{"id":38654,"date":"2023-04-11T17:01:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-11T14:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/?p=38654"},"modified":"2023-04-16T17:17:12","modified_gmt":"2023-04-16T14:17:12","slug":"after-32-years-of-legal-struggles-the-high-court-of-justice-has-decided-that-the-sumarin-family-will-not-be-evicted-from-their-home-in-silwan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/after-32-years-of-legal-struggles-the-high-court-of-justice-has-decided-that-the-sumarin-family-will-not-be-evicted-from-their-home-in-silwan","title":{"rendered":"After 32 years of legal struggles, the Supreme Court has decided that the Sumarin family will not be evicted from their home in Silwan"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 3, 2023, the Israel Supreme Court denied the Jewish National Fund\u2019s (JNF) eviction action (through the Himnuta Company) against the Sumarin family and thereby ended the possibility of evicting the Palestinian family from its home in Silwan. The family\u2019s legal struggle has been going-on for 32 years, with proceedings having been held at all of the judicial levels. Against the family were arrayed settlers, the JNF<\/a>, the Israel Attorney General<\/a> and a determined and strong governmental apparatus.<\/p>\n

A broad public campaign<\/a> on behalf of the Sumarin family and a request that the management of the JNF desist from efforts to evict the family from its home ended with the relief granted by the Supreme Court that saved the family from eviction.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s decision to recognize the Sumarin family\u2019s right to live in its home in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem is based on a decision of the Jerusalem Magistrate Court from 1999 which recognized the family\u2019s right to be in possession of the property.\u00a0 That decision clarified that it was permissible for the Sumarin family to live on the property.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Sumarin Family at the Supreme Court, 22.06.22<\/p><\/div>\n

The Supreme Court did not deal with the question of the ownership of the property.\u00a0 The Court accepted the family\u2019s assertion that the property was legally sold to them in 1983 in a transaction between family members and that since that time they have lived in the property.\u00a0 Therefore, the courts did not directly deal with the Absentees\u2019 Property Law<\/a>, which led to the legal struggle.\u00a0 Nonetheless, the Supreme Court Justice Daphne Barak-Erez related to the difficulty of declaring the Sumarin family\u2019s home as absentee\u2019s property\u00a0 and criticized the expansive and disproportional use made of the Absentees Property Law:<\/p>\n

In my opinion, there is a need to devote consideration and the deriving of lessons from the manner in which the government operated in this case.\u00a0 As I have already noted, the property, upon which the entire controversy is centered, was at one point declared absentee\u2019s property, with no basis in law for such a declaration, because there was doubt as to the fact that the owner was a resident of Jerusalem at the time of the first declaration regarding him.\u00a0 It was explained that this declaration was the result of a mistake.\u00a0 After the owner died, the property was again declared to be absentee\u2019s property, taking into consideration the place of residence of his children.\u00a0 This is not property that became absentees\u2019 property directly on the background of the events of the War of Independence.\u00a0 This is property that belonged to the Sumarin family and became absentee\u2019s property due to the vicissitudes of the family\u2019s life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It bears mentioning that the Sumarin home is strategically located in close proximity to Al Aqsa, and that the settler organization, the City of David Foundation (El\u2019ad) has established the City of David visitor\u2019s center adjoining the Sumarin property.\u00a0 Taking over the Sumarin property would have enabled El\u2019ad to complete a vast continuum of control at the entrance to Silwan, to carry out excavations, and in that manner to enlarge the visitor\u2019s center and to further reduce the Palestinian presence in this sensitive area.<\/p>\n

This is a victory of the weak against a strong and wealthy apparatus, that operates behind the scenes with support from governmental bodies, politicians, and strong settler organizations.\u00a0 They all operated in concert and did not balk at the use of any means to evict the Sumarin family from their only home.\u00a0 The Sumarin\u2019s victory is also a victory for the entire Silwan neighborhood, which is at the forefront of the struggle regarding the character and future of Jerusalem.\u00a0 The strategic location of Silwan, at the foot of the Temple Mount and adjoining the Old City, puts it at the heart of the political struggle over all of Jerusalem.\u00a0 For thirty years, the settlers and the State of Israel have been working to alter the Palestinian character of the city and to present the neighborhood as an integral part of Israeli Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Brief Review of the Legal Struggle<\/u><\/p>\n

The action against the Sumarin family was first filed by the JNF in 1991 through its subsidiary company Himnuta.\u00a0 After it lost and appealed and again lost, Himnuta re-filed the action.\u00a0 This time it prevailed in both the Magistrate Court and the District Court because the Sumarin family\u00a0 had chosen not to appear in court until the matter was brought before the Supreme Court.\u00a0 The Supreme Court decision last week puts an end to the 32-year struggle of the Sumarin family to prevent being evicted.<\/p>\n

The Sumarin family was the victim of a corrupt method<\/a> developed by entities within the Likud party in the 1980\u2019s, together with settlers\u2019 associations and the JNF, according to which the settlers and the JNF initiated the declaration of properties in Silwan as properties of absentees and thereafter the properties were sold by the State to the JNF, which in turn transferred them to settlers.\u00a0 The method was exposed and stopped by the Rabin administration which established a commission of inquiry regarding the matter (the Klugmann Commission<\/a>) but the properties themselves that had already been transferred in this manner were never returned to the Palestinians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is the way the method was used in the case of the Sumarin family:\u00a0 In 1987, the Custodian of Absentees\u2019 Properties declared the Sumarin family home as absentee\u2019s property, without the family\u2019s knowledge.\u00a0 The Custodian relied upon an affidavit filed with him at the initiative of the JNF and the settlers, according to which the owner of the property, Haj Moussa Sumarin, the uncle of the Sumarin family living in the home, was absent.\u00a0 It transpired that Haj Moussa Sumarin was not absent but rather had lived in Silwan until his death in 1983 (even the most basic search of the residents\u2019 registry was not made), but this did not keep the Custodian for Absentees\u2019 Properties from declaring the property to be absentee\u2019s property because Haj Moussa\u2019s children were absent.\u00a0 This declaration was also made without making any inquiries and it was not ascertained whether the children were indeed considered to be absentees and if they were indeed Haj Moussa\u2019s sole heirs.\u00a0 The members of the Sumarin family living in the house were not contacted.\u00a0 In this manner, the property was declared to be absentee\u2019s property and afterwards it was transferred from the Custodian to the Development Authority and then to the JNF.\u00a0 The JNF, for its part, signed a secret agreement with the El\u2019ad Foundation, according to which the foundation would take care of legal representation in the eviction action and, in return, would receive possession of the property.<\/p>\n

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On April 3, 2023, the Israel Supreme Court denied the Jewish National Fund\u2019s (JNF) eviction action (through the Himnuta Company) against the Sumarin family and thereby ended the possibility of evicting the Palestinian family from its home in Silwan. The family\u2019s legal struggle has been going-on for 32 years, with proceedings having been held at… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":37995,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2397,16],"tags":[2765,46,2319,1318,2881,1322,3211,3519],"class_list":["post-38654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-east-jerusalem","category-settlement-watch","tag-absentees","tag-east-jerusalem","tag-elad","tag-high-court-en","tag-jnf","tag-silwan","tag-sumarin","tag-supreme-court"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38654"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38658,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654\/revisions\/38658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacenow.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}