When two people were injured and six arrested during clashes in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik on February 13, international news agencies such as The Associated Press (AP) quickly reported on the story. This latest development came after Israeli police carried out a court-ordered eviction of a family’s home in the neighborhood last month to pave the way for its subsequent demolition.
Major international news outlets have become somewhat fixated on Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik, covering the minutiae of every new development coming out of the community after tensions stemming from a property dispute in the neighborhood were cited as a catalyst for the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas (see here, here and here, for example).
Yet, such reporting has often glossed over several salient facts.
An HonestReporting feature published in January revealed that Reuters, AFP, and AP – wire services whose stories reach more than a billion people every day – had failed to include crucial information pertaining to Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik. Specifically, the demolished structures were used to run a business that had been illegally built on the land, and the demolition order had been given after years of negotiations between authorities and the family. In addition, these outlets neglected to mention that under a years-old plan, the site had been earmarked for the construction of a special-needs school for Arab residents.
The crucial point that had been absent in reports is that Israeli courts had previously ruled that the home, business, as well as two storage units, had been built illegally on publicly owned land.
As a result of this selective reporting, the story of Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik has been repeatedly framed as that of helpless Palestinians being victimized by Israeli authorities engaged in a campaign todrive people out of their homes.
This grossly oversimplified depiction of events taking place in eastern Jerusalem pervades despite these important aspects of the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik story being regularly emphasized in the local press (see here, here, and here). Furthermore, significant portions of the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood’s history have been essentially struck from the mainstream media’s narrative.
Sheikh Jarrah and the Hadassah Medical Convoy Massacre
Violence broke out in Israel following the passage in 1947 of UN General Assembly Resolution 181. Known as the partition plan, the resolution called for the breakup of British Mandatory Palestine into three territories: an internationally-controlled area for Jerusalem and its holy sites, a territory for a future Palestinian state, and another for a future Jewish state. Each territory contained a mix of Arab and Jewish communities and were shaped into lobes connected by narrow necks.
Despite drawbacks like the separation of the holy city of Jerusalem from both communities, the mixed demographics, and the unconventional borders, Jewish authorities accepted the UN partition proposal.
Located near the boundary between what was to be a future Arab state and a future internationalized Jerusalem, as well as being strategically located on a road connecting the Mount Scopus enclave to the rest of the city, Sheikh Jarrah was one of the many communities caught in the bloodshed that followed the Arab rejection of the partition plan.
Related Reading: Was The War of Independence The Original Sin of Israel’s Creation?
On April 13, 1948, the neighborhood became the site of a massacre after a medical convoy of armored ambulances and trucks departed the western part of Jerusalem carrying doctors, nurses, students, patients, guards, and faculty members. Headed to Mount Scopus, the convoy aimed to deliver crucial emergency relief to the Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University that had been under siege by Arab fighters.
At 9:30 in the morning, vehicles marked with a “red shield,” to signal neutrality, hit a landmine while passing Sheikh Jarrah. Arab irregular forces immediately emerged from the surroundings and opened fire on the group. While five of the vehicles in the convoy were able to retreat to safety, everyone else was stranded – forced to repel the ambush with the few weapons they had on them.
Although British reinforcements were only minutes away, it took seven hours for backup to arrive. As a result, 78 Jews – of them, 23 women and one British officer – perished in the time it took British forces to respond to what would eventually be remembered in Israeli history as the Hadassah Medical Convoy Massacre.
Legacy of Sheikh Jarrah Tragedy: End of Local Coexistence
The episode, which is referred to in some Arabic publications as the “battle of Sheikh Jarrah,” took place at a time when communities in the area were relatively mixed. The historical record reveals the centrality of Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik to both the Jewish and Arab communities. Survivors of the Hadassah Medical Convoy Massacre have spoken of the trauma to the Jewish community that followed the bloody events in eastern Jerusalem; of having childhood friends move away because they had lost a parent in the convoy, and of the rise in Arab-on-Jewish violence that made coexistence impossible.
Ultimately, the convoy ambush in Sheikh Jarrah proved to be a strategic turning point for Arab forces. A few weeks later, they succeeded in cutting Mount Scopus off from western Jerusalem by seizing the road on which the massacre had occurred. After 700 Jewish doctors, medical students, and patients were evacuated in response to this turn of events, the historic Hadassah Hospital was abandoned. The role of Sheikh Jarrah in ensuring a victory for the Arabs bent on the nascent Jewish state’s destruction had proven to be essential.
Despite the current events in Sheikh Jarrah being portrayed almost exclusively by the media as a Palestinian enclave facing threats from a belligerent Israel, the Hadassah Convoy Massacre indicates that the dearth of Jews in the neighborhood is a relatively recent development and was the result of a successful campaign by Arabs to drive Jews out of the area.
The omission of this context from the coverage of reports coming out of Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik helps perpetuate the notion that the situation in the neighborhood has always been as it is today – that of interloping Jews moving into an area to which they have never had any historical connection.
Such revisionism enables Reuters, AFP, AP and other news organizations to frame Israel as embarking on a campaign of conquest. It is journalism that serves to deny individuals around the world of knowledge about the complicated story of Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik, a place where Jews and Arabs once lived side-by-side until the violent rejectionism of Jewish self-determination culminated in the recent events.
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