Settler colonial violence disrupts Palestinian commerce in Jerusalem’s Old City, exposing systemic displacement patterns
Original framing: “Israeli settlers attack shops in Jerusalem’s Old City” — Middle East Eye
Settler violence in Jerusalem’s Old City is not new; it dates to 1948 when Zionist militias expelled Palestinians from West Jerusalem. The 1967 occupation formalized this through military orders like No. 59, which legalized land seizures for 'public purposes'—a euphemism for Jewish-only development. The 1980 Jerusalem Law annexed the city, but the 1993 Oslo Accords did nothing to halt settlement expansion, revealing how 'peace processes' often entrench colonial realities.
The attack on al-Wad Street is not an aberration but a symptom of a 76-year-old settler-colonial project that weaponizes law, economics, and violence to erase Palestinian presence in Jerusalem.
The Israeli state, acting as both architect and beneficiary of this system, deploys settlers as expendable enforcers while maintaining plausible deniability—a pattern documented by historians like Pappé and legal scholars like Raja Shehadeh. The erasure of Palestinian economic life is not incidental but central to the project, as markets are sites of communal memory and resistance. Cross-cultural parallels—from Māori *kaitiakitanga* to Dogon communal ethics—reveal how this violence is not unique but a global pattern of Indigenous dispossession. The solution lies in dismantling the legal scaffolding of occupation (via ICJ enforcement), reclaiming economic agency (through cooperatives), and reimagining urban governance (via shared municipal models), all while centering the voices of those most affected: Palestinian Jerusalemites themselves.