Brooklyn Tenants Cite #SaveSheikhJarrah In Refusal To Pay Rent

“We demand the same support that they get for taking a stand against having to leave a rental property if you refuse to pay rent.”

New York, June 16 – Occupants of several apartments in Bushwick continued their withholding today of lease payments, invoking the international legitimacy that squatting now enjoys as a result of world media, organizations, and governments justifying thousands of rockets launched at Israeli civilians over two weeks last month to prevent occupants of several Jerusalem residences, who also refused to pay rent, from eviction.

Four families in The Vickers, a four-floor with rental properties, staged a demonstration in front of the building Monday morning to announce their refusal to pay the more than $1,000 per month that their lease contract requires. The group, holding placards and chanting the “Save Sheikh Jarrah” slogan, argued that if families in that Jerusalem neighborhood can go decades without paying rent, and the international community and media will defend any violence perpetrated in support of the rent scofflaws, then they, too, should be able to live rent-free, and they will not even call for violence.

“We are all Sheikh Jarrah!” cried Vicki Owens, who has lived at The Vickers for fourteen years, but only recently glommed onto the Jerusalem developments and realized the parallels between the situations in Israel and Brooklyn. “I know the people who came up with that slogan meant for people to show solidarity with Palestinian families facing eviction, but we here are taking the solidarity even further: we’re applying the Sheikh Jarrah sensibility to our own rental situation, and we demand the same support that they get for taking a stand against having to leave a rental property if you refuse to pay rent.”

The highly-publicized case in Jerusalem served as one of several pretexts for the launch of more than four thousand rockets at Israeli cities and towns, as activists and militants sought to prevent Israeli authorities from evicting several families from homes into which occupying Jordanian authorities moved them in the 1950’s and 60’s. The properties, however, were under the ownership of Jewish families ethnically cleansed from an area of Sheikh Jarrah known as Shimon HaTzaddik, leading Israel’s highest court to rule in the 1980’s that the Arab families may stay, provided they pay rent. In the decades since, they have paid none, following the guidance of Palestinian advocacy groups not to grant legitimacy to Jewish ownership.

The Vickers activists argue along similar lines. “All of the US is illegitimate, just like Israel’s presence in Sheikh Jarrah,” contended Jamaal Randolph. “I don’t care what the illegitimate ‘authorities’ or ‘courts’ say – we don’t have to pay rent if we don’t want to, and we certainly aren’t going to acknowledge any so-called sovereignty of an entity that doesn’t belong here, no matter what their so-called ‘authorities’ say. Those families were settled in Sheikh Jarrah because they lost their homes when Israel was created, and our ancestors were brought here as slaves or fled persecution and we demand reparations in perpetuity, starting right here and right now in the form of living rent-free in this nice building forever, including all our descendants. Everyone owes us everything they can give, and then some. The Palestinians taught us that principle.”

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