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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.
Related articles
- Harriet Sherwood erroneously places Knesset on Arab Farmland (cifwatch.com)
Like this:
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.)
Related articles
- 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)
A guest post by AKUS
Pitsuts Kiosk in Jerusalem
The link or clip below is in Hebrew, but anyone listening to it will have a pretty good idea of what a terrorist attack sounds like, and what Israelis have to live with when Palestinian terrorists attempt to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible.
The voice you hear is that of David Amoils calling in a report of a suspicious package to Sharon, who works in the police emergency call center (the equivalent of the American 911).
You first hear Sharon identifying herself, and then David comes on, saying that he is calling from “Pitsuts, the kiosk at Binyanei Ha’uma” – the Convention Center.
He says “There is a bag here” and Sharon sudden interrupts asking “What’s there?” and he continues, saying there is a bag opposite the bus station – and then the explosion goes off. David was seriously wounded. You hear Sharon again: “Hullo? Hullo?” and the rest contains cries for help, an initial [police] report on many wounded and messages calling for first responders to come to Binyanei Ha’uma to provide immediate assistance at the scene of the attack.
MP3 recording of the report from David and the explosion
Or listen via Ma’ariv using your browser
David calls his kiosk “Pitsuts” (פיצוץ), which means “explosion” in Hebrew. According to Yaakov Lozowick, he named the kiosk “Pitsuts” after he was injured in another explosion there in the 1990s. In Israeli slang, “pitsuts” can also mean “fantastic” – a really good-looking woman is a “ptsatsa”.
Incidentally, I have a relative of a relative by marriage whose last name is Amoils. 6 degrees of separation.
This is cross posted by Simon Plosker at Backspin, the blog of Honest Reporting
Back in January 2011, Honest Reporting addressed an advert published by the Palestine Tourism Ministry that appeared in the UK edition of National Geographic magazine which:
-
Implied that Palestine is a country
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Claimed that Jerusalem is part of Palestine
- Stated that “Palestine lies between the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River”.
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has finally issued its ruling following many complaints. While the ASA did not agree with all of the issues raised by us and a number of other organizations, it did, however, rule the advert to be misleading on the following grounds:
We considered, however, that the line “From the famous cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza … Palestine lies between …” suggested that the situation and recognition of those cities as being part of Palestine was universally accepted. Because that was not the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.
The ASA concluded:
The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Travel Palestine to ensure their ads did not suggest that it was universally accepted that locations were part of Palestine when that was not the case.
So it seems that the ASA is consistent in its view that while Jerusalem may not be part of Palestine, it is also not part of Israel. Unsurprising considering that the ASA previously, in an appalling decision, forced the Israel Government Tourist Office to withdraw an ad that featured Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, effectively banning Israel from including the Western Wall in any tourism advertising.
Nonetheless, in the face of the increasing delegitimization campaign against Israel that has taken hold in the UK, the ASA’s latest adjudication will go down as a small victory in a much wider struggle.
A guest post by AKUS
Harriet Sherwood upholds the Guardian’s tradition of airbrushing history and facts in her two latest efforts. Let’s start with her blog, “The View from Jerusalem”:
Israel to get first museum of Arab art and culture
Not quite, Harriet. You need to get out and about Jerusalem more. What about the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem, which has been there for decades?
http://www.islamicart.co.il/en/
Of course, it was donated by a Jewish woman to foster inter-community harmony, so I suppose that means it doesn’t really count even though when we visited the staff was almost entirely Arabs:
Visitors to Jerusalem’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art are privileged to view one of the foremost collections of Islamic art and Antique Watches & Clocks. The L.A. Mayer Museum was founded by the late Mrs. Vera Bryce Salomons, realizing her long-standing idea of giving expression to the impressive artistic achievements of Israel’s Muslim neighbors. Mrs. Salomons dedicated the Museum to her friend and teacher, Prof. Leo Arie Mayer. Many scholars of international renown took part in the establishment of the Museum, attracted to both its research activities and to the challenge of bridging the gap between the two cultures. The Museum was opened to the public in 1974.
Harriet says the new (yet to be built) museum will be in: “Umm al-Fahm, an Israeli-Arab city just north of the West Bank.” No, Harriet – Umm al-Fahm is an Israeli Arab village (at least she did not refer to it as a “Palestinian village” – she will get a few black marks from home office about that) just south of Afula in Wadi Ara or east of Haifa or Megiddo. London, for example, is not generally described as a British city north of France, nor Dallas as an American city north of Mexico.
Harriet, never one to hide her ability to airbrush the fact and skillfully avoid giving all the facts, also gave us the latest batch of nonsense about the eviction of Arab squatters in Jerusalem:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/10/jerusalem-palestinians-eviction-jewish-settlers
“The Hamdallah family have lived in the home in Ras al-Amud since 1952. The extension, in which Ahmed, Amani and Yazan Hamdallah now live, was built in the mid-1980s.”
Hmmm … and who lived there before 1952 I wonder…??? Oh… here’s a clue …
“The Hamdallah family came to Ras al-Amud after fleeing their village near Ramle in the 1948 war”.
Well, I’m sorry they lost their house in a war their leaders started to destroy the new State of Israel. Perhaps they should not have. How strange and fortunate, however, that they just happened to find an empty house in Jerusalem after the Jordanians forced all the Jews out. But equally, how unfortunate that King Hussein, who illegally occupied the land on which the house stands, attacked Israel in 1967 and a few days later the Hamdallah’s found themselves once again on the wrong side of history.
Clearly, Harriet seems to think they have “squatters’ rights” despite the fact that the house belongs to someone else:
“However, the land on which the home is built was bought in 1990 by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida businessman, from its pre-1948 Jewish owners. Moskowitz has spent millions of dollars purchasing property in East Jerusalem to create pockets of hardline Jewish settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods.”
Ah … those mysterious “pre-1948 owners”… I wonder who they were and how they lost their property and why they have no “right of return” in Arab eyes…?? And those “hardline Jews” who seem to hold the utterly ludicrous belief that if they pay Moskovitz rent or purchase the property from him they should be allowed to live there!! What an odd lot these “hardline Jews” are!!
Clearly Harriet believes that merely paying for the property gives Moskovitz no rights to it since Jews should be willing to pay for property but not actually be allowed to use it. She may have redeemed herself for her slip regarding the location of the not-so first Arab museum in Israel.
Parsing Harriet – so ridiculously easy for anyone with some knowledge of Israel and its history.
This essay was written by Hadar Sela for The Propagandist and was originally titled, “Et Tu Europe?”. Sela is also the author of Anti-Zionist and Anti-Semitic Discourse on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, published last year by the MERIA Journal.
A recent document drawn up by the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises some worrying issues, not least the proposal for organised boycotts. Readers will doubtless notice the report’s reliance upon information gleaned from politically motivated NGOs such as UN OCHA and ACRI, which set the tone for the cavalier repetition of numerous untruths such as;
“Successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of transferringJewish population into the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law.” (my emphasis)
It is also blatantly apparent that despite the fact that the status of Jerusalem is supposed to be the subject of long-awaited negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the EU Heads of mission seem intent upon creating their own ‘facts on the ground’, together with a flawed narrative which seeks to over-ride any negotiation process.
However, the report’s ‘action plan’ is possibly its most disturbing aspect in that it includes outright initiatives for boycott of Israeli businesses and institutions as well as specific calls for intervention in the affairs of the host state.
East Jerusalem as the future Palestinian capital
1. In conformity with the objectives of the StrategicMulti-sector Development Plan for East Jerusalem, promote a coordinated approach and a coherentPalestinian strategy towards East Jerusalem.
2. Promote the establishment of a PLO focal point/representative in East Jerusalem.
3. National Europe Day events held in East Jerusalem (when suitable at Palestinian institutions)
4. EU missions with offices or residences in East Jerusalem to regularly host Palestinian officials with senior EU visitors.
5) Avoid having Israeli security and/or protocolaccompanying high rankingofficials from Member Stateswhen visiting the Old City/EastJerusalem.
6. Prevent/discouragefinancial transactions from EU MS actors supporting settlement activity in East Jerusalem, by adopting appropriate EU legislation.
7. Compile non-binding guidelines for EU tour operators to prevent support for settlement business in East Jerusalem – e.g. hotels, bus operators, archaeological sites controlled by pro-settler organisations etc.
8. Ensure that the EU-Israel Association Agreement is not used to allow the export to the EU of products manufactured in settlements in East Jerusalem.
9. Raise public awareness about settlement products, for instance by providing guidance on origin labelling for settlement products to major EU retailers.
10. Inform EU citizens of financial risks involved in purchasing property in occupied East Jerusalem.
Strengthen the role of the European Union
1. Enhance local coordination between Quartet actors for input into policy making and decisions.
2. Ensure EU presence when there is a risk of demolitions or evictions of Palestinian families.
3. Ensure EU presence at Israeli courts cases on house demolitions or evictions of Palestinian families.
4. Ensure EU intervention when Palestinians are arrested or intimidated by Israeli authorities for peaceful cultural, social or political activities in East Jerusalem.
5. Operationalise the EU policy on bringing high level visitors to sensitive sites (e.g. separation barrier etc). - on logistics for high level visitors (e.g choice of hotel, change of transport East/West) - on contacts with the Jerusalem Mayor and on refraining from meeting Israeli officials in their East Jerusalem offices (e.g. in the Israeli Ministry of Justice etc) - on information sharing on violent settlers in East Jerusalem to assess whether to grant entry into the EU.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
7 things the Guardian and EU should know about Israel’s plan to build new apartments in Jerusalem
October 3, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Gilo, Jerusalem, Missing Peace, Second Intifada | by Guest/Cross Post | 11 comments
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:
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)
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