Israel verliest de strijd voor Joods Oost-Jeruzalem

 

Gisteren was het Jeruzalem dag. Dan viert Israel de eenheid van Jeruzalem na de Zesdaagse oorlog met allerhande festiviteiten in de stad. Politici houden ronkende speeches over het ondeelbare Jeruzalem als eeuwige hoofdstad en in diverse artikelen wordt de heiligheid van Jeruzalem voor het Jodendom benadrukt, met verwijzing naar de 600 keer dat Jeruzalem in de Bijbel wordt genoemd en foto's van biddende Joden bij de Klaagmuur. Volgens Ami Isseroff missen dergelijke speeches en artikelen echter de kern van het belang van Jeruzalem voor Israel, en is Israel de strijd om Jeruzalem aan het verliezen. Een 'thought provoking' artikel:

The statistics are grim. More people leave Jerusalem than settle in it each year. The future is black, literally. In Jerusalem over 60% of the Jewish elementary school students is Haredi, more than twice their representation in the adult Jewish population of Jerusalem. The Zionist will to settle the land is not thwarted by Hamas rockets, by Palestinian suicide bombers or by threats of international ostracism. But Zionism seems to be helpless against the black-coated anti-Zionist Jewish religious fanatics. Yet the government has done nothing to deal with this growing problem. Actually, the government has done something. The government subsidizes Haredim and exempts them from military service and pays for their education network and their Yeshiva studies. Zionism is not just sawing off the branch on which it is perched. We don't do things by half-measures. We are doing a thorough job. We have set fire to the whole tree. But this is only one aspect of the failure of Zionism to back the Jewish claim to Jerusalem.

When the PLO organized campaigns to eject Israeli police and social services from East Jerusalem, we acquiesced. Personnel could not enter because their vehicles were stoned and mobbed, telephone linemen were murdered. Services of all kinds disappeared, so that the Palestinian Authority can now claim that Israel doesn't exercise its sovereignty in those places. Arab medical emergencies are often serviced by the Palestinian Red Crescent.

We fail to explain to the world that Jewish East Jerusalem had a large Jewish community until it was intimidated by Arab pogroms in 1921, 1929 and the 1930s, and then the remainder was ethnically cleansed by the Jordanian Legion in 1948. Having brutally expelled the Jews, the Arabs, with no sense of irony, insist that East Jerusalem is "Arab East Jerusalem." That period, when East Jerusalem was "Jew free," which lasted only 19 years, has somehow been turned into an ancient and hallowed tradition in the eyes of the press and the world.

 

Lees het hele artikel: Losing the Battle for Jewish East Jerusalem

 

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