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NY Times Select “Evictions” in Jerusalem

Posted on May 9, 2021 by First.One.Through

The anti-Zionist New York Times is accelerating its attacks on the Jewish State with a narrative that Jewish Israelis are racists as it moves towards accusations of apartheid. It would seem that the Gray Lady is newly interested in evictions when it comes to illegal Arab squatters as opposed to Jewish families thrown out of their homes in their most holy city.

On May 8, 2021, the Gray Lady printed an article “As Court Decision Nears, Battle over Evictions in East Jerusalem.” The article noted that the Israeli Supreme Court will soon rule on whether to evict Arab residents of Jerusalem (the Times calls them “Palestinians of East Jerusalem”) who moved into homes “vacated” by Jews in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. The article failed to state that Jordan (and four other Arab armies) invaded Israel in that war, evicted all of the Jews from Judea and Samaria including the eastern portion of Jerusalem in an act of ethnic cleansing, illegally annexed the region in 1950, and then granted Jordanian citizenship to all Arabs in 1954 while specifically excluding Jews in a further highly anti-Semitic action.

*The New York Times on May 8, 2021 article about Israel*

Instead, the Times said that “Jordan captured the area, including East Jerusalem in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948” making East Jerusalem sound like an actual city rather than the fact that Jordan invaded Jerusalem and seized the eastern half CREATING “EAST JERUSALEM,” an entity that existed until Jordanians attacked Israel again in a war that resulted in Israel reunifying the city.

The paper had the temerity of calling the Jews who moved back into their homes in the reunified capital as “settlers.” Recasting people moving back into their homes nineteen years after being evicted in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing as new foreign interlopers, is something that only an alt-left anti-Zionist can explain.

To support its jaundiced narrative, the Times quoted an Israeli who said that Jews have an ancient connection to the city so they have a right to keep the city Jewish, making the Jewish claim to the area seem ancient and fanatical. The Times statement was designed to be inflammatory and distracted readers from the legal property rights of the Jewish owners. If the paper wanted to add historical context to the story, it could have added the fact that Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority for over 150 years. Jews living in the eastern part of the Jerusalem is not recreating a 2,000-year old factoid, but a continuation of Jews living – and being a majority – in the city for centuries.

Jerusalem Day, a holiday marking the reunification of the city divided by war, is also a moment to celebrate the end of the anti-Semitic Arab ethnic cleansing in Judaism’s holiest city. This year, it should also be celebrated with writing to The New York Times at letters@nytimes.com and corrections@nytimes.com to demand the paper stop its misinformation campaign regarding Israel, ignoring Jerusalem’s Jewish majority since the 1860’s and the eviction of Jews from the eastern half of the city at the hands of invading Arabs. The false narrative promoted by anti-Zionists is the basis for outrageous declarations like UNSC Resolution 2334, which advocate for a Jew-free “East Jerusalem,” and a reinstitution of the ethnic cleansing program of 1949 to 1967.

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NY Times Manufactures “Palestinian East Jerusalem” Narrative

Posted on April 25, 2021 by First.One.Through

Over Jerusalem’s 4,000-year history, it has been attacked and ransacked dozens of times. In modern times, the city was divided for 19 years, from 1949 to 1967, after the Jordanian army invaded Israel, evicted all of the Jews from Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, annexed the region and granted Jordanian citizenship to all Arabs, specifically excluding Jews. After the Jordanians attacked Israel again in June 1967, Israel took the region that Jordan had illegally seized and removed the barbed wire and roadblocks which had split the city, unifying Jerusalem once again. The Jewish State officially annexed the city in 1980.

The United Nations, which had wanted Greater Jerusalem and Greater Bethlehem to be an international Holy Basin, neither part of a Jewish State nor an Arab one, still uses the term “East Jerusalem” even though the demarcation has long been erased. Pro-Arab publications like the New York Times have called it “Arab East Jerusalem,” adding a non-Jewish adjective, either to note that the eastern part of the city is 60% Arab and only 40% Jewish, or to distance the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest place for Jews, from the public sphere. Or both.

As the number of Jews continues to grow throughout unified Jerusalem, the left-wing anti-Zionist publication took yet a new pro-Arab step on April 24, 2021, calling the eastern part of the city “Palestinian East Jerusalem,” in an article which inverted the Arab attacks on Jews and response of Jews to those attacks (but that’s standard reporting for the Times.)

*April 24, 2021 article in The New York Times now calling “Palestinian East Jerusalem”*

For clarity, Israel granted all Arabs living in Israel in 1948 citizenship and has allowed any Arab living in Jerusalem to apply for Israeli citizenship when it officially annexed the eastern part of the city. Thousands of Jerusalem Arabs have already taken Israeli citizenship and many more have applied and are in process. However, the New York Times has now opted to distance Arabs in Jerusalem from Israel by declaring that they are Palestinian and that the area is occupied Palestinian territory. This is a complete lie, as the area was never Palestinian, just illegally occupied Jordanian territory and the Arabs are either Israeli citizens or residents.

The article written by Isabel Kershner attempted to further the fabrication of a “Palestinian East Jerusalem” with statements like:

“Jews and Palestinians then split off into gangs and roamed the streets on their respective sides of the city…”
“… a main thoroughfare which that runs along the dividing line between East and West Jerusalem.“

These statements are ridiculous. There hasn’t been a dividing line in Jerusalem for 44 years as Jerusalem is a single unified city. Some of the largest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are in the so-called “Palestinian” side of the city.

For the Times, those facts need to be challenged as often as possible.

In the same article, the paper noted that “Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing it in the 1967 Middle East War,” failing to state that Israel didn’t capture it from “Palestine” which didn’t exist, nor that Israel took it from Jordan which had illegally annexed it, nor that Israel took it in a defensive battle. Instead, the Times added that “most of the world considers it occupied territory [by Israel].” An ill-informed reader is left with the false impression that Israel illegally seized Palestinian land.

Conversely, when speaking of the Palestinians claim for the eastern half of the city with quotes of “East Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Palestine,” and that Fatah “praised the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem for defending the city and the Aqsa mosque, the revered Muslim holy site,” it again called the Arabs of Jerusalem as “Palestinians,” noted that Jerusalem was holy to Muslims (the article never said anything like that for Jews) and did not have any counter-narrative as it did in regards to Israel reunifying the city.

To further its jaundiced narrative, the Times wrote about “an extremist Jewish supremacy group,” and “young, Jewish supporters of the Jewish supremacist organization Lehava,” continuing its narrative that Israeli Jews are racists. This is in sharp contrast to Palestinian Arabs who are portrayed as innocents who were prevented from gathering at a “festive meeting place… during Ramadan” by police. The facts that Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic group in the world, voted a Holocaust denier to the presidency and a terrorist group with a charter which reads like a combination of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion to 58% of its parliament, never make it into the pages of the anti-Zionist Gray Lady.

The New York Times has taken yet another anti-Israel step in the Arab-Israeli conflict to fabricate a narrative that eastern Jerusalem is an actual Palestinian city, uniquely holy to Muslims, besieged by a racist Jewish State.

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Trump’s “eastern Jerusalem” and Biden’s “East Jerusalem”

Posted on May 7, 2020 by First.One.Through

As people concerned about the Israel-Arab conflict consider the US presidential elections, an important understanding of the two candidates can be found in their articulation of where a theoretical capital of a future Palestinian state would be located.

President Donald Trump announced the US road map to peace In January 2020 which included proposed contours for a two state-solution, the first such third-party proposal since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. In regards to a Palestinian state, Trump said:

“The Palestinian people have grown distrustful after years of unfulfilled promises — so true — yet I know they are ready to escape their tragic past and realize a great destiny. But we must break free of yesterday’s failed approaches.

This map will more than double the Palestinian territory and provide a Palestinian capital in eastern Jerusalem where America will proudly open an embassy. (Applause.) No Palestinians or Israelis will be uprooted from their homes. (Applause.)”

The map highlighted areas within the eastern part of the city of Jerusalem which would become a “Palestinian capital.” The phrase “eastern Jerusalem” highlighted that the United States recognized not only that Jerusalem is a single city but that “East Jerusalem” has not existed for over fifty years; it had a brief turbulent life for nineteen years as an artifice of war in the 1948-1967 time period. Those dark years had barbed wire running through the heart of the city with the Jordanian Arabs controlling the eastern portion after they expelled all of the Jews. The Arabs would not let any Jew enter the Old City, even for prayer at Judaism holiest location.

Vice President Joe Biden sees Jerusalem quite differently as can be inferred by his recent comment in May 2020:

“I will reopen the US consulate in East Jerusalem, find a way to reopen the PLO’s diplomatic mission in Washington, and resume the decades-long economic and security assistance efforts to the Palestinians that the Trump Administration stopped.”

Biden referred to “East Jerusalem” as a proper noun as if such city exists and had any legitimacy. He spoke about it as if the United Nations had proposed splitting Jerusalem in 1947 and giving “East Jerusalem” to Palestinian Arabs. He conjured a world in which Israel hadn’t already divided the UN’s “Corpus Separatum” giving the Palestinian Authority the city of Bethlehem in 1996 while it held Jerusalem.

Biden spoke of pure fantasy. He might as well as have mentioned his Obama Administration’s permitting UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass which advanced a time-altering, human rights-scoffing principle that Jews living in their holiest city is illegal and an occupation of Palestinian territory.

Vice President Joe Biden addressing AIPAC in a pre-recorded message March 2020

Names highlight a particular narrative, and President Trump’s “eastern Jerusalem” and former Vice President Biden’s “East Jerusalem” underscore how each party understands the nature of the city. One party will deal with the Israel-Arab conflict on the basis of reality and the other in the construct of harmful fiction.

Related First One Through articles:

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Ramat Shlomo, Jerusalem and Joe Biden

Posted on April 18, 2020 by First.One.Through

In March 2010, Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel with the hope of pushing the Palestinians and Israelis towards a peace agreement. A 10-month settlement freeze which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in November 2009 was just drawing to an end with no engagement by the Palestinian Authority over the duration, but Biden was trying to move the parties forward.

Not long after he arrived, Israel announced the advancement of 1,600 homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo which is located north of the 1949 Armistice Lines. In response, Biden scolded Israel, saying “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem.” The statement using “condemn” was shocking, as it is normally only used regarding terrorism. Netanyahu’s 10-month freeze also never included any construction in any part of Jerusalem, so the Israeli activity was not surprising.

Further, it is important to understand Ramat Shlomo.

Ramat Shlomo, Jerusalem

Ramat Shlomo is not a vacant plot of land, it is not privately owned by Arabs and it is not located in the middle of Judea and Samara / the West Bank. It is an established Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.

This “East Jerusalem” neighborhood is located northWEST of Hebrew University which was built in 1925.
It is located southWEST of Pisgat Ze’ev, the second largest neighborhood in Jerusalem and just next to Ramat Alon, the largest neighborhood
it is located northWEST of the Jewish Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest location
It is located just on the other side of Highway 1 from Mobileye, a company which Intel bought for over $15 billion

The population in Ramat Shlomo is mostly ultra-Orthodox, and include Chabad and Litvish communities. The neighborhood has a median age among the youngest in Jerusalem and highest birth rates. Yet from 2006 to 2017, the population of Ramat Shlomo was flat at around 14,700 people. The lack of new homes and flat population growth despite the high birth rates meant that families actually had to leave their neighborhood. The Jerusalem Institute noted “The highest negative migration balance in relation to the size of the neighborhood’s population was recorded in Ramat Shlomo.”

Things finally turned around in 2018 with 500 new apartments commencing construction, the most in Jerusalem according to the Jerusalem Institute. The neighborhood also had the largest voter turnout for municipal elections in 2018, with 83% of eligible voters, indicating a highly engaged populace.

As the U.S. presidential election season moves into high gear, people will consider Biden’s relationship with Israel and the 2010 Ramat Shlomo incident will surely be discussed. It is therefore worth reviewing how Biden’s highly critical comments slowed the natural growth of that residential Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem for many years until just recently.

Related First One Through articles:

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Is Columbia University Promoting Violence Against Israel and Jews?

Posted on December 16, 2019 by First.One.Through

Columbia University has claimed to be a champion of free speech. It was in that spirit that it invited the noted anti-Semite Malaysian Prime Minster Mahathir Mohamad to speak on campus in September 2019. Mohamad has called Jews “hook-nosed,” said they “rule the world by proxy” and questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. He has even said he is “glad to be labeled anti-Semitic.”

That same week, seemingly to make the Jewish students on campus feel particularly unwelcome, one of Columbia’s professors, Lis Harris, released her book “In Jerusalem.” The student-run Columbia Spectator magazine reviewed the book in its Winter 2019-20 edition.

The review was shocking in seemingly endorsing the author’s contentions that Israel is an oppressor of Palestinians without adding any facts or context.

The article is set up to inform the reader that the book will have a natural “pro-Israel” tenor, as the author Lis Harris “grew up in a secular Jewish family in the United States fully alert, she says, ‘to the wrongs done to the beleaguered Jews across the ocean,’ but with little sense of the ‘wrongs done to the Palestinian people.’” Ah, if someone with a pro-Israel bias can see how terrible Israel is, it certainly must be true. The birth of a woke anti-Zionist is a cause for a progressive party.

Facts in the review and/or the book were seemingly few in the offering.

We are told that the book tries to look at the conflict through the lens of two families, a Jewish one living in “West Jerusalem” and a Palestinian one “living across the border wall in East Jerusalem.” This is fiction. There is no “border wall” between “West Jerusalem” and “East Jerusalem.” In 1967, Israel tore down the fence that divided the Jerusalem after Jordan illegally attacked Israel, and reunited the holy city. There is no West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, and the fence which had existed from 1949 to 1967 was explicitly declared to NOT be a border by Israel and Jordan in their Armistice agreement. The “security barrier” which Israel began to erect in 2002 to stop the terrorism of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank is to the east of unified Jerusalem.

Perhaps the facts make the author’s shuttle diplomacy seem less daring, but it’s a sad intro for a writer “who spent more than ten years gathering research and interviews for the book.” The book established zero credibility from the outset.

The review then moves from the gross inaccuracies to ignoring Jewish history and blessing Arab terrorists.

We are informed that the stories in the book are told by “accomplished women” and intelligent and respected family members who “want peace and a fair solution to the conflict.” The Jewish woman’s aunt escaped Nazi Germany who found asylum in Mandatory Palestine “as a refuge from violence.” There is no mention that Mandatory Palestine was designed to REESTABLISH the Jewish homeland years before Nazis came to power. Jews were not dumped into Mandatory Palestine in a reaction to the Holocaust; the land of Israel has been the Jewish homeland for 3,700 years. Modern Zionism pushed for Jewish sovereignty in that land decades before the State of Israel came into being. That’s why Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the 1860’s, all facts not covered in the review and presumably not in the book.

This Jewish aunt “is juxtaposed with the experience of Niveen’s [the Arab’s] aunt. At twenty-one, Rasema Odeh was accused of terrorism, illegally tortured, and served ten years at the Ramla prison… Rasmea’s story is shocking, but the chapter devoted to it is one of the book’s best.” The review made it sound like Odeh was a poor victim, unjustly “accused of terrorism.” It neglected to state that she was convicted of terrorism in which she placed a bomb at a supermarket killing two civilians (her accomplices openly admitted such on Palestinian TV). It failed to state that Odeh lied about the events in getting a visa into the United States in 1994 and was stripped of her citizenship in 2017 and deported. It failed to note that many countries – including Germany in 2019 – banned her from speaking in public and denied her a visa as she calls violence against Israel. The mayor of Berlin said about Odeh that “anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic resentments, wrapped up in liberation rhetoric, have no business here. I am glad that we have found a way to stop this propaganda.”

This “juxtaposition” of a Holocaust survivor finding refuge at the expense of Palestinian Arabs seems to take a page out of the book of pathological liar U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) who claimed she found comfort that her ancestors created a “safe haven for Jews“ when they actually did everything they could to kill the Jews and/or keep them out of Palestine. It is called Seeing the Holocaust Through Nakba Eyes, which turns the Jews from victims to oppressors, and the Palestinians from participants in the Holocaust to victims themselves.

The article continues with more inanity such as “Harris is clear-sighted and firm in her own view that the Israeli government is more oppressor than victim. She does not condemn the Palestinian people fighting to live in their occupied home of East Jerusalem (but neither will she excuse the violence of Hamas).” No commentary that the Arab population in the eastern part of Jerusalem has grown FOUR TIMES since 1967, a rate that surpasses the population growth of Arabs in any neighboring country. It also neglects to mention that Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem have the option of becoming Israeli citizens and thousands have opted to do so. Palestinians aren’t “fighting to live;” they are fighting to evict the Jews and destroy the Jewish State.

The Spectator adds that “Harris was able to comment on President Trump’s rash recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Rash? Was President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948 also rash? The snide comment didn’t even attempt to hide the reviewer’s bias.

In summation, the review states that “through the people she comes to know in Israel and Palestine, Lis Harris sees hope, and this brave new book ultimately helps us see it too.” Palestine? The United States recognizes no such country. And to the extent that it recognizes “Palestinian Territories,” those are limited to Gaza and Areas A and B, and certainly not “in Jerusalem.”

Columbia University has chapters of anti-Israel hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as student-run groups on campus. Their voices seem to have penetrated not only the student-run paper and magazine but the University itself which includes a faculty with anti-Israel authors and promoters of boycotts of Israel, and enabled the invitation of proud anti-Semites like the Prime Minister of Malaysia onto its campus. Beyond the student agitators, maybe the university’s anti-Israel platform was purchased by foreign donors like Saudi Arabia who pumped more than $193 million into Columbia between 2011 and 2017.

In October 2019, a report entitled “A Hotbed for Hate” produced by the Alumni for Campus Fairness listed over 100 anti-Jewish incidents at Columbia and Barnard since the 2016/7 academic year. In addition to the on-campus activities like a swastika painted on a Jewish professor’s office, the report listed numerous faculty members who deny the history of Jews as well as peddle forms of Holocaust denial.

At the very moment when antisemitism is on the rise, the murder of Jews is becoming commonplace and the demonization of Israel is accepted, it is a travesty that New York City’s only Ivy League school gives credibility, honor and an open mic to such vile sentiments.

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