(May 27, 2021 / JNS) In 1948, the armies of seven Arab nations invaded Israel. They failed to wipe out the newly reborn nation, but Jordan occupied part of Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed it of Jews.

Among the old Jewish quarters, there was a small area called Shimon HaTzadik or “Simon the Just,” after a high priest who became famous for preventing Alexander the Great from installing an idol in the Temple. The Arab-Muslim settlers who had occupied the region, however, called it Sheikh Jarrah in honor of an associate of the Iraqi invader Saladin.

Saladin invaded Israel some 1,500 years after the death of Shimon HaTzadik. His partner moved to Jerusalem and died there. A mosque was built above the home of the invader, Jarrah, who later gave the neighborhood its name when the Husseini family moved there in the 19th century. “Hitler’s mufti,” Haj Amin al-Husseini, grew up in the neighborhood’s first house.

Seven years after receiving Hitler’s promise to invade and kill all Jews, the Islamic leader attempted to complete work with the Holy Jihad Army, backed by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood jihadists. In addition to blowing up the offices of the newspaper which would later be known as The Jerusalem Post, the jihadists behaved badly in combat and collapsed when their commander, another Husseini, was killed trying to cut off Israeli supply convoys for the siege of Jerusalem.

Jordanians desecrated synagogues in East Jerusalem, used Jewish gravestones to pave roads, and seized Jewish property through their keeper of enemy property.

In 1956, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) worked with the Jordanian occupiers to settle “Palestinian refugees” in this Jewish quarter. The United Nations agency had devoted itself entirely to dealing with the Arab-Muslim settlers who had failed in their invasion of Israel and was installing them, in violation of international law, in the homes of Jewish residents who had fled the country. illegal occupation.

Once UNRWA “resettled” its “refugees” in homes stolen from their Jewish owners through ethnic cleansing, it considered them to be no longer refugees. The real refugees, however, were the Jewish residents who had their homes stolen by UNRWA.

The only thing more worrying than a United Nations agency collaborating in ethnic cleansing is that after Israel liberated and unified Jerusalem, the illegal Arab-Muslim occupiers of the houses not only refused to leave, but their right to stay in them. houses stolen from their Jewish inhabitants was taken. by the United Nations and the international community. Not to mention a lot of lawyers.

It took the original Jewish homeowners five years to even get the legal rights to the houses in court. But they did not get the property back. In an attempt to avoid the kind of international incident that is unfolding now, Israeli authorities negotiated a deal in which Muslim squatters would pay rent and accept the legal rights of the Jewish owners of the trusts.

Rent for houses was only a fraction of what they were going to get on the open market. But even that money was never paid. The next three decades were spent trying to expel illegal Muslim settlers who would not pay rent or leave.

The recent court ruling on the evictions, which was used by Hamas and the PLO as a pretext for the war they intended to start anyway, is the latest in a series of court rulings on these deportations. houses dating back 50 years.

These rulings came from independent courts, not the Netanyahu government, in a legal battle that began when he was a student at MIT. There is not a single argument as to why the Jewish trusts that owned the houses should have lost the right to them when Jordan invaded and seized these properties, or why UNRWA’s decision to illegally collaborate in ethnic cleansing. by installing members of an occupying nation. in these houses was legal.

All their arguments boil down to shouting “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing”, when the only time there was apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem was under Arab-Muslim occupation.

All anti-Israel radicals in the civil service denounced the expulsions of “Sheikh Jarrah”.

“We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces are forcing families out of their homes, ”Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (DN.Y.) tweeted.

“The expulsions of Palestinian families must not go ahead,” said Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“The administration must make the Israeli government understand that these deportations are illegal and must stop immediately,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Although she is a lawyer, she refused to identify how the Israeli court’s decision was “illegal”.

The Biden administration has also gotten into the act.

“We are deeply concerned about the potential eviction of Palestinian families in the Silwan neighborhood and in Sheikh Jarrah, many of whom have lived in their homes for generations,” said State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter, a former cheerleader who has wrongfully accused America of genocide.

The only way to argue that the houses were “theirs” is to recognize the legitimacy of occupation and ethnic cleansing, at least when it is practiced by invading Muslim armies.

The moral principle that AOC, Sanders, Warren and the US State Department are fighting for is that when Arab Muslims hunt Jews and take over their homes, it is their property now.

The legal basis for the squatters’ court case is their claim that the property was given to them by the Jordanian Enemy Property Custodian’s office. This claim is valid before the Israeli courts, which have chosen (wrongly) to recognize these seizures. And so court cases revolved around whether the squatters could ever prove that an illegal occupying power had transferred title to them during its campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The squatters couldn’t even reach that low bar as they were never given title to the houses, but the vicissitudes of local real estate law aside, there is always invasion, illegal occupation and the ethnic cleansing.

When AOC, Warren, Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), The United Nations and the Biden administration treat the occupiers of Sheikh Jarrah like the rightful owners, they advocate ethnic cleansing.

And it should be called what it is.

The fundamental question at play in Shimon HaTzadik and Sheikh Jarrah is crystal clear. Unlike some parts of Israel where the land has changed hands in more complex ways, in Sheikh Jarrah we know exactly what happened and why. And these simple facts tell the story of UNRWA’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem after an invasion and occupation. The United Nations, through UNRWA, violated international law by participating in the transfer of the population by an occupying power that had expelled the indigenous population. This is the accusation that the United Nations and anti-Israel politicians and media have repeatedly leveled against Israel.

And it is they who are guilty of it.

Their argument from Sheikh Jarrah is that ethnic cleansing and occupation are moral and legal when Arab-Muslim armies do it. This is because the Arab-Muslim squatters who moved into Jewish homes in 1956 had acquired an immutable moral right to live there in 1967 which outweighed those in the Jewish trusts which had owned them since the 19th century.

There is no better way to show the hypocritical double standards of an anti-Israel movement that weeps over occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid while practicing these same things.

The AOC, Sanders, Warren, the United Nations, the Quartet, the European Union and the Biden administration are calling for the Arab-Muslim occupation of Jerusalem to continue. They order a free country to overturn a court ruling in a case dating back to the 1970s because they believe the Arab-Muslim occupiers have the right to live in Jerusalem… and the Jews don’t.

This is what it was in 1948. It is still what it is in 2021.

The occupiers cry out about “the occupation” and the ethnic cleaners cry out “ethnic cleansing” as they fight to bring back the apartheid state that drove the Jews from Jerusalem.

Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer specializing in the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.