It is reported in the New York Times by its correspondent, Isabel Kershner, who never lets a fact get in the way of her news, that:
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said that “inserting settlers into Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem” undermined prospects for addressing the city’s status.
But, I would suggest, the UN person has it backwards.
In truth, the Arabs had inserted themselves into Jerusalem, the 3000-year old capital of the Jewish nation. It was they who expelled the last of the Jewish residents from the Old City in May 1948, who had been forced to leave in great numbers during the 1936-1939 period when Arabs killed Jews as they had in 1929 and in 1920. It was Arabs who refused to allow them to return for over 19 years under an illegal Jordanian occupation.
Peace was undermined by the Mufti whose house it was that was now demolished to make way for the construction of a new residential project, one that will permit 20 families to live where just one lived previously. Isn''t that what the civilized world terms "urban rennovation"?Of course, if some Arabs are concerned over the historical conservation heritage value of the building that no longer exists, I would suggest that they deliberate the matter with the Waqf which has been engaged in destroying any Jewish vestige of a site called the Temple Mount. Fair is fair.
It was that Mufti who was infamous as a Nazi-collaborator. A later couple who lived in the house, George and Katy Antonius, were also an interesting couple. He was an Arab propagandist who falsified his academic record while she, when a widow, eventually took to her bed there the British Military Commander of the Palestine Mandate, Evelyn Barker.
Unfortunately, if we have mentioned propaganda, it is now Isabel Kershner who keeps up the propaganda by writing in her report about the buidling:
Although it is mostly populated by Palestinians, nationalist Jewish Israelis have moved into a number of houses there in recent years, evicting the Palestinian residents after Israeli courts ruled that the properties had belonged to Jews before the establishment of the state of Israel and the Jordanian takeover of East Jerusalem in 1948.
That the Jewish residents of the area, who built their homes there beginning in the 1870s when it wasn''t even a neighborhood, purchasing the land from Arabs, were evicted is missing. Somehow, these nasty verbs such as "demolished" and "evicted" never get applied to Jews. Nor "belonged."
Even "takeover", I think, is less pejorative than "illegally occupied." Cannot the Arabs do anything "illegal", or is that framing reserved exclusively for Jews?
And this "East Jerusalem" terminology. It only came about after the Arabs launched an aggressive war in 1947 in violation of the UN recommended partition, one which the Zionist Movement accepted, and they managed only to conquer half of Jerusalem, it''s eastern section, and then prohibited Jews for 19 years from visiting our holy sites while desecrating our synagogues and the Mount of Olives cemetery despite the agreed upon provisions of Article VIII of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, signed on 3 April 1949. The city was never an east-west or north-south reality. Only Arab violence turned that into what the Arabs wish us to believe is "Arab East Jerusalem". As an aside, the UN defined the city limits as including Bethlehem and extending to south Ramallah as well as to where Maaleh Adumim is today in the east and the Mevaseret area in the west.
Quite unsettling a situation and quite disturbing the reporting.