Nahalat Shimon was located at the tip of the
Kidron Valley, west of the
tomb of Simeon the Just. The namesake Jewish settler organization contends that the land was purchased in 1890 and the first homes were built soon after, housing 20 impoverished families, and that by 1947 there were 100 Jewish homes in the neighborhood. In March 1948, due to mounting Arab violence during the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, the British ordered the residents to evacuate within two hours.[3][6] According to one of the evacuees, Justice Emeritus
Michael Ben-Yair, all these Jewish evacuees from Sheikh Jarrah were given Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem in compensation.[7][1] Meanwhile, the Palestinians who were given housing in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by Jordanian authorities in exchange for in a relinquishing their refugee documents and accompanying rights have no right under Israeli law to repossess their pre-1948 homes in
Haifa,
Sarafand and
Jaffa.[8] The settler organization Nahalat Shimon, registered in
Delaware, has pursued the case in Israeli courts for decades, demanding eviction of the Palestinian residents so that Jewish settlers can be housed there.[9]
^Daphna Golan-Agnon,
Teaching Palestine on an Israeli University Campus: Unsettling Denial,
Archived 15 May 2021 at the
Wayback Machine Anthem Press 2020 p. 57: "We were given two apartments and a store in Sheikh Bader in exchange for our assets in Sheikh Jarrah. We were not the only ones who were given alternative housing that had belonged to Arabs who had fled. All residents of the Sheeikh Jarrah/Shimon Hatzadik neighbourhood were given alternative housing in property abandoned by Arabs who fled to East Jerusalem (...) One could say with relative certainty that the number of properties abandoned in west Jerusalem was much higher than the number abandoned in east Jerusalem. They were also, in all likelihood, worth more then, and they certainly are today."
^Nahalat Shimon was divided into an eastern section called Karm al-Jaouni, where land was owned by the councils of the Jewish Ashkenazi and Mizrahi communities. Land in the western section, called Umm Haroun, where Ben-Yair’s family lived, was privately owned by Jewish families.[1]