So how did you sleep, cursed settlers, in the house in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter that you coveted and robbed from a sickly, elderly couple who had been thrown out of it? What was your first night among the ancient walls like?
What is it like to enter a home safeguarding 70 years of a family’s memories, memories not your own? What is it like to enter, just like in 1948, into the homes of the evicted, with the pots still simmering on the burners and the clothes in the closets? How does it feel to invade someone else’s home? And what is it like to see policemen dragging an old man out of his home to clear out the plundered property for you?
Did you see the graffiti on the walls, “We’ll be back” and “Palestine will be free?” I see you’ve already hung the Israeli flag in the window, like a thief hastily switching the license plates of the car he stole to conceal evidence. Now the house is Jewish forever and ever. Now it’s yours, thanks to the renowned Israeli justice system, which is corrupt, rotten and racist when it comes to your nation’s rights. How the judges in Jerusalem settle the unsolvable contradiction between the fate of Jewish property from before 1948 and the fate of Palestinian property? Is there another way to describe the verdict except as a proper apartheid response?
How did you sleep at night, cursed settlers? And how will you sleep in the nights to come? Will you think, if only for a moment, about the fate of Mustafa Sub Laban, a polite Palestinian of 74, who served in the Israel Police and now, in his old age, is homeless, crowding into his son’s home in Shoafat? And the fate of his impressive wife, Nora Gheith Sub Laban, who was born in this house 68 years ago and was hospitalized on Tuesday? Did you bother to look them in the eye? Does their image rise in front of you? One can only wish that the image of them being thrown out of their home, will haunt you in your nightmares until the end of your days. May their image rise before you every night as you put your children to bed.
But that’s not going to happen. They’re not human beings to you, they’re less than human – they’re not Jews. And this disgrace was authorized by the justice system.
Have you heard of the poor man’s sheep proverb? Perhaps you’ll open the Book of Samuel, chapter 12, and read? You’re religious Jews, aren’t you? The picture of one of you, a settler wheeler-dealer in a huge kippa and a beard, carrying loudspeakers to the house, an evil smile of triumph smeared over his face, a police officer by his side, is like a thousand accusing words. Ahmad Sub Laban, the son of the evicted couple, told me yesterday that the bearded man used to harass the family with deafening Jewish music over that large loudspeaker he was carrying.
The Israeli nation won again on Tuesday, this time an especially glorious victory, a victory over an old couple. The Sharabi, Wormser and Friedman families, who already live in the ancient building in the heart of the Muslim Quarter, will be joined by another family renting the property from the Kollel Galicia trust. If they enter the apartment today, they could still eat the rice and chicken casserole the couple’s daughter prepared for her parents and is in the fridge, on the top shelf. It had been cooked in the middle of the week, and can still be eaten. All the family’s possessions are still in the apartment, except for the family picture albums she took with her.
Meanwhile, the lock on the main entrance has been changed and the family no longer has access to what has been its home, where the couple lived as protected tenants. Again it became apparent the Palestinians have no protection, not even as tenants.
“This house will remain a prison until we return,” Nora told me sadly about a month ago, in her home. On Tuesday, the day the Israeli protest scored another impressive achievement, when hoarse voices cried “democracy” and “shame” from the ends of the country, this disgrace took place in Jerusalem. Nora and Mustafa don’t live there anymore. The Muslim Quarter will be Jewish, and Israel will be an apartheid state – officially as well.