LONDON: An Israeli rights group and Palestinian community organizations have asked a court to overturn approval for a Jewish religious school in occupied East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah, saying the project would be built on land expropriated for public facilities needed by Palestinians.
Israeli nonprofit Ir Amim, the Sheikh Jarrah Community Association and the Umm Lison Women’s Association filed the petition with the Jerusalem District Court, acting as the Court for Administrative Affairs, Ir Amim said in a statement on Tuesday.
The groups also requested an interim injunction to halt the project while the case is considered.
The planned institution, to be operated by Ohr Somayach, would include a Jewish religious school, or yeshiva, and a boarding school.
At the center of the challenge is land that petitioners say is privately owned by Palestinians and was seized by Israeli authorities on the grounds that it would be used for a public facility serving local residents.
Planning authorities instead approved a boarding school that the petition says would primarily serve Jewish students from abroad.
The groups argue that the approval contradicts the stated purpose of the expropriation and disregards a chronic shortage of public facilities in East Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Municipality data cited in the petition show that East Jerusalem is short about 2,000 classrooms. The Israeli government has previously acknowledged that insufficient land designated for public use is a key obstacle to addressing that deficit, according to the filing.
A professional assessment commissioned by the Jerusalem District Planning Committee also found a significant shortage of public buildings in Sheikh Jarrah itself, the petition said.
Against that backdrop, the petitioners said allocating one of the neighborhood’s few remaining public sites to an institution that would not serve local residents is unreasonable and inconsistent with the expropriation’s purpose and the city’s master plan.
The filing also challenges the decision to revive and extend the planning process after the project had been dormant for years. The petition alleges that the extension was approved without sufficient justification and in violation of planning law.
“For decades, settler organizations have sought to take over the homes of dozens of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah,” said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim. “The yeshiva project is part of a broader effort to reshape Sheikh Jarrah.
“It illustrates how Israeli authorities and settler organizations work hand in hand to transfer Palestinian property into settler hands,” he added.
The legal challenge comes amid what Ir Amim previously described as a widening state-backed effort to reshape Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood long emblematic of Palestinian identity.
In a report released in October, Ir Amim warned that Israel was entering a “new and dangerous phase” in efforts to cement its control over occupied East Jerusalem through legal and bureaucratic measures.
The group said the government was promoting two major housing projects in Sheikh Jarrah under the banner of urban renewal that could bring about 2,000 Israeli families to the area.
According to the report, the projects would displace Palestinians from the neighborhood’s western section, also known as Umm Haroun. It also cited land-registration procedures that it said enable state and settler bodies to assert ownership claims, as well as the expropriation of public spaces for Jewish institutions.
One of those plans involves a yeshiva and dormitory on land expropriated by the municipality, Ir Amim said. Additional public spaces are also being targeted, the group said.
A September study by the Israeli nonprofit Bimkom similarly found that Israeli land-title settlement procedures in East Jerusalem have been used to dispossess and displace Palestinians.
The group said the legal framework puts Palestinian landowners at a structural disadvantage when seeking to prove and formalize ownership, calling the procedures “part of the broader policy to promote the annexation” of occupied East Jerusalem.
Ir Amim said those measures accompany large-scale municipal projects elsewhere in East Jerusalem, including a business complex in Wadi Joz and a planned municipal park near Sheikh Jarrah.
Tatarsky told Arab News in November that the projects outlined in Ir Amim’s report were state-driven, including those presented as urban-renewal initiatives and the proposed yeshiva.
“Even though the yeshiva is supposedly a religious organization’s initiative, the land was allocated by the Israel Land Authority and the municipality,” he said.
“In the past, settler organizations would file eviction claims, and when criticized, state officials could say, ‘It’s a private matter; it has nothing to do with us.’ That pretense has now dropped. What we’re seeing today is the state itself directly driving these projects.”
