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Jerusalem Forever08/03/2009
Both the past and the future may be illusions, but it is in the present that blood is shed.
I have recently been sent videos by email explaining why Israel need not share Jerusalem with the Palestinians and has a right to keep it as its own, forever. I have previously seen articles by Palestinians and their supporters explaining that Jerusalem is and always was an Arab city, the third most important city for Islam, after Mecca and Medina. I suspect that the real purpose of both points of view is to raise old grudges and to obstruct any progress towards peace. As another American administration begins its search for a fair and amicable settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the people who prefer the ongoing struggle to any possible settlement bring out their historical debating points once again. The suffering of the Palestinian Arabs has certainly been terrible and many continue to exist in horrible conditions today. Of course, their suffering is not unique. There have been many refugees in the twentieth century, not a few of them Jews. I, myself, am the son of European Jews who survived World War II and my first memories are of the refugee camp in West Germany (then called a Displaced Persons Camp) that we lived in during my early childhood. Some of our family moved to Israel, but my parents chose the United States. The commonly publicized propaganda tends to include true history mixed with falsehoods, added for propaganda reasons. Jews did not begin coming to Israel, nor first settle in Jerusalem, after the Balfour Declaration, as is often implied. The Jews have been a majority in Jerusalem at least since the end of the 19th Century.* The Jews have had an almost continuous presence in the city since its conquest by King David, broken by only three short periods of forced eviction; after the Babylonian conquest of 586 BCE, after the Roman reconquest of the city in 135 CE and after the Crusader conquest of 1099. There are many Jewish families with deep roots in the Holy City. My wife, born in Jerusalem just after World War II, is a descendant of Israel Beck, who came to Jerusalem in 1838 and started the first Hebrew printing press there. She is the seventh generation of her family to be born in the city. Many Arab families lost their homes in West Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence, which was started by Israel's Arab neighbors when they, and the Palestinian Arabs, refused to accept the UN partition. Jewish families also lost their homes in East Jerusalem. The Jordanian army occupied the old walled city and evicted the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter. Some of them resettled in the homes vacated by Arabs in West Jerusalem. Most of the present inhabitants of previously Arab neighborhoods in West Jerusalem are not from Europe and the United States, as usually assumed by Palestinophiles, but rather, are the families of Jewish refugees from Iraq and Arab countries in North Africa. When my wife was a small child in Jerusalem there was a jingle sung by groups of Arab and Jewish children, often prior to throwing stones at each other. The Arab version translates as:
The Jewish version was the same with the last verse changed to "The Arab is our dog!" I keep seeing endless new variations of the same old message. Although terrible things happened on both sides, it really is time to move on so that the suffering may end. Lewis Reisman, MD
*Since the first modern population estimates were made in 1844, Jews were close to a majority. These estimates were not reliable enough to be conclusive. The census of 1894 showed a clear majority
Original text copyright by the author and MidEastWeb for Coexistence, RA. Posted at MidEastWeb Middle East Web Log at http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000772.htm where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Distributed by MEW Newslist. Subscribe by e-mail to mew-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by email with this notice and link to and cite this article. Other uses by permission. |
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Replies: 3 comments Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran. Posted by Marvin Jacobs @ 08/03/2009 11:09 PM CST
Marvin, Jerusalem is mentioned in the koran plenty of times, have you ever read it? Posted by random @ 10/21/2009 02:17 AM CST NO PALESTINIAN STATE – No land concessions R4.
If the historic documents, comments written by eyewitnesses and declarations by the most authoritative Arab scholars are still not enough, let us quote the most important source for Muslim Arabs: Imagine that the various people who settled in the United States for the past 300 years decided one day that they one to parcel the United States into an independent State just for them, would the American public go for it. The Answer is absolutely NO. The situation in Israel today is no different. The Arabs there are not Palestinians, there is no such Arab nation as Palestine or Palestinian people. Europeans countries today are consisting of numerous people from other countries. Would the Europeans people cede part of their country to set up another State in their midst. The answer is absolutely NO. All the Arabs in Israel and surrounding areas are from the various Arab nations, such as Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and other Arab nations. Prominent PLO Arab says there are no 'Palestinians' and no "Palestine" PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein admitted in a March 31, 1977 interview with a Dutch newspaper Trouw. "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. "
The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people Sequence of historical events, agreements and a non-broken series of treaties and resolutions, as laid out by the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations and the United Nations, gives the Jewish People title to the city of Jerusalem and the rest of Israel totaling approximately 45,000 square miles, as mandated by the League of Nations in July of 1922. The process began at San Remo, Italy, when the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I - Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan - agreed to create a Jewish national home in what is now the Land of Israel. (You might as well break apart Syria which was mandated at the same time). Jay Draiman.
PS (IsraelNN.com) Jacques Gauthier, a non-Jewish Canadian lawyer who spent 20 years researching the legal status of Jerusalem, has concluded: "Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, by international law.".
Gauthier has written a doctoral dissertation on the topic of Jerusalem and its legal history, based on international treaties and resolutions of the past 90 years. The dissertation runs some 1,300 pages, with 3,000 footnotes. Gauthier had to present his thesis to a world-famous Jewish historian and two leading international lawyers - the Jewish one of whom has represented the Palestinian Authority on numerous occasions. We must unleash the wrath of G-D against the enemies of Israel and those collaborating with the enemy. Posted by jay draiman @ 12/15/2009 05:10 AM CST Please do not leave notes for MidEastWeb editors here. Hyperlinks are not displayed. We may delete or abridge comments that are longer than 250 words, or consist entirely of material copied from other sources, and we shall delete comments with obscene or racist content or commercial advertisements. Comments should adhere to Mideastweb Guidelines . IPs of offenders will be banned. |
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