![]() There is also the matter of the settler groups’ ownership documents, which Sheikh Jarrah families argue are fabricated, and which the court accepts without authentication while refusing to give Palestinians’ ownership documents any weight, whether they were issued by the UN, Ottoman records, or the Jordanian government. One law allows Jewish groups to take over properties that were owned by Jews before 1948 Palestinians expelled during the Nakba have no such recourse. ![]() But settler groups have been targeting the neighborhood since the 1970s, working hand in glove with a ludicrous Israeli court system rigged in their favor, in both official and unofficial ways. The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem made American headlines in 2021 due in large part to the social media skills of the charismatic el-Kurd siblings, Mohammed and Muna, whose family home was being squatted in by a Long Island-born settler named Yaakov Fauci (“If I don’t steal it, someone else will,” he said in one filmed confrontation that went viral). The Ghawi home occupied by settlers in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Palestine, May 2023 What else makes life worth living, according to Darwish? The conqueror’s fear of memory. The land remains, its terraced hills trashed with plastic bottles and softened with wild za’atar, its stone walls, its swaggering hustlers, its wry old ladies exhausted and indomitable, their glittering laughter, their generosity and contempt. “We have on this land all of that which makes life worth living,” wrote Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s national poet. On Monday, the Israeli Defense Forces launched a full scale invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank with airstrikes, drones, and armored bulldozers, killing at least twelve Palestinians, injuring a hundreds, and forcing three thousand people from their homes. The grind of petty state aggression-of permit denials, intrusive searches, and arbitrary rules-still provides the backdrop for outbreaks of spectacular violence by Jewish settler organizations and the military, which often work in concert. The West Bank Wall, that monument to cowardice erected after the second intifada, still defaces the land. Yet in some ways the oppression is just more obvious now. The contradictions that plague any ethnonationalist project had all come to a bloody head with the reelection of Netanyahu last fall and his appointment of openly fascist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have been encouraging settler rampages across the West Bank. It had been eight years since my last trip to Palestine, and on the face of it, everything had gotten worse. I spent the end of May and the beginning of June in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, first as a guest of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and then documenting daily life in my sketchbook.
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