Beleaguered Jerusalem neighborhood refuses to be cowed
Issawiyeh checkpoint
Jaclynn Ashly reports in The Electronic Intifada:
It’s constant danger.
Amin Barakat doesn’t mince his words. The 50-year-old resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiyeh said life in the area was not safe.
Not because of crime. Because of the police.
“We feel constantly in danger. The Israeli police are everywhere. We’re not safe on the streets, in our schools, or even in our homes,” Barakat told The Electronic Intifada.
“I am too afraid to even send my sons to buy something from the store or allow them to go outside alone. I’m scared they will be arrested.”
Issawiyeh was occupied by Israel in 1967. After the war, Israel unilaterally annexed the entire area of Jerusalem, including Issawiyeh, and as a result, the neighborhood ostensibly comes under Israeli civilian police jurisdiction.
Over the last several months, the area has faced a dramatic uptick in police activity that has thrown the neighborhood into chaos.
Blinking blue and red lights from Israeli police vehicles have become an everyday fixture on Issawiyeh’s streets, while police drones fly above – surveilling each move of the neighborhood’s residents.
Police searchlights pierce residents’ homes as Israeli officers conduct raids in the dead of night, breaking into homes and arresting residents. Police have said at various times that the police activity was due to everything from cracking down on “terror cells” to stone-throwers, but residents and rights groups vigorously dispute this and say the police activity is “unjustified.”
Police checkpoints and roadblocks, arbitrary arrests and routine harassment of Issawiyeh’s residents have brought tensions to a tipping point. Violent confrontations between angry residents, sometimes throwing stones, and security forces, including anti-riot and paramilitary border police units firing teargas and rubber bullets, have left hundreds of residents injured.
In July, about a month after the start of the police operations, Muhammad Obeid, 19, was shot and killed in Issawiyeh by the Israeli police during a protest against the police brutality, sparking three consecutive days of intense confrontations between police and Issawiyeh’s residents.
Residents were forced to close their businesses, they said, and the Issawiyeh parents’ committee, which normally concerns itself with more mundane pedagogical matters in the local area, called a neighborhood-wide school strike.
Parents were too scared to send their children outside the home amid what rights groups have called an “unprecedented” level of police activity in the area.
Arbitrary arrests and harassment
“The situation is unbearable,” Muhammad Abu Hummus, a local community leader, told The Electronic Intifada in a recent interview. “The police are here 24 hours a day. Parents are scared to send their children to school.”
“There is no justification for any of this. The police want to harass us for no reason,” he added.