A large sign over an alleyway in the conservative Jewish neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in inner Jerusalem beseeches entrants to the area, in bold Hebrew and English, to refrain from immodest attire or other practices that might offend residents’ Orthodox precepts. Two large Palestinian flags have been painted on the stone walls on either side of the notice. The images are a silent but unignorable reminder of the existence of an indigenous population whom many of Mea Shearim’s locals and other citizens of Israel will go their whole lives without encountering.
Less than two kilometres away, in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, an elderly Palestinian woman has just been issued with an official Israeli order to demolish the home she was born into in 1952 in order to make way for Jewish settlers. Though her family has lived in the area since before Israel itself was founded, their 25-year battle with the authorities has been quashed by a court ruling, on the pretext that the site was Jewish property prior to 1948.1 ‘We will not leave, no matter what happens,’ she insists, ‘this home is our whole life, with all our memories.’ Nonetheless, her house is likely to join the some 1,000 structures destroyed each year in East Jerusalem and the West Bank for these purposes – part of a population transfer by the Israeli state that UN special rapporteurs recently branded an illegal and ‘deliberate intention to colonize the territory it occupies.’2, 3
