A study conducted by Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage in Israel has revealed that Al-Aqsa Mosque and its surrounding area has been subjected to around 100 attacks and violations in 2011 alone. The study noted that the attacks varied between physical attacks and plots which pose threats to the sanctity and security of the mosque. The study also documented provocative statements constituting incitement by Israelis to damage the third holiest site in the Muslim world.
The report claims that around 5,000 Israelis, including Jewish settlers and members of other extremist groups, stormed into Al-Aqsa in 2011. The intruders performed Talmudic rituals, sometimes in public, other times in secret, including carrying parts of the Torah inside the mosque.
There has also been an escalation in the frequency of incursions by Israeli intelligence officers and political and official figures into Al-Aqsa Mosque.
More than 200,000 tourists were granted admittance to the mosque, sometimes violating its sanctity by wearing scanty clothing.
Al-Aqsa has witnessed a campaign of unprecedented military presence; strict measures preventing Muslims from going to the mosque; and acts aimed at decreasing the continuous Muslim presence in the Noble Sanctuary, through banning orders and limiting entry to certain age groups. The Israeli Occupation Authorities also prevented 3.7 million Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip from reaching Occupied Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque to conduct acts of worship therein.
While the Israelis have blocked essential maintenance and reconstruction within the mosque compound, Jewish organisations’ calls for the mosque to be destroyed and a temple to be built in its place have increased in number. The year 2011 saw a campaign of excavations and the construction of long, interlinked tunnels underneath Al Aqsa and the surrounding area in all directions. The tunnels are to have “Jewish synagogues and Judaisation centres”. What has been notable about the excavations last year is that they have been more overt, unlike previous years.
Israeli efforts to Judaise the area have included work at the Muslim-owned Buraq (“Wailing”) Wall and the proposed demolition of the historic Magharba Gate Bridge. The report notes that the latter was saved, temporarily at least, by the effects of the Arab Spring and concerns raised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has plans to transform the area around Al-Aqsa into so-called “Talmudic gardens”, which will incorporate tourist centres and commercial shopping malls. All of this is in addition to the increasing number of illegal Jewish settlers and settlements in districts such as Ras Al-Amoud.
The Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage has issued a warning that the Israeli Occupation Authorities could seek to capitalise on the developments of the Arab Spring so as to damage Al-Aqsa Mosque and Sanctuary in 2012. Intelligence reports, it says, predict serious attacks against Al-Aqsa by extremist Jews. Such predictions follow statements by former Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Member Avraham Burg that Al-Aqsa will be demolished or torched while Netanyahu is in office; and this, he claimed, will be followed by the establishment of the so-called Third Temple. In the light of these serious threats to the Holy Mosque, the Foundation called on Muslims and Arabs to put Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa at the top of their priorities for action.
Large quantities of waste are being piled by the Jerusalem Municipality inside the Islamic cemetery (Bab Alsbat) next to Lions Gate in the old city, in a move that has upset and offended the City’s thousands of Muslim inhabitants. The Lions Gate, which lies close to the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, is now awash with the overpowering stench of accumulated garbage.
One resident stated that the Jerusalem Municipality “is unashamedly discriminatory in its practices. They not only use a sacred place as a rubbish dump, they even burn the rubbish here, inside a holy place the Bab Alasbat cemetery. Why has UNESCO not tried to stop the Municipality?”
A resident Christian priest of the Old City told Silwanic that he considered the Municipality’s actions unlawful, and encouraging of racism in Jerusalem.
Israel’s use of national parks to expropriate Palestinian land and prevent development in East Jerusalem is the subject of Bimkom’s latest, January, report.
Bimkom, a group of Israeli planners and architects advocating for planning rights, has studied the state’s strategy of making “green” settlements as a more convenient alternative to building its controversial Jewish-only housing enclaves alongside Palestinian communities in occupied East Jerusalem.
Designating urban space as a national park is not only easier but cheaper too, the state having no obligation to compensate owners.
The Jerusalem municipality leaves the creation of these parks to the National Planning Authority (in the Ministry of Interior), Bimkom noted, which deals more with the protection of nature and heritage than the rights of Jerusalem’s residents.
By passing authority over to the NPA, the municipality can absolve itself of responsibility for the people it professes to serve, the report argued.
The report came in the wake of a new national park set to appear on Mount Scopus, using land privately owned by residents of Issawiya and A-Tur, neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem.
The plan, currently under public review, was initially thought up by the Israel Nature and Park Authority, a body of the Ministry for Environment.
More recently it has been championed by the Jerusalem Development Authority – a government body helping the municipality with development projects – which was given 40 million NIS in 2005 to develop green spaces around the Old City of Jerusalem.
As a result of the state’s categorical neglect of Palestinians in Jerusalem, Bimkom began working with A-Tur and Issawiya residents years ago to devise development plans.
The national park will cover the neighbourhoods’ remaining available land, making Bimkom’s project impossible.
Locals, with the help of Bimkom and other rights groups, are raising legal objections to the plan, amid efforts to bring the public’s attention to their plight.
The case forwarded by the municipality is based on the site’s purported archaeological significance.
Municipal representatives pointed to “antiquities, caves … and burial sites from the era of the Second Temple,” Ha’aretz reported last month.
This argument has been rubbished by Bimkom, who argue what is really at play is Israel’s control over land, usually achieved by stunting Palestinian development.
Avraham Shaked – member of the Interior Ministry’s Jerusalem District Committee as an environmental advocate – agrees the prospective park is part of a more sinister political agenda.
“This process is definitely a political process,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “If it’s possible to develop the area for the good of the public it’s a positive thing. But this is not important as a nature reserve.”
The INPA – the management of which is dominated by several prominent settlers – denies doggedly that it is political. The group is “only concerned about preserving nature in the areas under its control,” a spokesperson told Ha’aretz.
“The declaration of the area [as a park] safeguards the last segment of the Judean Desert that begins on the Mount Scopus slope, and its importance stems from its view onto the desert, heritage landmarks and desert vegetation.”
While the state is forbidden from working on the site until the period for public comment is over, the INPA has forged ahead regardless.
Bulldozers have begun work on private land, moving a large mound of earth to create an effective wall which blocks a path to agricultural land. The municipality insists this measure was designed to prevent the area from being used as an illegal dumping ground, stopping the passage of trucks that would dump rubbish.
While residents remain unconvinced, the state’s response to their objection to this breach has been characteristically repressive and disproportionately severe.
On the morning of Monday, 6 February, border police arrived on the private land of Issawiya and A-Tur residents to continue preparatory work on the park.
When locals, along with Israeli supporters, gathered to protest the construction work, police arrested six people, five Jewish Israelis and one Palestinian.
The disparity between the management of space for West Jerusalemites compared to their counterparts in the east is stark, with national parks notably absent from the west.
“The Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are crowded and they suffer from extreme neglect and shortage of public infrastructure,” Bimkom architect, Efrat Bar-Cohen, said in a statement.
“The residents are in desperate need of space by which they can improve their quality of life, even if slightly.”
The building of the park will have ramifications beyond the strangling of Issawiya and A-Tur residents.
It will stretch into the E1 area of the West Bank, which represents an important reserve of space for Palestinian development, creating a string of Jewish Israeli-only settlement between the Old City and Ma’ale Adumim settlement.
Elad Kandl is director of the Old City projects at the Jerusalem Development Authority, whose website describes their work as rehabilitating and conserving the Old City.
He expressed succinctly Israel’s aim of curbing Palestinian development in Jerusalem. “When you make it a national park,” he told The Jerusalem Post in reference to open space, “you keep the status quo.”
‘De-Arabizing the history of Palestine is another crucial element of the ethnic cleansing. 1500 years of Arab and Muslim rule and culture in Palestine are trivialized, evidence of its existence is being destroyed and all this is done to make the absurd connection between the ancient Hebrew civilization and today’s Israel. The most glaring example of this today is in Silwan, (Wadi Hilwe) a town adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem with some 50,000 residents. Israel is expelling families from Silwan and destroying their homes because it claims that king David built a city there some 3000 years ago. Thousands of families will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king that may or may not have lived 3000 years ago. Not a shred of historical evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men, women, children and the elderly along with their schools and mosques, churches and ancient cemeteries and any evidence of their existence must be destroyed and then denied so that Zionist claims to exclusive rights to the land may be substantiated.’ — Miko Peled, Israeli dissident.
Indeed, archaeology has become a state apparatus for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Zionist fairyland aka the City of David Archaeological Park located in the Palestinian village of Silwan in East Jerusalem.
East Jerusalem is the proclaimed capital of the proposed Palestine state. It was illegally annexed by Israel in the 1967 war. Prohibiting annexation of territories gained by military conquest is one of the major principles of international law. The international community does not recognise Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem nevertheless over 50,000 illegal premises have been built for 250,000 illegal Israeli colonists.
The goal of the archaeological judaisation of Jerusalem is to transform Jerusalem into the City of David, the capital of Greater Israel by eradicating the mixed ethnic composition of the Palestinian and Jewish population of East Jerusalem to a solely Jewish identity and unifying East and West Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.
This judaising in Silwan is executed by the Israeli government, the Municipality of Jerusalem, and the rightwing colonist (settler) organisation, Elad, through the revocation of residency rights, absentee property laws, discriminatory taxation policies, home demolitions, transfer of Palestinian residents, replacing Arabic place names with Hebrew names and the expansion of settlements which Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, describes ‘as a form of ethnic cleansing ‘ which is defined as a crime against humanity under the statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Furthermore Article 53 of the Geneva Convention states: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons.is prohibited.”
Financial support for judaising programmes comes from hundreds of moneyed Zionist organisations and foundations worldwide. In 2005, archaeologist Eilat Mazar announced she had discovered the palace of King David circa 10 Century BCE. The excavations in Silwan were funded by the Shalem Center whose Zionist neocons have invested heavily in the judaisation efforts to give historicity to the David myth. Shalem’s founder, Ron Lauder of the Estee Lauder empire, is an uncompromising Zionist extremist, a Likudnik and a major shareholder in Israeli TV Channel 10 as well as the current Chairman of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and President of the World Jewish Congress (JWC) which normalises the Israeli occupation. Curiously, in January, Abbas and Erekat had a closed meeting with Lauder in London even though the Palestinian team refused to meet with Netanyahu.
The Shalem Center has association with Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who is a Likud supporter and a key financial backer of the Newt Gingrich campaign and Newt’s ‘Palestinians are an invented people’ idiocy. From 2007-9 the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in the Shalem Center was directed by Natan Sharansky who is now Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental organisation advancing Jewish immigration to Israel including the illegal colonies. Its 2008 the core budget was $314,760,000. The Jewish Agency was established by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1929 founded on the commitment to warrant “The unity of the Jewish people, its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael, and the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital “It acts as agent of the government in assigning land to Jewish colonists in the Israeli-occupied territories. Its new chairman is religious Zionist Avraham Duvdevani who served as head of the WZO’s Settlement Division, co-chairman of the board of the Jewish National Fund and a member of the Jewish Agency’s Executive. Over a quarter of WZO delegates are from Orthodox Zionists attesting to their sinister rising influence.
The Shalem Centre works closely with Elad the right-wing hardline colonist organization and militia that advocates illegal Jewish colonial settlement in East Jerusalem acquiring, in cahoots with the Jewish National Fund and its subsidiary Hemanuta, Palestinian properties often through threats, false depositions, forged documents, posthumous witness signatures and militant house takeovers.
Elad is mainly funded by the tax-exempt ‘charities’ Ir David Incorporated and the Irving Moskowitz Foundation which illegally funnel monies to Zionist political objectives. Moskowitz, the casino magnate, is a hardcore Zionist and founder of the Friends of Ateret Cohanim which finances Jews to live in East Jerusalem and owns about 70 properties in the Muslim Quarter. Daniel Luria, its chief fund-raiser commented “Our [fund-raising] activity in New York goes solely toward land redemption.” In 2005, Ateret Cohanim instigated, without license, an archaeological project tunneling 20 meters toward the Al-Aqsa compound causing damage to Palestinian homes in violation of the law.
Elad was given, without tender, exclusive control over the City of David Archaeological Park including a tunnel network that is being dug around and under the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Elad’s lucrative tours of the historic sites, although there is no historical evidence of David or Solomon’s existence, spout historical fabrications from the Jewish biblical narrative such as the Byzantine water pit that is falsified as Jeremiah’s pit. The 8000 year old Palestinian-Canaanite narrative is glossed over.
In December 2011, Australian listeners were treated to a fantasy tour of the so-called Palace of David by ABC presenter Rachael Kohn and archaeologist Avner Goren both of whom gushed forth fairytales about the mythical king absurdly comparing him to George Washington and sidestepping his dubious authenticity by urging trust in the Bible.
In archaeological circles there is an ongoing controversy about whether Biblical texts can be equated to history. In the 70s William Dever suggested that rather than Biblical Archaeology, the term Syro-Palestinian Archaeology (note not Syro-Israeli) was more appropriate and is used in academic circles.
Archaeologists who follow the Minimalist or Copenhagen school “conclude that the books of the Hebrew Bible were written during the Persian (or Hellenistic) period. The historical books actually contain made-up stories (that may have exploited some vague, ancient legends) through which the local organized refugee population provided itself with a mythic cover-(hi)story that linked it to the land and to a religion. This conclusion has two important corollaries: (1) Bible narratives about the political, social, and intellectual world of ancient Israel from Abraham to the temple’s destruction lack probative value. (2) Any narrative about what actually happened to the real people living in the central mountain areas of ancient Israel during what archaeologists call the Iron Age must, accordingly, be based on archaeological data alone. No other authentic sources for their history are available.”
It is widely accepted that the Bible originated in the 7th Century BCE, 300 years after David and other historical aberrations encompass the palaces officially ascribed to Solomon in Megiddo which are dated long after Solomon’s time. Cities conquered by Joshua in the 14th century BCE were destroyed well before that era. Daniel Gavron comments that “The story of Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldees, the Patriarchs, the Exodus, Sinai, and the conquest of Canaan, all these were apparently based on legends…” In 2004, Yuval Goren admitted he examined ” a seemingly endless line of fake biblical texts of various kinds. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such forgeries referring especially to the time of the First Temple. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the disciplines of biblical history and archaeology have been contaminated to such an extent that no unprovenanced written source seems to be reliable anymore.”
Proof of David’s existence rests on a piece of stone found at Tel Dan in northern Galilee (not Jerusalem) inscribed with the words ‘Beit David’ which could mean House of ‘David’ or ‘Beloved’ but not King David conclusively as with the sherd found at Tel Safi with the name ‘Goliath’ which “almost certainly did not belong to David’s Goliath, if it does say “Goliath” then it shows that there was such a personal name used in the region at approximately the correct chronological period.” The first ancient reference to an Israelite king is found in an 8th Century BCE Assyrian document recording “King Ahab of Israel sent 2,000 chariots and 10,000 soldiers.”
Sumud (steadfastness) life and land are synonymous in the Palestinian soul. King David may be a myth but it is the modern indigenous Palestinians, outcasts in their own land, who stand alone with the stone of sumud in their hands daily facing off the militant aliyah hordes backed by the Zionist Goliaths of multi-billion dollar empires, by Christian Zionist offerings, by the servile US Congress, by a depraved UK and EU and by a contemptibly inadequate United Nations.
– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 and was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The Jerusalem occupation municipality announced a plan to build a new shopping centre with a car park on a piece of land that is owned by the Armenian Church in the old city.
The municipality further banned residents of the Armenian quarter in the old city from parking their cars on the land which is owned by the church.
Residents of the Armenian quarter demonstrated on Thursday to protest the steps taken by the municipality, but the demonstration was dispersed by the Israeli occupation police.
The land which is about 4000 square meters and which is owned by the Armenian Church was used by local residents as a free car park, but the locals were surprised when the so called Jewish quarters committee started collecting parking fees, and now barred them altogether from parking their cars there.
After interrogating him at a Police station in occupied Jerusalem, on Tuesday, the Israeli Police issued an order forcing Palestinian activist and intellectual, Rasem Obeidat, to remain in his residential area in Jerusalem for seven months. He will not be allowed out of Jerusalem, and will only be allowed into certain areas in the city.
The Police handed Obeidat a map detailing the areas he will be allowed to enter in Jerusalem for the duration of this order.
Obeidat was repeatedly imprisoned by Israel for his political activities and writings. He is active in many areas, mainly: social issues, the occupation, the issue of the detainees imprisoned by Israel, and in defending the Palestinian rights in the city.
He stated that preventing him from entering the West Bank, and forcing him out of several parts of Jerusalem, is a direct violation to the Freedom of Movement guaranteed by all international laws and regulations. Obeidat added that this order specifically violates the Fourth Article of the Geneva Convention of 1949.
He also stated that this order is unjust, and aims at targeting Palestinian political and social figures in the city, the same way Israel targets religious figures and all intellectuals, adding that this decision does not only target him personally, but also targets his family, as he heads the Vocational Rehabilitation Program at the YMCA in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem.
Obeidat was arrested in 1985 for his political activities with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and was imprisoned for two years.
He was also imprisoned for 17 months (June, 7, 2005 – October 9, 2006) for his social and political activities. He is married and a father of four; the oldest is 17 years old.
Obeidat said that the European Union, the Quartet Committee, and all related international groups, must impose sanctions on Israel for its ongoing attacks and violations against the Palestinian people.
Two weeks ago, the Israeli Army and Police broke into the Red Cross headquarters in Jerusalem, and kidnapped Palestinian Legislator, Mohammad Totah, and former Jerusalem Minister, Khaled Abu Arafa.
Two days ago, the police raided an Islamic Club in Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, and shut down the Silwan Charitable Society under claims of supporting the Palestinian resistance.
Join us as we intensify our struggle against forced exile and the system of Israeli apartheid on Land Day 2012. We Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed and uprooted from our lands starting in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) which resulted in the creation of the millions of refugees who are now living in the Diaspora. Nineteen years later, in 1967, Israel illegally annexed East-Jerusalem and the West Bank in a move which marked the Naksa (Setback), and subjected the remaining Palestinians to a brutal military occupation.
We are now in 2012, and we are still living in exile or under the Israeli apartheid regime, the illegal construction of colonial settlements is confiscating the remaining parts of Palestine, the Separation Wall divides and separates villages and towns, and Palestinians in Jerusalem are threatened with being driven out of their homes and lands for the mere purpose of the Judaization of this sacred city.
But we will not leave. We will stand and be firm. We will not permit thousands of years of our attachment to our land and our Holy City to be broken. We therefore invite and call upon all persons of courage and good will around the world to stand up and walk, with your fellow human beings, regardless of religion, of political affiliation – to stand up as responsible human beings and walk peacefully towards Jerusalem on the 30th of March, 2012.
We therefore ask all our brothers and sisters throughout the world to join Palestinians on Land Day, 30 March, 2011, in challenging the barriers, borders and procedures that separate Palestinians from Jerusalem and from their homes and lands in all of historic Palestine.
On his visit to Switzerland, Hamas spokesperson Mushir al-Masri unequivocally condemned the Jerusalem Light Rail project. French companies Veolia and Alstom should stop assisting the occupier and leave Jerusalem, he said.
Al-Masri headed a delegation of members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva. The Electronic Intifada reported on the first official visit of Hamas members to a European country since the 2006 PLC elections. I interviewed Al-Masri on Thursday, 19 January, about his views on the Israeli Jerusalem Light Rail project.
The first line of the light rail connects West Jerusalem with the illegal settlements of Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the annexation of East Jerusalem are illegal under international law. This status has been confirmed repeatedly by numerous UN resolutions and the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank.
I wrote about the negative impact of the light rail on Palestinian Shuafat in my blog of 14 December. The first line of the light rail – for which two thousand square meters of land belonging to Shuafat resident Mahmoud al-Mashni have been confiscated – has three stops in Shuafat.
Jerusalem Light Rail stop in Shuafat, 30 December 2011, 11.50 am (Ibrahim Yousef)
According to Al-Masri, “This a dangerous project, well planned by the occupier to maintain, strengthen, change the image of Jerusalem. To destroy the historical monuments of Islam. The aim is to link West Jerusalem to East Jerusalem and to make sure that Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of Israel. It proves that Israel does not believe in peace.”
When I inform him that Veolia repeatedly states that the light rail is important for the Palestinians because they use it, he responds: “Any company that assists the occupier does not contribute to peace. They should leave Jerusalem. They should respect the resolutions of international organizations. Companies that support the occupation violate international law. If Palestinians use the light rail, it is not an argument. They maybe have to use it because it is a means of transport that is available. Veolia should not look for excuses for the occupation.”
Through its spokesperson Al-Masri, Hamas has joined the protests and criticism against the Jerusalem Light Rail and the two French companies involved in it: Veolia and Alstom. Palestinian non-governmental organizations, the PLO, the Arab League, international law experts, solidarity activists, churches, trade unions, city councils, socially responsible investment advisers and pension funds have called on Veolia to end their involvement in Israeli projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
However, Veolia has chosen to continue its collaboration with the Israeli authorities in a project that was developed to serve the needs of the settlers in East Jerusalem. Veolia has therefore been targeted by the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Veolia Israel’s CEO Arnon Fishbein commented on Veolia’s attempts to sell off its shares in the light rail to Egged in the Israeli magazine The Marker on 26 January. “There were pressures inside Veolia, because there are many among the group who believe the company lost a lot of contracts because of this project”, he admits. “One way or another, we will never leave a contract in the middle”, says Fishbein. (Translated from Hebrew)
It is unlikely that the deal with Egged will be approved because Israel requires the operator to be a foreign and experienced company. According to The Marker, banks are not happy to entrust the project in the inexperienced hands of Egged.
Fishbein sums up Veolia’s commitment to the Jerusalem Light Rail: “We are not running away from any contract. We made a business agreement. If it would be approved, we’ll be happy to carry on with it. If not – we won’t stop the train.”
Instead of listening to the voice of the Palestinians and respecting decisions of UN bodies, Veolia Israel’s CEO expresses clearly the company’s dedication to a project of the occupying power Israel. The global BDS Movement will therefore continue its activism against Veolia.
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Top Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has denied the existence of Jewish roots in the city of Jerusalem, contrary to Israel’s claims that have prompted continued Judaization of the city.
Finkelstein, a professor at Tel Aviv University, said Jewish archaeologists have failed to unearth historic sites to support some of the stories in the Torah. Among those stories are the Jewish Exodus, the forty-year wandering in the Sinai desert, and Joshua’s victory over the Canaanites.
He also said there was no archaeological evidence that concludes that the alleged Temple of Solomon ever existed.
For his part, Professor of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University Raphael Greenberg said that the Israelis should have found something after digging for six weeks in the City of David in East Jerusalem’s Silwan district, but have found nothing in two years of continuous excavations.
Prof. Yoni Mihrazi, an independent archaeologist who has worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency, agreed with Finkelstein’s findings, saying that top settler organization Elad had not stumbled upon even a banner saying “welcome to the city of David”, given that claims were made to have been relying on sacred texts to guide them in their work.
On Thursday, February 24, 20-year-old Mohammad Gharib of al-Issawiya village near Jerusalem was driving home, bringing dinner from a restaurant in Jerusalem.
Mohammad Gharib – PNN
Mohammad took his youngest brother and his friend along for the ride. When they reached the intersection leading to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, their car broke down.
“As I was trying to see what happened to the car, three settlers stopped and offered to help,” Mohammad recalled. “I thanked them and as I was speaking to them in Hebrew, they realized I was Arab. They started calling me names, then one of them pulled his gun and shot me in the knee.”
Mohammad was taken immediately to al-Maqasid hospital in Jerusalem, then moved to the Israeli hospital of Hadassah where doctors told him his knee was shattered and muscles torn.
“Doctors installed a device to make me walk,” he said, “but now I can’t leave my bed on my own”.
Mohammad said he filed a police report and told Israeli officers that he could identify the settler who shot him. He also demanded they work on his case quickly.
As of now, he is still lying in bed in pain and waiting for the police to arrest his attackers.
Ankara – Once again Israel demonstrates its contempt for the world. This time the location is the Jerusalem quarter of Sheikh Jarrah and this time the occasion is the demolition of the Shepherd Hotel, the latest target in a process of demolition and rebuilding in the Zionist image that has been going on for the past six decades in all of Palestine.
The first actions of the occupying regime in East Jerusalem in 1967 was the destruction of the medieval Magharibah quarter, founded in the 12th century by a son of the great warrior Salah al Din al Ayyubi (Saladin), to make way for a ‘plaza’ in front of the western wall of the Haram al Sharif. Soon after it was the turn of the Fakhriya compound, the home of the sheikh of the Shafi’i school of Islamic law. A section of the Mamilla century, where the remains include the bones of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, was bulldozed to make way for a garden, a car park and lavatories. The rest has since been built over to make way for a ‘Museum of Tolerance’. The destroyed buildings were part of Jerusalem’s architectural and historical heritage. The people who lived there were driven into the street and left to fend for themselves as best as they could, a precedent for thousands of similar situations which were to follow. Had the awful chief rabbi of the Israeli ‘defence’ forces, Shlomo Goren, had his way, the destruction would have included the Aqsa mosque. Israel’s intention is to destroy Arab Jerusalem and replace it with Jewish Jerusalem. The difference is that Arab Jerusalem was a tolerant city. Jewish Jerusalem is not. It is a city of religious and secular fanatics, who have no consideration for any interests, laws or rights other than their own. The city has not known a worse period of history since it was captured by the Crusaders in the 11th century.
Now we have the destruction of the Shepherd Hotel, a landmark in Jerusalem since early in the 20th century. It was built as a home for the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Hussein, before he escaped from the British in 1937. He never lived there. The building was the home of Katy and George Antonius, the celebrated Palestinian Arab historian, and then was used as a base for British soldiers before being converted into a hotel. In 1967 the government of Israel declared the hotel ‘absentee property’ and used it for its own purposes before ‘selling it’ in 1985 to the American Jewish billionaire Irving Moskowitz, who made his money from casinos and gives a sizeable percentage of it to the Ateret Kohanim settler organisation. The US government theoretically opposes settlements but has never even attempted to put a spoke in Moskowitz’s wheel, which it could have done by removing the tax-free status of his ‘philanthropic’ donations to Israel. Of course, the Shepherd hotel was never sold. It could not be, seeing that it was not the property of the state of Israel in the first place. It remains the property of the Husseini family. The property which was ‘sold’ was stolen and under any laws except those of Israel’s, it remains the property of the original owner (ask your friendly local policeman for confirmation).
Beyond all of this, everything Israel has done in East Jerusalem since 1967 to bring about permanent change is illegal under international law. The movement of civilians into occupied territory is specifically prohibited under article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention (1949), one of many articles of the convention which Israel has violated. The declaration of the Greater Jerusalem municipality in 1967 is an inherent violation of international law. Nir Barkat has no more right to call himself the mayor of Jerusalem than any official administering any occupied territory anywhere at any time. Laws and regulations changing the status quo in East Jerusalem represent breaches of international law enabled by the government of Israel. Those of Barkat’s voters who live in East Jerusalem have no right to be there and therefore no right to vote. They are civilians who have been transferred into occupied territory. The whole situation is quite mad, but at least consistently mad.
The purpose of pulling down the Shepherd Hotel, all but the facade, which will be maintained to give the new structure some semblance of historical authenticity, is to built 20 luxury apartments for Jews only. This could not happen nowhere elsewhere without being described as open racism but in Israel it is no more than par for the course. Racism seeps out of the state and society more overtly and openly and defiantly every day. It is not accidental but structural. It is embedded in the ideology of Zionism and in the laws and regulations of the state and it is encouraged right from the top. Notwithstanding Netanyahu and his equally repugnant Foreign Minister are driving forward the whole ugly process. They are the head on the body of the stinking fish. Opinion polls show that Jews don’t want to live in the same street or apartment block as ‘Arabs’. Hundreds of fanatical rabbis sign petitions prohibiting the sale or rental of property to ‘Arabs’. Again, we should not be surprised, seeing that this was the principal article of the Jewish National Fund when it began trying to purchase land in Palestine early in the 20th century. ‘Arabs’ in East Jerusalem are beaten up by marauding gangs of Jewish youth. ‘Arab’ students in Safad – a Palestinian city taken over by the Zionists in 1948 as all other cities were – are threatened and abused by Jewish fundamentalists. Demonstrators protest against Jewish women going out with ‘Arab’ men. Even love cannot deflect their hate. Inside and outside the Knesset members of this less than august body threaten the ‘Arabs’ and threaten the Jews whose conscience does not allow them to remain silent witnesses any longer to the brutality and the racism of the state. So why should anyone be surprised by the decision to pull down a Palestinian-owned hotel and replace it with an apartment in which only Jews can live.
The only positive sign in this ugly climate is that the EU finally seems to be getting its act together. A document has been prepared calling on representatives of all EU governments to refuse to have anything to do with representatives of the government of Israel east of the so-called ‘green line’. They would not deal with them, they would not acknowledge them, they would not visit their offices, they would not use Israeli travel and tourist offices when making their plans and they would not accept to be protected under Israeli ‘security’ arrangements. The reasoning behind this document is that if there is ever to be a settlement, East Jerusalem must be the Palestinian capital, and that option is fast disappearing in the dust of Israeli bulldozers. Israel will be trying to work on the EU directly and through the US to compel it to drop this plan. Let’s hope that for once, the EU sticks to its guns and actually does something that opens up a little sliver of light in this gloomy situation.
– Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.
The Ma’man Allah (Mamilla) Cemetery was the oldest Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem with graves dating back to the seventh century, comprised of 33 acres and tens of thousands of graves. After 1948 the Israeli ministry that maintained the site reassured world leaders that this important religious site would be cared for in perpetuity.
Less than fifteen years later, in the 1960s a park was built in part of the cemetery and a parking lot covered another part. These were followed by a school, football field, underground parking garage, and road. Electrical wires were laid in other sections.
The final few acres were dug up just before the beginning of Ramadan, in the middle of the night (as can be seen on the CNN video) so that Israel can build the Museum of Tolerance in conjunction with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States.
An enormous amount of knowledge was lost with the destruction of the Mamilla Cemetery, according to St. Paul based archaeologist, John E. Landgraf, Ph.D., because the era since the end of the Byzantine period and the beginning of the Islamic conquest (around 638 CE) up to the present day is the least known period of history in the Middle East generally. There is much to be learned by examining skeletal remains, headstones, and tombs. However, the Israeli Department of Antiquities, which has recently been taken over by the Orthodox Rabbinate, does not allow any human skeletal remains to be examined; Jewish remains must be re-interred as quickly as possible out of respect, whereas non-Jewish remains at the Mamilla Cemetery were disposed of along with tombstones and other debris in construction dumpsters.
Dr. Landgraf, who participated in a number of archaeological digs in Israel and the West Bank between 1965 and 1980, said that the Israeli Department of Antiquities was seldom interested in the preservation of remains or artifacts from the Islamic period. In the late 1960s the discovery of Muslim graves at Tell Gezer did not interest the American head archaeologist at the time, and so bulldozers were used to push remains, artifacts, and debris back into the graves.
Archaeological excavations are a way of learning about the past in an orderly fashion. One exposes history a layer at a time, and by careful examination knowledge can be gained of the various eras and cultures. When Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 Israeli archaeologists used bulldozers to excavate the Western (Wailing) Wall area down to the late Roman period, destroying the homes of Palestinians living there at the time, and along with them the 1500-year history of the people who had lived there since the Byzantine period. “Thus there is a loss of continuity in our understanding of the past,” said Dr. Landgraf.
It is ironic that in the midst of mass hysteria over an Islamic center to be built in lower Manhattan, because some people feel that this would be disrespectful to the dead, that a genuine desecration of a sacred place occurs, unreported in most mainstream media. “The unfortunate reality is that Indigenous populations live in a world in which we are never safe from colonizer assaults even when we are dead,” says Wazayatawin, Ph.D., Indigenous Peoples Research Chair and Associate Professor, Indigenous Governance Program, University of Victoria, someone who has worked on behalf of Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere for many years, and sees many parallels with the experience of Palestinians. “The ongoing desecration of Indigenous burial sites, including the Mamilla Cemetery in West Jerusalem, reflects a deeply embedded colonizer mentality that views subjugated peoples as fundamentally inferior and unworthy of even the most basic dignities afforded other human beings,” she says.
Dr. Wazayatawin continues, “The act of erasing a people’s memory from the landscape is a necessary element in the colonization process. In order for the colonizers to legitimize their occupation of another’s land, they must eradicate all memories of the colonized, including even the human remains that demonstrate a deep and powerful connection to the land itself.”
Everywhere in Israel are the eradicated memories of the dispossessed Indigenous people. Old mosques are transformed into bars and nightclubs, so that patrons drink alcohol where Muslims used to pray. The history museum in Jaffa (more of a tourist site than an educational institution) is inexplicably silent about the existence of people in the city between the Roman times and Napoleon’s invasion. Street names are changed from their ancient Arabic names to new Hebrew ones. Golda Meir’s famous comment “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” reflected her desire, not a reality, but it has been repeated so often that many Israelis believe it. The destruction of a cemetery shows starkly how little regard Israel holds for the humanity of the Palestinians. As Dr. Wazayatawin says, “There is something terribly wrong with a culture that digs up the dead of others. The societal justification for such a crime reveals its own sickness.”
I am an American Jew who began to question Zionism in 1982 after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. After reading everything I could on the Israel and Palestine I realized I could no longer remain passive on this issue while Palestinians suffered from Israeli human rights abuses and international law violations. I am actively involved in the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), in a state-wide campaign to get our state to divest from State of Israel bonds, and in other Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns. As I write this in June 2010 there are reasons for optimism as well as pessimism. Pessimism because the repression experienced by Palestinians increases daily. Optimism because the increasing repression is a result of the work that we are doing. I believe we will end Israeli Apartheid in my life time. This issue is all-consuming for me, and so I suppose it’s not horrible that I was laid off from my waste water design engineering job in February 2009 and have been unemployed since.
Here is the Promotion for the “Museum of Tolerance”
During World War I, for security reasons the Australian Government pursued a comprehensive internment policy against enemy aliens living in Australia.
Initially only those born in countries at war with Australia were classed as enemy aliens, but later this was expanded to include people of enemy nations who were naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants born in enemy nations and others who were thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security.
Australia interned almost 7,000 people during World War I, of whom about 4,500 were enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.
During World War II, Australian authorities established internment camps for three reasons – to prevent residents from assisting Australia’s enemies, to appease public opinion and to house overseas internees sent to Australia for the duration of the war.
Unlike World War I, the initial aim of internment during the later conflict was to identify and intern those who posed a particular threat to the safety or defence of the country. As the war progressed, however, this policy changed and Japanese residents were interned en masse. In the later years of the war, Germans and Italians were also interned on the basis of nationality, particularly those living in the north of Australia. In all, just over 20 per cent of all Italians resident in Australia were interned. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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After interrogating him at a Police station in occupied Jerusalem, on Tuesday, the Israeli Police issued an order forcing Palestinian activist and intellectual, Rasem Obeidat, to remain in his residential area in Jerusalem for seven months. He will not be allowed out of Jerusalem, and will only be allowed into certain areas in the city.
Join us as we intensify our struggle against forced exile and the system of Israeli apartheid on Land Day 2012. We Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed and uprooted from our lands starting in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) which resulted in the creation of the millions of refugees who are now living in the Diaspora. Nineteen years later, in 1967, Israel illegally annexed East-Jerusalem and the West Bank in a move which marked the Naksa (Setback), and subjected the remaining Palestinians to a brutal military occupation.
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