The pain of Sheikh Jarrah is also our pain

LET ALL OUR CHILDREN LIVE!

The pain of Sheikh Jarrah is also our pain

We are all, writes MICHAEL WEEDER, dean of St. George's cathedral in Cape Town, the community of the Jerusalem suburb of Sheikh Jarrah; we who are from the South End and the East Bank, from Green Point and Sophiatown, Albertsville, Maluleke, Simonstown, and Cato Manor. From District Six, Fietas, Goodwood, Parow, Paarl, Clairwood, Umkhumbane, Redhill …

THIS past week the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine, has been marked by the violent onslaught of the powerful and brutally efficient Israeli Defense Force. The conflict has been marked by such immense cruelty that it has been impossible to ignore. We stand accused by our silence about this perpetual open wound of history: The state of Israel’s brutal adaptation of apartheid’s ethos of greed clothed in the language of religion. 

The commonwealth of South African communities know more than most about how lives can forever be shrouded by the memory of having been dispossessed of land and of the homes built on it. 

Oh, the casual arrogance of the Jewish settler’s response to a Palestinian woman’s challenge when he attempts to claim her property: “If I don’t, somebody else will …” So secure was this delinquent in his entrenched right as a citizen of Israel that the courts would decide in favour of him and the marauding others like him, confirming their unjust legal entitlement to dispossess others of land and home. ..

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