In the heart of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem lies the home of the Sub Laban family. From the doorway one can see the golden dome of Al-Aqsa Mosque, bright and shiny, almost within touching distance. Yet the family members are shuttered inside. They’re afraid police forces and judicial emissaries could show up any minute and forcibly remove them from the place they have lived since the early 1950s. After 35 years of legal battles, an Israeli court ruled that the family has lost its rights and no longer qualifies as a protected tenant. After they’re evicted, the key will be handed over to representatives of the Ateret Cohanim settler organization, marking another achievement in its bid to Judaize East Jerusalem.

The Shamasneh family of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is also living on borrowed time. Here, too, the law regulating the trusteeship of property owned by absentee landlords, which allows claims for property owned by Jews before 1948, serves the political aims of the settlers’ organization. The discriminatory Israeli law, which allows Jews to claim the property they were forced to leave in 1948 but bans Arabs from doing so, faithfully serves those wishing to display sovereignty over all parts of the holy city (and country). If the eviction is carried out, it will be the first time since the start of the protest in Sheikh Jarrah five years ago, which generated international interest and resonated abroad, that a Palestinian family will be forced to leave its home for the benefit of Jewish settlers.

Every house handed over to the right-wing nongovernmental organizations, which enjoy government backing, increases the separation between the Jerusalem Old City and the Palestinian neighborhoods in the city’s northeast. That’s the reason Sheikh Jarrah was dubbed Jerusalem’s E1 area, after the stretch of land that lies between Jerusalem and the settlement town of Maale Adumim. E1 is designed to further cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank, although the Palestinians consider the two a single entity. Implementation of these measures will signal the end of the two-state solution more than all the recent declarations and denials by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning the Bar Ilan speech and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

On March 20, The Guardian published details from a classified document compiled by the consuls of the European Union member-states in Jerusalem. The consuls note that the city has not been divided since 1967 as it has been for the past year. They warn of a vicious cycle of polarization and violence, and identify among the central causes the housing crisis in the Palestinian neighborhoods and the enforcement activity against illegal construction in those neighborhoods. A special chapter is devoted to the growing tensions on the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif). One of the document signatories told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity: “Since the question of Jerusalem in an essential dimension of the two-state solution for the EU, the report expressed serious concern regarding the unprecedented level of violence and division in the city, and warned that the solution to this situation cannot be of a security nature.”