Hebron Etzion
_______ Bloc Betar Jerusalem
/Kiryat \ _______ ______ _____________
/ Arba \ / Efrat \ / \ / \_______
___/ \____/ \__/ \____/ Maaleh Adumim
######### #### #### # Tekoa ______
# # # # # # # # _____ / \
# # # # # ### ##### / \ / \
# # # # # # # # # _/ \____/ \_
### ## #### #### # #
"Rebuilding Jewish Life in Judea, Israel"
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JUDEA ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE Vol.10, No.1 Shvat-Adar 5762/Jan-Feb 2002
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Website: http://www.womeningreen.org/judea OUR 10TH YEAR!
Contents:
* In Memoriam: Avraham Fish and Aharon Gorov
* Jewish Heroes: Miracle in Efrat / Facing Down Terrorism
* A Broken Heart: Teens Targeted in Karnei Shomron
* Listen to Israel's Leading Revisionist Historian
* Where Are We Headed?
* Lot's Wife
* The Myth of Occupation
* The "Muslim Quarter" of Jerusalem is Jewish
* Koran: Jews to Inherit the Promised Land
**********************************************************************
IN MEMORIAM: AVRAHAM FISH AND AHARON GOROV
Avraham Fish, 65, a physicist, and Aharon Gorov, 46, a musical
director, were shot to death by Arab terrorists as they drove to their
homes in El David in Judea on 25 Feb 02, the eve of the Purim holiday.
They were ambushed on the road between Tekoa and El David, just beyond
the spot where their neighbor, Sarit Amrani, was murdered on 20 Sep 01
(see Judea Magazine 9.5). The murderers escaped into Palestinian-
controlled Bethlehem.
Riding in the back seat of the car, which was flying an Israeli
flag, were Fish's married daughter Tamara, who was wounded in the
stomach, and Tamara's 5-year-old daughter, who was unhurt. Tamara, a
nurse, was in her ninth month of pregnancy. Within hours of the murder
of her father, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl, and reported that
her pregnant condition saved her from suffering more serious wounds.
**********************************************************************
Jewish Heroes:
MIRACLE IN EFRAT
Friday morning, 22 Feb 02 - The Efrat supermarket, located beneath
the town council offices, is filling up with pre-Shabbat shoppers. An
alert local resident (an immigrant from a Western country) notices an
Arab workman -- who had helped build his house -- standing outside the
supermarket, even though it was the start of a 4-day Muslim holiday. As
the resident watches and follows, the Arab, carrying a large sack,
enters the supermarket and goes to the back of the store, returning to
the front without the sack. Suddenly there is an explosion. The
shoppers run toward the entrance -- where the Arab is standing. The
resident sees him about to trigger the explosives strapped to his body
-- and shoots him dead -- saving scores of lives. It takes the army
demolitions team six hours to neutralize the explosives on the
terrorist's body.
**********************************************************************
Jewish Heroes:
FACING DOWN TERRORISM
Moshe and Rachel Sapirstein made aliya after the Six-Day War. A few
years ago they "retired" from Jerusalem to Neve Dekalim in Gush Katif.
(See his article "High Holidays in Gush Katif" - Judea Magazine 8.5.)
Moshe, now 73, had lost a hand and an eye in the Yom Kippur War. On 18
Feb 02, he found himself driving into the scene of an Arab terrorist
attack at the Kissufim entrance to Gush Katif. A young Jewish mother,
Ahuva Amergi, had just been shot to death, as were IDF Captain Mor
Elraz and his radioman, Sgt. Amir Mansuri. Saperstein ran his car
straight into the armed terrorist, who fired at him, wounding him in
his remaining hand and in the leg.
**********************************************************************
A BROKEN HEART: TEENS TARGETED IN KARNEI SHOMRON
Ayelet Kedem
On 16 Feb 02, an Arab suicide bomber walked into the pizzeria in
Karnei Shomron, called out to the Jewish teenagers: "We'll meet again
in the Garden of Eden," and detonated his nail-packed explosive belt.
Two 15-year-olds, Nechemiah Amar and Keren Shatzky (whose parents moved
to Israel from the U.S.), were killed and scores were wounded.
A nail entered Shira Hazan's heart, missing her main artery by
millemeters. Maya Damari lies unconscious in Schneider Children's
Hospital in Petach Tikva with a nail in her brain. Rachel Teller also
remains unconscious.
Meir Hazan, Shira's father, was on his way to pick up his daughter
after her weekend visit with friends in Karnei Shomron. "When I reached
the mall I saw tens of teenagers lying scattered on the pavement.
Wounded children were crying and I saw a lot of blood. I searched for
my daughter and at first I passed her without recognizing her. Then
after a few more steps I realized that I recognized her blue and gray
checked skirt and brown boots. But I still wasn't sure -- her face was
so burnt and one eye was covered with blood. I whispered: 'Shira, is
that you?' And she looked at me with her other eye and answered: 'Abba
(Daddy), my chest hurts.'"
At first the medics could find no signs of internal injuries, but
at the hospital they discovered the nail, that doctors removed in open
heart surgery lasting four hours. One doctor told the parents: "I'm not
a religious person, but I've been performing heart surgery for 25 years
and I tell you today that God exists. A case like this is one in a
million."
(From _Makor Rishon_ Yoman, 22 Feb 02)
* *
Saturday night. The telephone rings and my wife answers. Suddenly
she yells: "Moshe, there's a terrorist attack at the shopping center -
run!" I grab my rifle and equipment from the emergency reaction squad
and literally fly to the shopping center at the entrance to town. I'm
walking on glass, I see blood smeared everywhere, the injured are
groaning and surrounding each one are dedicated medics and doctors.
There's a young boy sitting opposite me - the one who prays across from
me in the synagogue. He's holding the hand of a dead boy. He knows he's
dead - but doesn't release his hand.
They begin to bring the stretchers. I help lift one of the injured.
His sweater is soaked with blood. Hours later I look at my hand - and
it's covered with congealed blood, other people's blood.
Hillel Trattner- who just got married a few months ago - was
seriously injured in the head - lost an eye and is full of shrapnel.
His wife was lightly injured.
Is this what the Jews of Europe went through? Is this the Auschwitz
syndrome? Is this how Jabotinsky felt when he wandered around Europe
and told people to run away before the calamity?
(The author, Moshe Feiglin, led the campaign of mass civil
disobedience against the Oslo accords in 1995 in the framework of Zo
Artzeinu - This is Our Land.)
(Excerpted from IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis,
www.imra.org.il, 18 Feb 2002)
**********************************************************************
LISTEN TO ISRAEL'S LEADING REVISIONIST HISTORIAN
Benny Morris
(Prof. Benny Morris is the father of revisionist Israeli
historians, who charged Israel with responsibility for the Palestinian
refugee problem. Below are excerpts from his article in the _Guardian_
[UK], 21 Feb 02.)
The rumor that I have undergone a brain transplant is unfounded,
but my thinking about the current Middle East crisis and its
protagonists has in fact radically changed during the past two years. I
feel a bit like one of those Western fellow travelers rudely awakened
by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956.
Back in 1993, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for
Middle East peace. But my restrained optimism has given way to grave
doubts. My main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and
crystallized, was the figure of Yasser Arafat. Unfortunately, he has
proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the
mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into
their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and
during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the
emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic
defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini
had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a
trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues
nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied
rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement.
He spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi
foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht.
Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once quipped that
the Palestinians had never missed an opportunity to miss an
opportunity. But no one can fault them for consistency. After Husseini
came Arafat, another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar,
trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to
be many Europeans who are taken in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the
Israeli-Egyptian Camp David framework, which might have led to
Palestinian statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning his back on the
Oslo process, Arafat rejected yet another historic compromise, that
offered by Barak at Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon
in President Bill Clinton's proposals (endorsed by Barak) in December.
Instead, the Palestinians resorted to arms and launched the current
mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some 790 Arab and
270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of hatred on both sides to the
point that the idea of a territorial-political compromise seems to be a
pipe dream.
The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war, with the underdog, who
rejected peace, simultaneously in the role of aggressor and, when the
Western TV cameras are on, victim.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of
mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his
days lying to a succession of Western journalists. The reporters
routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they
hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day
Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped
shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas.
Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish
- and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines
in Western and Arab newspapers.
Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres" and
"bombings" of Palestinian civilians - when in fact there have been no
massacres and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA
buildings. The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large
numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli - by Palestinian suicide
bombers. In response, the army and Shin Bet (the Israeli security
service) have tried to hit the guilty with "targeted killings" of bomb-
makers, terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently moral form
of reprisal, deterrence and prevention.
Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli peace
offers, the Palestinians have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of
anti-Israeli incitement and lies in the PA-controlled media. Arafat has
honed the practice of saying one thing to Western audiences and quite
another to his own Palestinian constituency to a fine art.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from its
inception, has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck
fast to the vision of a "Greater Palestine", meaning a Muslim-Arab-
populated and Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with
some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority.
The Palestinian leadership, and with them most Palestinians, deny
Israel's right to exist, deny that Zionism was/is a just enterprise. (I
have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari
Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: "Zionism is a legitimate
national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just
claim to Palestine, like we do.") Israel may exist, and be too
powerful, at present, to destroy; one may recognize its reality. But
this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's repeated denial
in recent months of any connection between the Jewish people and the
Temple Mount, and, by extension, between the Jewish people and the land
of Israel/Palestine. "What Temple?" he asks. The Jews are simply
robbers who came from Europe and decided, for some unfathomable reason,
to steal Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses to
recognize the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish
connection to the land of Israel.
I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the creation of the
refugee problem, publishing _The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949_ in 1988. Critics of Israel ignore the fact that the
problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians -
and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states - had launched.
But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on - and Israel
exists. Like every people, the Jews deserve a state, and justice will
not be served by throwing them into the sea. And if the refugees are
allowed back, there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel.
Israel is currently populated by 5 million Jews and more than 1 million
Arabs (an increasingly vociferous, pro-Palestinian irredentist time
bomb). If the refugees return, an unviable binational entity will
emerge and, given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will
quickly cease to be a Jewish state. Add to that the Arabs in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority.
Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the 7th century -
and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never much enjoyed the experience.
They were always second-class citizens and always discriminated-against
infidels; they were often persecuted and not infrequently murdered.
Giant pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as the 1940s
Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in Baghdad, and hundreds more in
Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled the Arab
world during the 1950s and 60s.
It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton
peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada,
and the demand ever since that Israel accept the "right of return" that
has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this generation, do
not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to the occupation.
They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible.
Ultimately, I believe, the balance of military force or the
demography of Palestine will determine the country's future, and either
Palestine will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab
minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually diminishing
Jewish minority. Or it will become a nuclear wasteland, a home to
neither people.
**********************************************************************
WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
Eli Kamir
An interview with Prof. Yehezkel Dror, Hebrew University; Gen.
(Res.) Meir Dagan; Lt. Gen. (Res.) Effie Eitam; and industrialist Stef
Wertheimer.
Q: Do there remain any shared values that everyone agrees on?
Eitam: Years ago, when I was commander of the Golani reconnaissance
force, we held a simulation of capture. The team came to organize the
simulation and I immediately warned them: "Guys, this is only a
simulation; don't be too rough on the soldiers, don't break arms and
legs."
The head of the team was quick to calm me: "Effie," he said,
"within 48 hours we will extract detailed information from everyone,
and this without touching them, not even a fingernail." And after 48
hours they had everything. The soldiers told their interrogators
everything that they had needed to hide, without touching a hair on
their heads. "How did you do it?," I asked. "We didn't let them
sleep," they explained. A person who hasn't slept for more than 48
hours goes crazy. Take sleep away from the world and things break up,
they can't continue. Why? Because of one reason: the need to dream.
Take away a man's dream and he has no reality. It's that simple. No
philosophy, no religion. Fact. And just as it is true for a single
individual, it is the same for a people. If they have no dream, the
reality becomes an unbearable burden, something irrelevant, that you
just want to escape from.
This isn't just a word game, it's a personal matter in Judaism.
There is no "lehima" (fight) without "halima" (dreaming). If there is
no dream, a man cannot fight. He can't overcome the difficulties, the
complications, everything seems fatal to him, inescapable. And the
State of Israel finds itself currently in the exact same situation. We
have lost our ability to dream, and when we do dream, we dream foreign
dreams, American dreams, Western dreams.
I have great respect for Stef Wertheimer. He has built something
incredible here in the Galilee [the Tefen Industrial Zone and the new
town of Kfar Veradim]. But he doesn't tell us one thing: Why, for
goodness sake, he planted his wonderful work in this forgotten place,
controversial, distant from markets, that is called the Galilee, in the
State of Israel, in the Middle East, which is certainly a crazy place.
Because his is an enterprise that every robot, every dollar, screams
Zionism.
Dror: First of all, the objective of our state is to be a Jewish-
Zionist state that guarantees the flourishing of Judaism and the Jewish
people. Just to be one more normal country is not worth the effort, in
my opinion. There are 150 countries and one more, even if it is another
Japan, Holland, or the U.S.A., is just not interesting. A Jewish-
Zionist state is the entire basis for our existence here.
Eitam: Now is the time to strengthen our compass according to the
criteria of: what strengthens the State of Israel as a Jewish state,
and what doesn't.
Is the State of Israel the safest place? Certainly not, it's the
most dangerous. Is it a natural place for business? No. Does it bring
an end to anti-Semitism? No. There is no other explanation except if it
offers us something that doesn't and will not exist for us somewhere
else, and that is a Jewish state. It's not a matter of semantics, but
rather the return of a perspective according to which we can check to
see if we are walking straight, crooked, forward, or backward.
(From _Maariv_ Shabbat, 25 Jan 02, p. 16+)
**********************************************************************
LOT'S WIFE
Sherri Mandell
When my son Koby Mandell and his friend Yosef Ish-Ran were murdered
by Palestinian terrorists eight months ago, my family and I were sucked
into the vortex of the tragic Middle East conflict. After a group of
men used boulders to crush and mutilate our 13-year-old son and his 14-
year-old friend, I began to pay attention to what the Palestinians and
particularly my counterparts, Palestinian mothers, were saying about
the conflict.
When a newspaper runs the story of my family's tragedy, they often
parallel it with the story of a Palestinian woman who has lost her
child. In the most recent article in the Denver Post, the Arab mother
said she would be happy to send her other children to be killed.
In the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong English-language
daily, the newspaper paralleled our story with the story of the Al Dura
family whose son, Muhammad, was killed in the crossfire between
Palestinians and the Israeli army.
This boy is being celebrated as the premier Palestinian martyr. His
death is screened and rescreened on Palestinian national television. A
commercial on the official Palestinian Authority television shows an
actor playing Muhammad in heaven flying a kite in a lush meadow,
frolicking on a beach and riding a Ferris wheel in an amusement park.
He then calls on the Palestinian children, saying: "I am not waving
goodbye, I am waving to tell you to follow in my footsteps." His
parents are quoted in the article as saying they have learned to hate
as a result of their son's death.
My family, on the other hand, refused to release any footage
showing my son's battering. We want to remember our son alive, not as a
victim. We refuse to live on a diet of hate. We would never send our
son as a sacrifice. We would never choose death.
Where are the Palestinian mothers who refuse to live in hate? Where
are the mothers who are speaking out against martyrdom? Where are the
Palestinian mothers who are saying - no longer will we purposefully
sacrifice our children for our ideology?
The problem is rooted deep in Palestinian society. Not just the
mothers and the media are teaching hate. The schools are also
sanctifying death.
On January 2, 2002, in the International Herald Tribune, Hanna
Rosin interviewed the head of the Hamas school in Ramallah, a highly
reputable institution with high salaries for its teachers, and small
classes where pupils learn English, Koran and computers, and where
dying as a martyr is encouraged.
The principal asked a five-year-old boy what he wanted to be when
he grew up. The boy answered, "Just like my father." His father was a
terrorist who had been killed. The principal hugged and kissed him. The
boy is a good student. He has learned the language and practice of
martyrdom.
If there are Palestinian parents speaking out against martyrdom, we
don't know about it. The Palestinian entity is not a democracy, and
therefore doesn't allow a multitude of opinions. Instead, it exploits
the fundamentalist ideology of martyrdom that asserts that each child
killed will rise to heaven and be rewarded with paradise; each child
killed will move the Palestinians forward in their political struggle
with Israel.
What happens to the mothers' and fathers' grief? What happens to
the society? Palestinian political and religious leaders encourage
parents to deny their natural feelings. But if grief is unexpressed, it
stays in the body and hardens. As a result, these parents may not allow
themselves to acknowledge their deepest feelings - loss and betrayal.
As a result, they can turn to stone. They turn to a pillar of salt,
like Lot's wife who is always looking back. They are frozen where they
are, looking at their dead children, frozen with hate for what they
perceive to be their enemy, the Israelis.
But what if the enemy is really themselves? The fact that they
won't say enough, no more sending children to be martyrs.
Arafat and the Palestinians must renounce terrorism, not because,
after September 11, it is no longer an expedient strategy now that the
democratic world is speaking out against terrorism, but because
terrorism is wrong, morally wrong, and anyone who supports it is
morally wrong.
I call on Palestinian mothers to stop the sanctification of their
children's death. I call on Palestinian mothers to refuse to allow
their leadership to exploit and reward the deaths of their children.
Most Israelis are willing to make sacrifices to attain peace. But
peace has to mean something. Peace with people who encourage their
children's suicide missions is no peace at all. Until the majority of
Palestinians learn to value compromise as much as they value martyrdom,
there can be no peace.
Compromise comes with democracy, with the ability to hear other
points of view, the ability to allow other voices, not just the voice
of martyrdom. When the mothers admit that their children's death is too
high a price to pay, then perhaps the salt of Lot's wife can be melted
into tears that flow freely. Maybe then the grief will emerge and
unlock the frozen posture of these women, their educational
institutions, their leaders and media.
When they acknowledge their losses, maybe then Lot's wife can look
ahead to a better future instead of being locked into a past of anger,
vengeance, hatred and cruelty.
(From _Jerusalem Post_, 10 Jan 02)
**********************************************************************
THE MYTH OF OCCUPATION
Dore Gold
At the heart of the Palestinian diplomatic struggle against Israel
is the repeated assertion that the Palestinians of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip are resisting "occupation."
The politically-loaded terms "occupied territories" or "occupation"
seem to apply only to Israel and are hardly ever used when other
territorial disputes are discussed. For example, the U.S. Department of
State refers to Kashmir as "disputed areas," while the patch of
Azerbaijan claimed as an independent republic by indigenous Armenian
separatists is referred to as "the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh."
Nor is it commonly accepted to describe the Moroccan military incursion
into the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara as an act of
"occupation." The Persian Gulf island of Zubarah, claimed by both Qatar
and Bahrain, was described by the International Court of Justice as
"disputed territory," until it was finally allocated to Qatar. In
a variety of other territorial disputes from northern Cyprus, to the
Kurile Islands, to Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf -- which have involved
some degree of armed conflict -- the term "occupied territories" is not
commonly used in international discourse.
The case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appears to be a special
exception in recent history, for in many other territorial disputes
since the Second World War, in which the land in question was under the
previous sovereignty of another state, the term "occupied territory"
has not been applied to the territory that had come under one side's
military control as a result of armed conflict. Yet in the case of the
West Bank and Gaza, where no internationally recognized sovereign
control previously existed, the stigma of Israel as an "occupier" has
gained currency.
Under UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 22, 1967 --
that has served as the basis of the 1991 Madrid Conference and the 1993
Declaration of Principles -- Israel is only expected to withdraw "from
territories" to "secure and recognized boundaries" and not from "the
territories" or "all the territories" captured in the Six-Day War.
Britain's foreign secretary in 1967, George Brown, stated three years
later that the meaning of Resolution 242 was "that Israel will not
withdraw from all the territories."
The last international legal allocation of territory that includes
what is today the West Bank and Gaza Strip occurred with the 1922
League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which recognized Jewish
national rights in the whole of the Mandated territory: "recognition
has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with
Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in
that country." The members of the League of Nations did not create the
rights of the Jewish people, but rather recognized a pre-existing
right, that had been expressed by the 2,000-year-old quest of the
Jewish people to re-establish their homeland.
These rights were unaffected by UN General Assembly Resolution 181
of November 1947 -- the Partition Plan -- which was a non-binding
recommendation that was rejected, in any case, by the Palestinians and
the Arab states.
Given these fundamental sources of international legality, Israel
possesses legal rights with respect to the West Bank and Gaza Strip
that appear to be ignored by those international observers who repeat
the term "occupied territories" without any awareness of Israeli
territorial claims. There is a world of difference between a situation
in which Israel approaches the international community as a "foreign
occupier" with no territorial rights, and one in which Israel has
strong historical rights to the land that were recognized by the main
bodies serving as the source of international legitimacy in the
previous century.
Under the 1993 Oslo Agreements, Israel transferred specific powers
from its military government in the West Bank and Gaza to the newly
created Palestinian Authority. Since that time, 98 percent of the
Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has come under
Palestinian jurisdiction. Israel transferred 40 spheres of civilian
authority, as well as responsibility for security and public order, to
the Palestinian Authority, while retaining powers for Israel's external
security and the security of Israeli citizens.
The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 6) states that the
Occupying Power would only be bound to its terms "to the extent that
such Power exercises the functions of government in such territory."
Under the earlier 1907 Hague Regulations, as well, a territory can only
be considered occupied when it is under the effective and actual
control of the occupier. Thus, according to the main international
agreements dealing with military occupation, Israel's transfer of
powers to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Agreements has made
it difficult to continue to characterize the West Bank and Gaza as
occupied territories.
Describing the territories as "Palestinian" may serve the political
agenda of one side in the dispute, but it prejudges the outcome of
future territorial negotiations that were envisioned under UN Security
Council Resolution 242. It also represents a total denial of Israel's
fundamental rights. Reference to "resisting occupation" is simply a
ploy advanced by Palestinian and Arab spokesmen to justify an ongoing
terrorist campaign against Israel.
It would be far more accurate to describe the West Bank and Gaza
Strip as "disputed territories" to which both Israelis and Palestinians
have claims. As U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright stated in
March 1994: "We simply do not support the description of the
territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 War as occupied Palestinian
territory."
(From Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 470, 16 Jan 02; the full text is
available at http://www.jcpa.org/art/vp470.htm)
**********************************************************************
THE "MUSLIM QUARTER" OF JERUSALEM IS JEWISH
Benny Toker
The archeological site near the Gate of Flowers in the Muslim
Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, that is about to be opened to the
public, will prove to the world that this area belonged to the Jews
until the Second Temple period.
This represents a strong blow to the representatives of the Wakf
and the Palestinian Authority, who have worked hard in recent years to
erase Jewish artifacts in the Old City.
The artifacts revealed by archeologists Yuval Baruch, Boaz Zissi,
and Gidon Avni of the Antiquities Authority prove beyond any doubt that
the Muslim Quarter -- according to every historic measurement --
belongs to the Jews.
The quarter known today as the "Muslim Quarter" was actually never
Muslim. Jews have always lived there. In 1936, in the wake of a wave
of murders and destruction by the Arabs, the Jews abandoned the Muslim
Quarter and escaped. Jews returned to the area in 1979 and today sixty
Jewish families live in the Muslim Quarter.
Five years ago the Arabs murdered Haim Karman, a resident of the
Muslim Quarter, who was on his way to pray at the Western Wall. The
Jews of the Muslim Quarter decided in response to establish a new
outpost, called the Flowers of Haim (Life). The outpost was established
on a site 120 meters east of the Gate of Flowers, in an open space that
had never been occupied.
Ten families moved in, and at first they lived in tents. In 1998,
when they wanted to pour foundations for a cement floor in order to
build homes, they left the site in order to allow the Antiquities
Authority to survey the area, in accordance with the law. The digs
began in summer 1998 and took place next to the walls of the Old City.
Matti Dan, of Ateret Cohanim, explained, "We must reveal our past.
The area between the City of David and Mount Zion was populated and
built by Jews. The Arabs arrived only during the Ottoman period."
Fifty archeologists worked at the site. The digs occurred in two
places and yielded amazing discoveries. "We uncovered nine levels of
settlement, beginning with the First Temple and up until our time,"
said archeologist Yuval Baruch. "We found remains from the Second
Temple period, that teach us about the spread of Jewish settlement
northward. We found coins from the days of the Hasmoneans [Jewish
kings]; inscriptions in the Hebrew script of the days of the Second
Temple; 800 cooking pots with holes." According to ancient Jewish
tradition, holes were made in impure cooking pots to prevent their use,
and they were then thrown into pits. According to Baruch, this area was
never settled, even by the Arabs, because of its strategic location on
a controlling hill.
(From _Makor Rishon_ Yoman, 25 Jan 02, p. 12+)
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KORAN: JEWS TO INHERIT THE PROMISED LAND
Abdul Hadi Palazzi
Islamic Scriptures state specifically that God through His chosen
servant Moses decided to free the offspring of Jacob from slavery in
Egypt and to make them the inheritors of the Promised Land.
The Qur'an (Koran) cites the exact words with which Moses ordered
the Israelites to conquer the Land: "And (remember) when Moses said to
his people: 'O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has assigned
unto you, and turn not back ignominiously, for then will ye be
overthrown to your own ruin'" (Qur'an, Sura 5:22-23, "The Table").
Furthermore, Islam expressly recognizes that Jerusalem plays the
same role for Jews that Mecca has for Muslims, as well as a tolerance
for Jewish worship. We read: "They would not follow thy direction of
prayer (qibla), nor art thou to follow their direction of prayer; nor
indeed will they follow each other's direction of prayer" (Qur'an, Sura
2:145, "The Cow").
(The author is Secretary General of the Italian Muslim Association,
http://shell.spqr.net/islam; from _Olam_, Winter 2001)
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