Israeli Court Orders Muslim Cemetery Destroyed to Build Homeless Shelter
July 8, 2020 11:04 AM Celine Hagbard– IMEMC News
▻https://imemc.org/article/israeli-court-orders-muslim-cemetery-destroyed-to-build-homeless-shelter
In Tel Aviv on Tuesday, an Israeli court rejected an appeal by the Islamic Council of Jaffa to preserve a 200-year old Muslim cemetery, ruling instead that the municipality of Tel Aviv can move forward with plans to build a homeless shelter on the site.
The ruling followed weeks of protests, in which Israeli police beat Palestinian citizens who challenged the plan to demolish the cemetery. They said it was part of the Israeli government’s policy to erase Palestinian heritage, just as the Israeli government had erased and demolished so many Palestinian towns, villages and historic sites over the past 72 years that Israel has existed.
In addition to ruling that the cemetery could be destroyed, Judge Limor Bibi ordered the Jaffa Islamic Council to pay $2,200 in legal fees.
The case evoked memories of a similar fight that took place in Jerusalem several years ago, in which Palestinians resisted the Israeli plan to demolish a Muslim cemetery in order to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance’. They lost that fight, and the cemetery was destroyed in order to construct the Museum.
In the current case, the Islamic Council had managed to get an Israeli court to temporarily halt construction on the site when they proved that the Tel Aviv municipality had no legal permit to destroy the 200-year old Al-Isaaf cemetery. The original hearing was supposed to be July 22nd. But lawyers for the city of Tel Aviv argued that the city’s finances were being negatively impacted, and the court agreed to move the hearing up to July 7th.