I saw how the US backed Jerusalem’s ethnic cleansing – and Blair looked on

In a small house in the hills of East Jerusalem, I witnessed a microcosm of the slow-burn murder of a people. No American who reads the mainstream newspapers or watches the corporate TV news would have had any idea this was happening. But seeing it upfront there was no way to dispute the huge crime that was being perpetrated with American taxpayers’ dollars and diplomatic support.

In May 2009, I spent a week sleeping on the floor in the home of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children, all Palestinian. I was there with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – a brave collection of international activists who attempt to help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. East Jerusalem was, by international law and basic morality, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.

After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel illegally occupied East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law, and has never left. In fact, by 2009, Israel was working to take it all. At the time of writing, in August 2014, the Israelis have killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority civilians. There is talk in the mainstream Israeli media about depopulating Gaza and turning it into an Israeli tourist attraction.

But during the time I was there the most pressing of the many issues were the attempts by an Israeli settler company to slowly cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, which sits in a beautiful valley looking out toward Bethlehem.

Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document what everyone expected would be an imminent eviction. A few months later, at 5.30am, the Israeli border police did come and forcibly evict the Hanouns (so forcibly that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets.

The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross. It was the culmination of a decade-long program of intimidation and harassment of the Sheikh Jarrah community that had seen lives destroyed to appease the most rancid kind of religious zealotry.

Sheikh Jarrah is situated in a valley down from the American Colony Hotel where Tony Blair, former British prime minister and possibly the most willing servant of the American racket in the world, was staying in a luxury suite in May 2009, when he graced Jerusalem with his presence as the racket’s “Peace Envoy”.

When you looked out of the Hanouns’ window, Blair’s hotel was 30 meters away; Blair, I had no doubt, could see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. Before I contacted his spokesperson, Blair had nothing to say about the evictions, and he said nothing publicly in the aftermath.

That was one side of the valley. On the other, the British consulate peered down from its high-security peak. The British consulate had been only slightly better, calling the latest eviction “appalling”, but had done nothing tangible to halt this obscenity. The US silence was even louder.

The Hanoun family, like so many Palestinians, had been the victims of terror for decades as they fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun, who continued to lead the resistance, spoke to me with eloquence and calm as he chain-smoked his way through the evenings and recounted what had befallen his family.

Maher’s father was a refugee from the Nakba, or “the Catastrophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948 when gangs of Jewish paramilitaries expelled 800,000 Palestinians violently from their homes. Maher’s father was forced out of Nablus; his grandfather was forced out of Haifa at the same time.

The Jordanian government gave them the houses in East Jerusalem in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so had spent his whole life, and brought up all his children, in his home. The Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, used a forged century-old Ottoman-era contract to claim ownership. Like all over East Jerusalem, the Israelis also tried to bribe Maher with an open check, if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he told me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.” In the end, they succeeded.

The Israelis’ tactics were what Maher calls “slow torture”, and included arrests, bribery and violence. In 1998, after Maher refused to start paying rent to settlers, soldiers came to his house while his mother was very ill with leukaemia and took all their furniture, including the bed. Maher had pleaded with them to leave it so his mother could die peacefully.

In 2002, the Israelis succeeded and eventually kicked the Hanouns out for four years, before they returned in 2006; in 2002 his two girls were nine and 13 years old.

Across the way, and in the sightline of Blair and the British consulate, there was a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman was living after settlers took over her house. Initially, they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when the Israelis violently repossessed their house with the help of over 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory).

After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another heart attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused a bribe of an open check – in the millions of dollars – from the Israelis to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she told me from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.” I never could find out what happened to this woman in the violent eviction by Israeli forces, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

I walked from Sheikh Jarrah to the British consulate (it took about five minutes) and asked Karen McLuskie, the then spokesperson, what the British line was on the ethnic cleansing of what is meant to be the future capital of Palestine.

“The British position is that Jerusalem has to be the shared capital of two states,” she told me. “I think what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah is not unique, sadly. There are a number of sites around Jerusalem where these kinds of actions are taking place – demolitions, evictions and settlement encouragement.”

McLuskie specifically declined to comment on what the British government is actually doing to stop this illegal and inhuman destruction of Sheikh Jarrah. She did concede, however, that: “The annexation of Jerusalem simply makes it harder to reach a peace deal, it simply cuts off the options.”

After I contacted Blair’s spokesperson I was told that “Blair has raised the issue with the Israeli government” and that “it remains an issue of concern”. I asked if Blair would make the three-minute walk down to the Hanouns to talk to them about their predicament, to which the spokesperson assured me: “Staff from his office have previously visited families who have been evicted.” Notice the past tense. Maybe when the Hanouns had actually been evicted, Blair would send an emissary to their tent. The US embassy in Jerusalem refused to give an interview.

When you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area, there are considerable plots of land without homes. If Israel wanted to (illegally) build new settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could, there is space.

The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is a process of ethnic cleansing, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem. As Maher asked, “Why can’t they build a settlement on any other bit of land?”

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration, which was in power at the time, was that they were much more honest about their colonization program than their “centrist” predecessors.

The Netanyahu administration was now willing to get rid of some “outposts” in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the same policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu was just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state.

“I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” agreed Maher.

*This is an excerpt from the new edition of Matt Kennard’s book, The Racket