On Tuesday, Al-Awda (The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition) in conjunction with the National Lawyers Guild held a protest outside the East Meadow, Long Island home of Yaakov Fauci who moved to the Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood of Jerusalem. The organizers delivered mock eviction notices to Fauci’s home and posted “Wanted” posters around the area.

Protesting Jews in the US and Israel

Lamis Deek, a US-based attorney who immigrated from Shechem in Israel and is a board member for the Council on American Islamic Relations, led the demonstration. She began by pointing out that Fauci left behind a comfortable home in order to move to Israel.

“Also we must question what is wrong in New York that somebody would leave this perfectly fine actually well-maintained middle-class home to go and invade Palestinian homes, to go and engage in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians thousands of miles away.”

“What is happening in New York is not an anomaly. What is happening in New York is being allowed to happen because our communities in the west, in the US, Canada, and Europe especially, have been normalizing the right of Europeans to travel to Palestine to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with impunity and worse over while we normalize these crimes and these criminals. We say that the day has ended when Zionists and Israelis and Americans and New Yorkers can go to Palestine without being exposed, without being held to account, without being made to pay for their crimes and made to leave Palestine.”

Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood

Her claims against Fauci center around the conflict in the Shimon Hatzaddik neighborhood in Jerusalem incorrectly referred to as the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. It received its name from the 13th-century tomb of Sheikh Jarrah, a physician of Saladin, located within its vicinity. But the original name of the neighborhood was Shimon Hatzaddik due to the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik, one of the last members of the Great Assembly and a High Priest from the Temple who was buried there. 

In 1876, the cave and the adjoining land were purchased by Jews who built houses there. Fully one-third of the residents of the area were Jewish. After Jordan illegally occupied that section of Jerusalem, the Jews were killed or driven out and their homes occupied by Arabs. 

After Israel reunified Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War of 196, the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesset Yisrael Committee went to court to contest the ownership of the properties they had owned before being driven out by the Jordanians. In 1982, they demanded rent for this property and the Supreme Court of Israel ruled in their favor. The tenants were allowed to remain as long as they paid rent which the Arab squatters refused to do. Selling property to Jews is a capital offense under the PA and Palestinians are usually killed if they do so. Paying rent would have been a tacit acknowledgment that the land belonged to Jews. The Israeli court decision (resulting in the aforementioned evictions) stated that the document presented by the Palestinian families was a forgery, while the document of Jewish ownership was authentic.

The court ruled that the properties undoubtedly belong to Jews. The Arabs are being evicted but they are not being banished. They can move next door or to some other place in Israel.

Ironically, the Al Awda protest ran banners with the slogan, “Everyone has the right to return to their home.”

The sin of Joseph’s brothers almost led to Holocaust in Palestine

Rabbi Nachman Kahana pointed out that the organization was protesting Jews living in Israel while also demonizing Jews for having homes in New York.

“This is the basis of the so-called pro-Palestinian movement is saying that the Jews in Palestine should move to the exile and the Jews in the exile should move to Palestine. Meaning that their goal is that there should be no place on the globe for Jews to be allowed to exist.”

Rabbi Kahana noted that this concept actually linked the Palestinian national movement to the Nazis, an early ally of the Palestinians.

“The founder of the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler. He made a deal that when the Germans took over Palestine, they would set up an extermination camp to kill all the Jews in the Middle East. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims volunteered for the SS. Thank God, Rommel was defeated in El Alamein. Otherwise, the plan would have been carried out.”

“But it is important that the camp was supposed to be built in a flat region that had railroad tracks. This was the Dothan Valley, where Joseph was put into a pit by his brothers and sold into slavery. There is a tradition that ten great sages, including Rabbi Akiva, were brutally tortured and executed by the Romans. The Midrash states that all ten were killed as a Divine, national punishment for the sale of Joseph by his ten brothers.”

“The deaths of these holy sages saved the Jews from a future punishment in the days of the Nazis. The Nazi plan to kill Jews in the Valley of Dothan should have come through because of the guilt of Joseph’s brothers but it was averted because of the great sacrifice of the ten sages.”

“You have to be blind not to see the hand of God in Jewish history,” Rabbi Kahana concluded.