis who sat down and said “no more” to racism in Jerusalem…”
And David Shulman writes about the Christmas Day protest at Sheikh Jarrar: “This time I was sure they’d arrest me—I’d somehow eluded them, without trying to do so, the last three times I was here for the Friday demonstration—but once again it didn’t happen[...]

Many of you have asked me, in response to my last two reports, if there is anything you can do in a practical way. I’m attaching a letter which offers some suggestions that are not time-consuming and that may have an impact on an increasingly desperate situation…

David Shulman writes: “As always in violence, it’s impossible to put together a coherent story. You lose track of what happened first, what came next, who got hurt when; the moments stretch out endlessly, run together, overlap, images are superimposed or interwoven; the physical pain gets buried somewhere safe, more or less, inside the surreal limbo of your memory, which seems oddly to correspond to the external limbo of the action as you saw it unfold. So this time I won’t try to tell the story. Instead, a few vignettes…”

David Shulman writes about the Sheikh Jarrar evictions in a text circulated by email on 4 December: “Let me say at once: the legal situation in Sheikh Jarrah is complicated, but it’s also largely irrelevant. The settlers, through what is called the Sephardic Community Committee, have produced documents to support their claim that these plots of land belonged to Jews during the Ottoman period, over a century ago. Ergo, they must be restored to Jewish hands (like all the rest of Palestine? And what about the hundreds of Palestinian houses in West Jerusalem now inhabited by Jews? No Israeli court is about to return them to their original owners.).”

In the occupied West Bank, a bedouin community whose school is made out of car tyres and mud faces the same problem as a developer planning a whole new Palestinian town: building controls imposed by Israel.
The Jahalin bedouin are Area C residents who gave up seeking permission to build long ago but want their children to read. They erected the makeshift school with the help of an Italian NGO this year, their community representative said… “We never apply for any permissions because we know in advance none are given.”[...]

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit human rights organisation based in the Netherlands. It has contributed to many campaigns in Palestine and has a webpage devoted to the Occupied Palestinian Territory at http://www.cohre.org/opt
It is currently coordinating the EWASH (Emergency, Water and Sanitation Hygiene) Advocacy Task Force, representing around 30 organisations working on water and sanitation in the OPT [...]