Volunteers urgently needed to stay with Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarakh.

We have just gotten an urgent call from Rabbis for Human Rights: Two more Palestinian families at the Sheikh Jarakh Neighborhood in East Jerusalem are threatened with expulsion. According to the one-week eviction orders handed to the Ghawi and Hannun families, the police would be empowered to come and evict them at any moment of the day or night.

The Al-Kurd Family, evicted in Sheik Jarakh some months ago, has been living since in a tent erected in an empty lot - and even there is constantly harassed by the police, which again and again comes to demolish the tent.

Volunteers are urgently needed, to stay in the threatened homes from 22:00 on Saturday night until the danger has passed. Those willing to come, please call the Rabbis for Human Rights office 02-6482757 or Rabbi Arik Ascherman 050-5607034. .

Background: The Sheikh Jarakh expulsion campaign is carried out at the instigation of extreme-right settler associations which seek to take over the Palestinian homes and turn them into settlement enclaves. The settlers base their claim upon asserting that the area where the Palestinian families' homes are located was Jewish-owned at the end of the 19th Century. However, a pending Supreme Court appeal is challenging the validity of the Turkish document – which, when translated, turned to have been merely a temporary rental agreement from more than a hundred years ago, rather than a deed of ownership. Beyond the specific issue of this document, there is the essential question of a glaring double standard at the heart of Israel' legal system: According to the Absentee Land Law of 1952, Palestinian ownership deeds from before 1948 were rendered null and void in Israeli law. At the same time, Jewish title deed from the same time and even much earlier are perfectly legal and can be used for the dispossession of Palestinians. This discrimination is intolerable and clearly must be wiped out of Israeli law and practice.