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It’s getting near that time of year when people in the UK, fed up of their dank, grey winter, begin flicking through holiday brochures and the travel supplements in their weekend newspapers, dreaming of a warm and exciting destination for their summer break.
Sarah Irving - Former ISM activist
As may be expected, the Guardian’s travel section also contains articles on a variety of tempting destinations. Las Vegas, Spain, Turkey and the Red Sea to to name but a few, and this week there’s also an article by the author of the newly published Bradt Guide to Palestine, Sarah Irving, on its top 10 attractions.
The vast majority of readers of the article will of course be unfamiliar with the region and may therefore not pick up onIrving’s distinctly partisan style or the inaccuracies in her article and, one can only assume, her book.
Already in her introduction,Irving makes much of potential travel difficulties visited on the unsuspecting voyager by the Israeli authorities. Of course she makes no mention of why inconveniences such as checkpoints or airport security checks may be necessary in order to protect the lives of tourists just as much as Israelis.
Irving then proceeds to give her recommendations for places to visit. Sebastia becomes a site of “Hellenic watchtowers, ruined Samaritan palaces and crumbling Byzantine churches” along with “Islamic shrines”: no mention of the history before the relatively late naming of the town Sebastia after Augustus Caesar, which includes the archeological excavations of the royal citadel and kings of Israel, including Ahab, between 880 and 721 BCE.
Next, Irving moves on to the Dome of the Rock which, despite this being a guide to Palestine, is of course situated in Israel. The only clue the reader might get about that fact is her claim that the site is “[u]sually closed for Islamic holidays, Jewish holidays, Fri/Sat (except Muslim worshippers), and whenever the Israeli authorities consider there to be a security risk.“ Ah, those unpredictable and hysterical Israelis again!
Northwards to Jenin and Irving cannot resist yet another context-free remark: “this bustling town, sadly better known for the Israeli army’s massive 2002 attack on the refugee camp.” Of course one does have to admit that Jenin’s other title as terror capital of the Palestinian Territories is somewhat less likely to draw in the crowds.
Next Irving manages to turn Abraham, after whom a hiking trail is named, into “the Prophet Abraham”, and to skip meticulously over any Jewish history in Taibeh or Jericholiable to distract the reader, before arriving in Hevron. The tomb of Abraham and the other patriarchs at Machpela is not recommended to visitors – presumably because that would not fit into the narrative – but she does manage the by now obligatory mention of wicked Israelis. “Many [shops] have closed, shut by Israeli military order to protect the settlers who have occupied parts of the city, or because the settler threat makes business unviable.” In fact, rather than having ‘occupied’ it, the Jews living in Hevron do so under the terms of the Oslo Accords signed by the representatives of the Palestinian people.
Irving’s attention turns next to Acco – or as she for some reason calls it ‘Akka’. Acco is of course situated in Israel, but Irving gets round this by informing her readers that “The new Bradt guide also covers areas of Israel that are home to large numbers of Palestinians and where their culture survives.” The Arabs living in Acco are Israeli Arabs – who chose not to leave Israel during the War of Independence in 1948.
It is clear that far from being a ‘travel guide’, Irving’s book is actually a political polemic.
Why Bradt should have selected such an obviously biased author to write a guide which appears to attempt to erase Jewish history from Judea and Samaria (unless in the form of context-free references to contemporary security issues) is a mystery.
A quick Google search would have shown Bradt’s editors that Sarah Irving has a very rich history of her own.
In 2002 she visited the Palestinian territories as a member of the International Solidarity Movement. She writes for ‘Electronic Intifada‘ (among others) and also maintains her own fiercely anti-Israel blog. She has co-written a book (promoted by the ISM) about Operation Cast Lead which she describes as “the massive Israeli invasion in December 2008 and January 2009, when 1,400 people were killed, mainly children and other civilians.”
As is well known, Hamas itself has admitted that over half the casualties were members of its own terrorist organization which had fired rockets at Israeli civilians for years before the Israeli military operation.
Currently Irving is writing a biography of the hijacker and terrorist Leila Khaled, also to be published by the same Pluto Press which includes Gilad Atzmon in its stable of reviewers, and runs a blog dedicated to Leila Khaled.
Irving’s ‘understanding’ and ‘expertise’ on the Middle Eastis summed up here in her own wors:
“On a wider political scale, it’s impossible to disconnect the West’s support for Israel and our governments’ apparent blindness to Israeli human rights abuses and also to the massive theft of land for settlements, the discrimination meted out to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and Palestinian citizens of Israel, from issues like control of the Middle East and its oil, racism and anti-Islamism, and global hatred and hostility which feed religious fundamentalism – Christian and Jewish as well as Islamic.”
Obviously, this article byIrving calls into question the reliability of this particular Bradt travel guide as far as genuine tourists are concerned but it also prompts one to wonder if their previous publications also cater exclusively to the terror-chic market.
That the Guardian’s travel editor apparently saw nothing unprofessional in publishing an article and promoting so blatantly faulted a book by a terrorist-supporting writer indicates that readers need to regard its travel recommendations with considerable caution.
(h/t Infinity)
Before commenting on the latest report by the Guardian’s Chris McGreal, “Israel plans new settlement of 2600 that will isolate Arab East Jerusalem“, an understanding of the designation “Arab East Jerusalem” is in order.
This isn’t, of course, a comprehensive history, but represents important context sorely lacking in the Guardian’s frequent misrepresentations about issues pertaining to Jerusalem.
Around the year 1010 B.C.E., King David made the Jerusalem the administrative capital of Israel and brought the Ark of the Covenant to the city. It is believed that David’s son, Solomon, built the first Jewish Temple as a permanent resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, a place which would become the focus of Jewish veneration from that point to the present.
In 597 B.C.E. the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, deported thousands of Jews, and razed the city.
In 560 B.C.E., the Persians conquered “Palestine” and told the Jews they could return to their homeland, and rebuild their Temple. The Second Temple was completed in 516 B.C. Over the next 150 years Jews rebuilt Jerusalem and developed the surrounding areas.
In 332 B.C.E., the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, became Palestine’s new ruler.
In 167 B.C.E., Jews rose up and, three years later, Jerusalem was recaptured from the Greeks and the Temple restored, an event that gave birth to the holiday of Chanukah.
After 76 years, the Romans wrested control of Jerusalem and the rest of Judea from the Jews.
Under King Herod, the area of the Temple Mount was doubled and surrounded with four retaining walls, including the area known as the Kotel or Western Wall. In 66 A.D., after a failed Jewish revolt against Roman rule, The Romans laid siege to the city and in the year 70 A.D. destroyed the Second Temple.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Christianity began to rise, until the Islamic conquest in 633 – the beginning of a 1,300-year span during which more than ten different empires were to rule in the Holy Land prior to the British occupation after World War I.
The Ottoman Turks took control of Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The Ottoman Turks were defeated in World War I and Palestine was captured by the British, who subsequently were awarded a mandate from the League of Nations to rule the land.
When the United Nations took up the Palestine question in 1947, it recommended that all of Jerusalem be internationalized. The Jewish Agency agreed to accept internationalization, while the Arab states were opposed to the plan, as they were to the rest of the partition plan.
In May 1948, upon Israel’s declaration of Independence, Arab armies invaded the newly created Jewish state and (by the end of the war, per the 1949 armistice lines) Jordan occupied east Jerusalem, dividing the city for the first time in its history, and driving thousands of Jews — whose families had lived in the city for centuries — into exile.
Jewish girl, Rachel Levy, 7, fleeing from street with burning buildings as the Arabs sack Jerusalem after its surrender. May 28, 1948.
For the next 19 years, from 1948-67, the city was split between Israeli and Jordanian control, a period which represents the only time the city has been divided in its history.
This is what is meant by the extremely misleading refrain by Guardian reporters (and others in the MSM) of “Arab East Jerusalem“.
Jews living in the Jordanian controlled section of Jerusalem were expelled and all Jews were denied access to the Western Wall. Jordan also subsequently desecrated Jewish holy place and attempted to erase all traces of Jewish history in the city. Fifty-eight Jerusalem synagogues — some centuries old — were destroyed.
Also, under Jordanian rule, Israeli Christians were subjected to restrictions and many subsequently emigrated from Jerusalem, leading their numbers to dwindle from 25,000 in 1949 to less than 13,000 in June 1967.
Upon the beginning of the Six Day War in June of 1967, Jordanian forces launched multiple attacks on Israel, which included thousands of mortar shells fired at West Jerusalem.
However, Israeli forces fought back and within two days managed to repulse the Jordanian forces and retake eastern Jerusalem.
Within weeks, free movement through Jerusalem became possible. Israeli Muslims were permitted to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock for the first time since 1948. And Israeli Christians came to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Knesset passed the Protection of Holy Places Law granting special legal status to the Holy Sites and making it a criminal offence to desecrate or violate them, or to impede freedom of access to them.
Arab residents were given the choice of whether to become Israeli citizens and, while most chose to retain their Jordanian citizenship, all Jerusalem Arabs are permitted to vote in municipal elections.
The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (DoP) signed September 13, 1993, left open the status of Jerusalem. Other than an agreement to discuss Jerusalem during final status talks, Israel conceded nothing regarding the status of the city during the interim period.
In both 2000 and 2008, Palestinian negotiators accepted in principle (in the context of final status negotiations) that large Jewish communities beyond the Green Line, such as Gilo, would remain under Israeli control.
Finally, moving to Chris McGreal’s report, he writes, regarding Israeli plans to build new homes in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood of Jerusalem:
”…it would virtually cut off the Arab east of the city from the rest of the occupied West Bank.”
The word “virtually” is an interesting word, meant to obscure the fact that the neighborhood wouldn’t actually cut off the “Arab east of the city”, as this map shows.
More broadly, McGreal spares no effort to characterize the potential construction of new homes in Israel’s capital in the most hyperbolic and hysterical terms, quoting a leftwing city council member thusly:
“The people behind this are pyromaniacs and terrorists because they are lighting fires all over the place that at the end of the day will set up a new wave of terrorist attacks.”
But, as the Jerusalem Post noted about the proposed community.
“The plan for a new neighborhood at Givat Hamatos has been in the works for years. The general construction plan for Givat Hamatos with 2,610 housing units was approved in September. At least some of the housing units will be reserved for an Arab extension of Beit Safafa.
However, the project’s approval in September did not raise any red flags since the land for the project has many different owners, including the Spanish government and the Latin Patriarch, said Margalit. Determining and reorganizing the ownership for building purposes is a complicated legal process called “reparcelization” that can take years, leading activists and politicians to focus their energies elsewhere.”
Moreover, the logic which suggests that Israelis shouldn’t live in the east section of the city represents an acceptance of the logic of the Jordanian expulsion of Jews, and destruction of Jewish life, from 1949-1967 – the only time in history the city was divided by religion.
Equally as important in understanding the issue of Israeli building in Jerusalem, Palestinians in East Jerusalem consistently indicate that, in a final status agreement, they almost universally do not want the city divided.
Jerusalem has been the center of Jewish life for over 3,000 years. Moreover, Jews have constituted the largest single group of inhabitants there since the 1840′s.
As Yaacov Lozowick observed about the possibility of a divided Jerusalem:
Imagine a city with an international border running between buildings on the same block in Jerusalem; to one side a free and rich society, to the other: not. The rich enjoy a world-class health system and social security; the poor lost access upon division. Each side has its own police force, with no love lost between them. Could it ever work? Wouldn’t it generate never-ending tension?
That’s the optimistic scenario, where both states share a cautious wish to live in peace. Now imagine if one or both comes to regret the arrangement, immediately or in 50 years.
Go to the website of the Geneva Accord and its detailed recommendation to divide Jerusalem. Follow the line, imagining it: What do the divided streets look like? Between which buildings will there be a border? What about where the line runs through single structures in the Old City? Ponder the possibility that the gamble fails, and the townspeople on either side of this hellish border decide not to live in peace.
Refusal to divide Jerusalem need not preclude creating a Palestinian state. Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank should be dismantled to enable the Palestinians to have a coherent state. Within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, outlying Arab neighborhoods that don’t abut Jewish ones should be transferred to Palestine. Not the Holy Basin, however. Dividing the historic sections of Jerusalem is delusional. It will never bring peace, and it could lead to war.
Of course, such stubborn logic will never penetrate the ideological blinders which continue to skew the Guardian’s view from Jerusalem.
This is cross posted from the site, Missing Peace, and serves as a rebuttal to Harriet Sherwood’s report, “Israel approves new settler homes in East Jerusalem, Sept. 27., which characterized the plan to build new apartments in Israel’s capital as “provocative” and a threat to peace.
A new international outcry about the latest building plan in Jerusalem has led to a mini crisis in German Israeli relations.
Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to criticize a building plan in the Gilo neighborhood. Last week the plan received initial approval from the Jerusalem district planning and building committee of the Israeli Interior Ministry.
Earlier Merkel’s spokesman had expressed doubts about Netanyahu’s seriousness in regard to new negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
Merkel wasn’t the only European leader to criticize Israel for approving the building plan, which will provide 1100 much needed new apartments to the population of Jerusalem.
EU commissioner Catherine Ashton also joined the chorus and called the plan ‘provocative’ and even urged Israel to ‘reverse its plans’.
Aside from the fact that these criticizers are totally ignorant when it comes to some of the most basic facts about Jerusalem and Gilo, there is also the deafening silence in light of Palestinian intransigence and blatant violations of signed peace accords.
Recently PA president Mahmoud Abbas, officially announcing the Palestinian statehood bid – which by the way constitutes a violation of the Oslo accords - delivered a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, that was full of distortions and incitement against Israel.
He received applause.
Similarly Senior Fatah official Abbas Zaki last week openly declared that the PA attempts to obtain full UN membership, were in fact meant as a next step towards the establishment of a Palestinian state in place of Israel.
No international outcry followed.
But let us return to the claim that the building of 1100 units in Gilo threatens peace or even the peace negotiations.
Here are seven facts everyone making claims like these should know:
1. Gilo is not a settlement. The Jerusalem neighborhood, situated roughly one kilometer beyond the 1948 armistice (Green) line, was mainly built on land that was purchased by Jews before World War 2. After 1967 when Israel in fact recaptured Gilo, additional land was sold to Israelis by Jabra Hamis the former mayor of Beit Jallah . The same land was later used for building projects in Gilo.The status of Jerusalem was left out of the 1947 partition plan and out of the Oslo accords. Jerusalem has had an overwhelming Jewish majority since the second half of the 19th century and has always been the capital of Israel.
2. Final status talks between Israel and the PA always focused on keeping Gilo and other Jewish neighborhoods beyond the Green Line within Israel.
3. Israel never committed itself to a building halt in Jerusalem. The city is suffering from a severe housing crisis caused by a lack of building due to political pressure and a shortage of available land in West Jerusalem, where the city borders one of Israel’s most important nature reserves. As a result rent for an average three room apartment in a Jewish neighborhood has skyrocketed to 900 $ a month. Compare that to the 220 $ for an average three room apartment in a Palestinian town on the West Bank.
4. The approval of the building plan by the Israeli Interior Ministry does not mean that building will start tomorrow. The process of building a neighborhood in Israel can take up to ten years from the moment a plan is submitted for initial approval to the first of a series committees dealing with building plans.
5. The particular plan in Gilo deals with building within the current neighborhood, as is shown on the maps below. Most of the building will take place in parts of the Gilo Forest on land situated between two ‘peninsula’s’ on the west side of Gilo, opposite land within the Green line where the Jerusalem Zoo and the Central Train Station are located.
6. No Arab village on the southern or eastern side of Gilo is threatened by the building plan, nor are the planned units ‘encroaching’ on land owned by Arabs.
7. Gilo is the only Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem directly bordering an area under PA control. The strategic importance of Gilo to the security of Jerusalem became clear during the Second Intifada, when Palestinian terrorists conducted daily shooting attacks on the neighborhood from BeitJallah. As a result houses on the east side of Gilo had to be fortified. In the end a huge wall was built to protect Gilo against incoming fire from Beit Jallah.
Meanwhile Danny Ayalon Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister criticized the foreign intervention in building affairs in Jerusalem and said that the condemnations only serve the Palestinian agenda of making preconditions to complicate future peace negotiations.
Indeed, the way large parts of the international community react to building in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem has taken the form of a Pavlovian response in which rationality doesn’t matter anymore.
Apparently all that counts is to make clear that, contrary to the historical and legal Jewish claim on the whole of Jerusalem, Israel has no business in the parts of Jerusalem that where illegally occupied by Jordan during the war of independence in 1948.
google map of Gilo showing the area's where the building is scheduled (D,E,F)
This is cross posted by Simon Plosker at the blog of Honest Reporting
The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood just keeps demonstrating her gross ignorance of the region that she is meant to be covering. In May we caught her mistakenly claiming that Israel’s Knesset and other national buildings were located on Palestinian-owned land.
Prior to that, Sherwood was critiqued by HonestReporting for referring to the Western Wall as Judaism’s most holy site while promoting the Palestinian narrative of the Temple Mount as a primarily Muslim site.
This, despite the incontrovertible fact that the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site.
Evidently, Sherwood doesn’t learn from her mistakes. In an article concerning US broadcaster Glenn Beck holding rallies in Jerusalem, Sherwood writes:
Reinforcing his point, the rally is to be staged in the shadows of the Old City, close to boththe Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and the Haram al-Sharif, also known by Jews as the Temple Mount, which is revered by Muslims.
We don’t deny the attachment of Muslims to their holy sites but Sherwood not only gets her facts wrong but peddles a false historical narrative that denies and delegitimizes Jewish roots in Jerusalem.
See our previous expose of Sherwood’s error and why the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site here.
Related articles
A large H/T to Akus
Below is the title and subheading of Harriet Sherwood’s Aug. 17 piece about Jerusalem’s Light Rail Project, Jerusalem’s long-awaited light railway splits opinion, which, as I commented on yesterday, was characterized as a violation of international law,
It includes the original reference to a “Jewish grip” on E. Jerusalem, which I underlined in red: (via a cached version of the page).
The subheading was subsequently changed to “Israeli grip”:
The offensive phrase was also originally used in the following passage in Sherwood’s report:
“The project’s many critics include those who believe that, in a city with a long history of bombings, the light railway is vulnerable to attack. Others claim it is the latest example of the tightening Jewish grip on the Arab east of the city, part of an attempt to create an indivisible Jerusalem.
And, was likewise revised to:
The project’s many critics include those who believe that, in a city with a long history of bombings, the light railway is vulnerable to attack. There are others who claim it is the latest example of the tightening Israeli grip on the Arab east of the city, part of an attempt to create an indivisible Jerusalem.
The revised edition has this editor’s note:
• This article has been amended to correct language inconsistent with Guardian editorial guidelines
Related articles
This is cross posted at Backspin, the blog of Honest Reporting.
Here’s a new canard leveled against Israel: Many Christians living in the Holy Land have to convert to Islam or to a different Christian denomination in order to obtain a divorce.
So claims Jill Hamilton in a shocking commentary published in The Guardian‘s print edition:
In Israel, Christians come under 10 personal status codes: Latin Catholic, Melkite, Maronite, Syrian Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Chaldean, Anglican, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox and Armenian. Some can divorce; others cannot. Some codes give equality; others do not.
In the Holy Land, Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans can only separate; to remarry they first have to convert to Greek Orthodox or Islam to obtain a divorce. Annulment is possible, but there are only about five cases finalised in the region annually . . . .
But if Arab Christians had the same legal rights as their Muslim neighbours and fellow Christians in the west, there would be no need for conversions.
If Hamilton did her homework, she would discover that Israel gives autonomy to each of these communities, respecting their rules and authorities on matters of personal status. (Israel only steps in to enforce human rights or civil rights such as in cases of wife-beating, child marriage, etc.)
Denominations have varying outlooks and rules on divorce; couples choosing to fast-track a divorce by converting aren’t Israel’s concern. If Hamilton wants to take issue with denominational differences over divorce, that’s a discussion for the clergy, not the Israeli government.
Hamilton is misleading, and scandalously so.
She’s also divorced from reality.
I was invited, along with a group of journalists, to take a test run on Jerusalem’s Light Rail Project, which was preceded by a presentation by officials from the Jerusalem Transportation Authority responsible for its implementation.
While, as most Israelis know, the project is well behind schedule and over budget (another indication that Jerusalem is a normal municipality with all the requisite bureaucratic and administrative red tape and inefficiencies), when the first phase of the Light Rail is completed (maybe by late August), as well as subsequent phases which are to expand service to additional parts of the city, it will likely solve many of Jerusalem’s traffic issues, and offer a much more efficient way to travel around the city.
Dubbed the ‘Red Line’, it will initially have 23 stations and is planned to run from Pisgat Ze’ev in the northeast, south along Road 1 (intercity) to Jaffa Road (Rehov Yaffo). From there, it is planned to run along Jaffa Road westward to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and continue to the southwest, crossing the Chords Bridge along Herzl Boulevard to the Beit HaKerem neighborhood, and finishing just beyond Mount Herzl next to Bayit VeGan.
As you can see by the map below, it the first line will run through the East part of the city, and serve Arab neighborhoods, such as Shu’afat, and the Project planners noted that they consulted with, and gained the approval of, resident associations there – many of which will benefit by the increased ease of access to the center of town, and a rise in property values – which, according to Rail planners, has already occurred.
As media events in Israel go, this was, for most journalists covering the story, quite non-controversial, and the smooth, quiet ride we took on the modern rail car, on a small section of the route which runs through the center from Yaffo to the road along the Arab section of the Old City, was a quite pleasant experience.
However, during the Q&A session after the presentation, both by transportation officials, and then later, in our group’s meeting with Jerusalem’s Mayor, Nir Barkat, two American journalists – one from National Public Radio (NPR) and the other from the New York Times – noted Mahmoud Abbas’s opposition to the project (Abbas actually tried to initiate a boycott of the European companies involved with its construction) and asked whether the fact that the route runs though the East part of the city (serving Arab neighborhoods) was an impediment to peace.
Indeed, anti-Israel NGOs have gone even further than Abbas – with the Swedish NGO Diakonia characterizing the Light Rail Project as a “Violation of Humanitarian International Law.”
What they were parroting, of course, was the specious argument that any Jewish presence in “East” Jerusalem was illegal, the myth of “historically Arab” East Jerusalem, and the belief that only the only possible way peace could be achieved would be to divide the city – with Israel retaining the West part, and the Palestinian State including the East.
As we noted earlier, polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem DO NOT want to divide the city as part of a peace agreement.
More broadly, while listening the NYT and NPR correspondents question Mayor Barkat on the political implications of the Light Rail Project, I began wondering what the reaction would be if the Arab neighborhoods were excluded from the Rail’s route. Is there any question that the narrative would have been one of racism and discrimination against Jerusalem’s Arabs?
Further, would it be preferable if the city were to delay addressing such major municipal problems until a peace agreement is one day achieved?
I’d challenge reporters (such as Harriet Sherwood and the Americans I encountered on the Light Rail tour) who insist on inserting politics into every aspect of life in Jerusalem to move beyond their comfortable ideological boundaries, and challenge their preconceived conclusions, by talking to average Arab, Jewish, and Christian residents of this incredibly diverse, vibrant, and largely successful city – as I suspect they’d learn that (despite the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict) the daily concerns of Jerusalemites are not much different than those who live in New York or London.
A familiar narrative of the mainstream media about Palestinians who voted for Hamas in 2006 was that their decision to vote for the Palestinian Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was not based on ideology, nor did it represent an embrace of the terrorist group’s anti-Semitic charter but, rather, was merely a rejection of the corrupt Fatah, and motivated by a simple desire, as all people in the world have, to improve their quality of lives.
Interestingly, the assumption of the universality of Western progressive values (which Richard Landes refers to as cognitive egocentrism) by such journalists is often strangely absent when reporting on, and imputing values to, Israelis.
As Jonathan Spyer noted, those who are obsessively critical of Israel see the country not as it is, but often as “a [mythical] place of uninterrupted darkness and horror, in which every human interaction is ugly, crude, racist, brutal.”
As a resident of the city, I can attest to the fact that the mythical Jerusalem which the Guardian, NYT, and NPR often conjure has almost no resemblance to the real, complex, layered and unimaginably dynamic reality of everyday life here.
Related articles
- Who supports dividing Jerusalem? Not the Palestinians (cifwatch.com)
- The myth of “historically Arab” East Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- A brief note to Harriet Sherwood on her return to Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood erroneously places Knesset on Arab Farmland (cifwatch.com)
- In Praise of Yaacov Lozowick (cifwatch.com)
- More “Nakba Day” violence: Riots in Qalandiya and Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian “East Jerusalem” series features quote characterizing Israeli Jews as a “swarm of ants” (cifwatch.com)
- Censored by Harriet Sherwood: Jewish Voices from Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- Don’t Divide Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- Israel, wave your flag! (cifwatch.com)
Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalaim) held on the 28th of Iyar, celebrates the return of the city to its unified state after the period of partial Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967. Amazingly, despite those 19 years being the only time in history that the city was not united, there are those who would today divide the city again, as though that would return it to its ‘authentic’ and ‘rightful’ state.
Equally amazingly, whilst many a ‘peace activist‘ can quote by heart the often revised names of Jerusalem neighbourhoods in which they consider people of one specific ethnicity should not be permitted to live, and Palestinians and their descendants recount to Western audiences emotional stories their family’s uprooting from the city (such as the one promoted by Harriet Sherwood on May 29th), hardly a word is heard about the Jewish Jerusalemites who spent many long months under Arab siege and years under British military and Mandate rule.
Perhaps most significantly – because there exists a clear political agenda to make Jews appear as newcomers and non-native inhabitants of the city – rarely does a Western audience get to hear that Jews in fact made up the majority of the city’s population at least from the mid-nineteenth century, or that many of them became internally displaced when they were forced to leave their homes both before and during the War of Independence.
Recently I met up with two ladies whose memories of their childhood in Jerusalem are part of the story of the city itself. Both were born there – Carmella in 1935 and Sarah in 1921. In a country in which one receives such a variety of often unexpected answers to the question ‘where did your family originate?’ it is fairly rare to meet people who do not have a reply. Carmella looked puzzled for an instant, and then replied “Oh – my mother came from Tsfat and my father from Jerusalem”. As for Sarah – the answer to her was obvious; “From the Old City”.
Carmella
Neither of them could tell me exactly how many generations of their family had lived in Jerusalem before them, but Sarah was proud to recount how her great- grandfather, who lived in the Rothschild Building built in 1870 in the Jewish Quarter, had met the building’s sponsor, Baron Rothschild, when he came with his daughter to tour the sites of his investment. Apparently, the whole neighbourhood had been busy preparing delicacies in honour of the distinguished visitor – mostly citron (etrog) cakes – but the Baron’s clerks had warned him in advance not to partake of anything cooked in the Jewish Quarter due to the famously insanitary conditions there. In fact the only thing which the Baron consumed throughout his entire visit to the Old City was a glass of water drawn from the cistern at Sarah’s great-grandfather’s sparsely furnished house.
A clue to the origins of both families perhaps comes from the fact that the languages they spoke at home were Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Arabic, with a smattering of Yiddish for good measure. Ladino was the predominant language among Jews in Palestine between the 17th and 19th centuries after Sephardi Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492 returned to the land of their forefathers, settling in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tsfat, Tiberius and even Schem and Gaza.
However, after so many generations of life in the Jewish Quarter, Sarah’s family, along with almost half of the Jewish population of the Old City, finally had to leave it in 1936 as a result of the riots which were part of the Arab revolt. This, of course, was not the first case of Jerusalemites who were no less indigenous than their expellers being forced out of their homes: in the 1929 riots some 4,000 Jews had also fled Neve Ya’akov, Motsa, Romema, Beit HaKerem and Talpiot. Neither was this phenomenon confined to Jerusalem; in the 1929 riots Carmella’s grandfather’s brother and his wife were both slaughtered by an axe-wielding mob in Tsfat.
Jewish refugees leaving the Old City -1936
Carmella described their home: one of six houses built around a communal courtyard and lacking electricity, sewage or running water, but with a strong community life in which people readily shared what little they had. Both women spent their childhood under the British Mandate with regular curfews from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. the next day. Sometimes they knew that the curfew was a reaction to activities by Jewish underground groups, but more often they had no idea why they were under curfew. One 9th of Av, Carmella’s father and the neighbours in the yard wanted to pray. Because of the curfew they could not go to the synagogue and there were not enough men to make up a minyan, (prayer quorum) so they snuck out to bring additional men from surrounding streets to the prayers. Unfortunately, someone left the door to the courtyard open by mistake, and the British promptly arrested them all, imprisoning them in the Russian compound until the next morning.
On November 29th, 1947, friends and family gathered at Carmella’s parents’ home – the only one in the neighbourhood with a radio – to listen tensely to the UN vote on partition. As the votes were announced, they made lists of the results on scraps of paper. “We have a state!” cried Carmella’s brother, but as they set off to dance in celebration on Jaffa Road, their father urged caution; “Let’s see what happens tomorrow morning.” And indeed, difficult days lay ahead.
During the siege of Jerusalem, their daily routine revolved mostly around the fight to survive. Water was strictly rationed as the British-built pipeline had been sabotaged by the Arab militias. Initially they had to rely upon the original cisterns which collected rainwater from the roofs of the houses: Sarah and Carmella painstakingly explained to me the knack behind filling a bucket on a rope from a deep cistern. Later, water tankers began to arrive intermittently in Jerusalem and Carmella and her siblings would spend hours standing in line waiting to take their rations home in buckets and tin cans.
Queuing for water, Jerusalem 1948.
The precious fresh water would be stored in large clay pots – both Sarah and Carmella call them by the Ladino name ‘Tanaja’. One contained fresh drinking and cooking water and the other water which had already been used to wash their hands. Once a week – before Shabbat – the children would be washed, the laundry then done in the same water, the floor then washed with that soapy water and anything left used to water the few plants such as mint and lemon balm which they grew in tin cans in the yard.
Food too was strictly rationed with each item weighed scrupulously by the shop-keeper in exchange for coupons. Carmella’s family lived mostly off bean or lentil soup with small amounts of meat becoming a rare delicacy and bread limited to 200 grams per person. Carmella’s father used to give his portion of bread to the children, saying “I’m grown already”. Just before Pessach a truck-load of fresh vegetables managed to make it through the blockade. Carmella recounts how that became a whole day’s entertainment as everyone gathered around just to gaze at the vegetables – the likes of which they had not seen for so long.
Fuel was also severely rationed and because they had no electricity, both light and heat came from the paraffin they had to stand hours in line waiting for every time the arrival of a lorry load was announced by megaphone. That winter was a particularly harsh one in Jerusalem, and often the only way they had of warming themselves was to stand around the kettle or cooking pots.
On the afternoon of the Declaration of Independence Carmella’s family once more gathered around their radio, but yet again violence followed their celebrations: the next day shops were burned to the ground in the Old City and less than two weeks later it fell to the Jordanian forces. Many of the men were arrested and taken prisoner by the Arab legion, including Carmella’s father. He returned only almost a year later, but Carmella says “We don’t know what he went through there. He never talked about it”. The women and children were transported by lorry to the Katamon neighbourhood from which the Christian Arab residents had fled and four or five families found shelter in each empty house. Carmella’s family later moved to the Nahalat Zion neighbourhood which had been built in 1908 to answer the growing need for housing outside the walls of the crowded Old City.
Jewish girl, Rachel Levy, 7, fleeing from street with burning buildings as the Arabs sack Jerusalem after its surrender. May 28, 1948. John Phillips
With war still raging and the Arab Legion installed in the Old City, the nights became unbearable with repeated shelling forcing them to huddle together in the lower storey of their building, along with all the other neighbours. The lack of food and water became even worse; children had not been able to go to school for a year and few people had work as factories and workshops had closed due to lack of materials.
Like all the other young men, Carmella’s brothers were of course fighting in the army, specifically at Latrun and Ma’ale HaHamisha. The dead from the battles were brought to Bikur Holim hospital and every morning, Carmella and her mother would make their way there to check that the names of her brothers did not appear on the list of names of the dead attached to a tree in the courtyard with a drawing pin.
After the first cease-fire, there was an improvement in the amount of goods which got through to Jerusalem, and the schools re-opened at last, but the fighting still continued, as did the shelling by the Arab Legion. Carmella’s best friend was injured and her father killed by a direct hit on their house.
By 1967, Camella was married and living in Kiryat HaYovel . Her husband, like many others, had been called up some three months before the war broke out and was stationed on the Egyptian front. Once more the women of the family found themselves alone in wartime. Day after day they would hear Nasser threatening total annihilation of the Jewish state on the radio and there was a real fear that the tiny young country would not be able to survive such an onslaught. With a shortage of air-raid shelters making for unbearable over-crowding, Carmella and her two small children took to sleeping in the corridor outside their apartment as an alternative.
Soon, soldiers coming to visit their families began telling them that the Old City had been re-taken: stories which at first they did not believe as there had been no official announcement on the radio. Gradually they began to realise that after 19 years they could indeed finally go to the Western Wall. It was the festival of Shavuot, and so as observant Jews they walked all the way to the Old City – along with Carmella’s youngest sister who was nine months pregnant at the time and yet insisted upon not missing out on such a momentous occasion.
Carmella was surprised to see that the Old City retained many of the features she remembered from 19 years before – the same paved streets, the same lack of electricity, sewage or running water – and that it was terribly neglected. When they arrived at the Western wall, they at first wondered if they had come to the right place; their memories were of a narrow, confined area beside the wall where they had always prayed, but now it was an open area with plenty of room for the crowds of people who had come to be part of the miracle. Torah scrolls appeared from nowhere, and people prayed and sang, elated not only by the fact that their most holy site which they had been unable to visit for 19 years was once more accessible, but full of relief that their country actually still existed.
Their happiness was, however, mixed with sadness – not only because of the heavy price of Israeli casualties during the war, but also on personal level because they had heard nothing from Carmella’s husband and no lists had been issued of Israeli soldiers taken prisoner by the Egyptians. Only a month and a half after Jerusalem had been re-united did he finally return home.
“We really thought that now there would be peace”, said Carmella, but of course little has changed in the ideology of Israel’s attackers since the days of 1948 and 1967. As the stories of Jerusalemites such as Sarah and Carmella show, the almost century-old campaign to expel Jews by means of violence was never only about those immigrants who came to Israel from other countries. It was just as much directed at Jews who had a family history hundreds of years old in this land, many of whom were expelled and displaced in chapters of history which are ignored by activists, campaigners, politicians and journalists alike.
As Palestinian activists organise yet another day of potentially violent demonstration scheduled for June 7th, which they term “the anniversary of the theft of Jerusalem, the ‘flower of cities’, by the Zionists” it is imperative more than ever to set the record straight on the subject of the prolonged and systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem neighbourhoods up to and including 1948 and to ensure that the current status quo, whereby ethnicity and religion are not criteria for place of residence, is upheld.
True liberals and progressives would want that future for Jerusalem – just as they would promote it in any other city in the world.
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- Harriet Sherwood erroneously places Knesset on Arab Farmland (cifwatch.com)
This is cross posted by Simon Plosker at Backspin, the blog of Honest Reporting.
Only yesterday I blogged the BBC’s video report on the Arab village of Lifta, located at the western entrance to Jerusalem and abandoned since 1948. Within 48 hours of the BBC’s report, the Guardian has also published its own story and video.
Is this an amazing coincidence or is this an obvious demonstration of the similarity in the agendas of both the BBC and Guardian?
Both media outlets seem determined to bring the focus of the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the events of 1947/8 – a tactic employed by the Palestinians to present Israel as being “born in sin” and responsible for the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians and the creation of the refugee problem.
The fact that one Yacoub Odeh is the former Lifta resident guiding the BBC’s Wyre Davies and the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood separately would suggest that this “tour” was a well-organized effort offered to the international media and eagerly picked up by those outlets sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative from 1948.
But where does Sherwood get her information from? She states:
“Out of sight of Lifta’s ruins, but built on its former farmlands are the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), the supreme court, the Hadassah hospital, the Hebrew University and the city’s central bus station.”
In fact, the Knesset was built on land leased from the Greek Orthodox Church and not Lifta’s farmlands. The Knesset, Supreme Court and Hebrew University are located in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Ram, which prior to the 1948 war, was known as the village of Sheikh Badr and not Lifta’s farmland.
As for Hadassah Hospital, is Sherwood referring to Hadassah Mount Scopus in the north of Jerusalem or Hadasah Ein Kerem in the south west of the city? Either way, both are located a considerable distance from Lifta and could not possibly have been part of its farmland prior to 1948.
According to Sherwood then, it appears that entire swathes of Jerusalem were actually built on Lifta’s farmland.
Looks like Sherwood’s lack of fact checking has been caught out.
But this isn’t surprising as Yacoub Odeh is given carte blanche to push the Naqba narrative and both the Guardian and BBC are prepared to accept this at face value.
So is this a story that pits development against the preservation of historical memory or is it really all about the right of Jews to build in Jerusalem, even in the western part of the city?
Considering that the BBC and Guardian both refer to Arab East Jerusalem and make no secret of their opinion that Jews should not be a part of the landscape there, it’s no surprise that even the western “Jewish” side of Jerusalem is now apparently part of the discussion.
(Also, see OyVaGoy’s post on Sherwood’s enormous mistake, here.)
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- Harriet Sherwood, Egypt’s opening of its border with Gaza, and the photos not posted (cifwatch.com)
- The myth of “historically Arab” East Jerusalem (cifwatch.com)
- Lies About Jerusalem: Guardian-style journalism of the BBC exposed (cifwatch.com)
- Harriet Sherwood story in Guardian quotes Richard Falk in accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian helps Hamas hitch a ride on the ‘Arab Spring’ (cifwatch.com)
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The Guardian: Geographically Clueless
December 6, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Bedouin, Delegitimization, Guardian, Harriet Sherwood, Honest Reporting, Jerusalem, Ma'ale Adumim, Pesach Benson | by Guest/Cross Post | 3 comments
This is cross posted by Pesach Benson at the blog of Honest Reporting
In the middle of an article about a plan to relocate Bedouins, The Guardian‘s Harriet Sherwood worries that Maale Adumim might one day bisect the West Bank:
Many Palestinians see this as part of a strategic plan to close a ring of Jewish settlements that would cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank. By stretching down to the Jordan valley, an expanded Ma’ale Adumim would also bisect the West Bank, making a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
I’m not going to address the Bedouin issue – thats a separate discussion (which Sherwood and The Guardian have muddied before).
But as for her sense of geography, we heard the same hot air in 2005 over a parcel of land known as E-1.
The inconvenient fact for Sherwood and her Palestinian fixers is this: Even if Maale Adumim morphed into a sprawling metropolis up to the borders of its designated area, the Palestinians would still have a waistline of nine miles (15 km) connecting their north and south. Our colleagues at CAMERA published this useful map making the very point.
Map courtesy of CAMERA. Text and graphics added by CiF Watch.
To put it in perspective, the narrowest point of Israel’s waistline is the roughly nine km distance between Netanya and the Palestinian city of Tulkarm.
But who worries about Israel’s contiguity?
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