Evictions in Jerusalem Become Focus of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The effort to evict six Arab families from a contested neighborhood has drawn attention to the Israeli effort to remove Palestinians from parts of East Jerusalem and led to protests.

JERUSALEM — In confrontations with Palestinian protesters over the past week in Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the Israeli police sprayed so much skunk water, a noxious liquid used to deter demonstrators, that its stench lingered over nearby streets. The symbolism of the neighborhood extends much further. In the space of a week, Sheikh Jarrah has become the centerpiece of spiking tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and has galvanized Palestinians and their advocates across the world, from the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and Gaza, to lawmakers and officials in nearby Jordan and faraway Washington. On Monday, the Israeli Supreme Court is set to decide whether to uphold the eviction of six families from the neighborhood in favor of Jewish settlers. The decades-old legal battle over the fate of a few dozen Palestinians, which Israeli officials dismiss as “a real estate dispute,” has become emblematic of a wider effort to remove thousands of Palestinians from strategic areas in East Jerusalem and a stand-in for the whole decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.