chapters 16-18: jerusalem, one city, three faiths
I found it interesting that Armstrong started calling the people who lived in Palestine "Palestinians" to make us see that whoever lived there was a Palestinian, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish.
As Jews were migrating to Palestine, the European powers divided the Middle East, and gave the power to the Jews. I'm very saddened that Jews, Christians, and Muslims were not able to coexist after the great influx of Jews. If it wasn't for the religious ties of all groups, especially the Muslim and Jews, Jerusalem and the whole of Israel/Palestine could be united, but religious Jews don't see how they can share Jerusalem with anybody else.
I find it inspiring that Armstrong tells many instances in which secular Jews felt deep emotion upon being in Jerusalem and seeing the wall. I feel as if it is ingrained in almost every Jewish soul to long for a place to belong and own.
I don't know how fair it is for me to say that the Palestinian plight is not as ancient as the Jewish one. Regardless, I wish pro-Israelis would not use this as their main argument. Even though Jews bought land from the Palestinian Arabs, it doesn't mean that these Palestinians were obligated to leave Palestine.
I am fairly sure that Armstrong is unbiased. Throughout the book, she seemed empathetic to the Jewish cause, but she strongly opposed their expulsion of the Palestinians.
3 comments:
I didnt even notice that Armstrong started calling all the people who lived in Palestine Palenestinians. Now that you mentioned it I recognized it.
I agree that it's irrelevant how "ancient" everyone's plight is. When I hear Jews arguing that "we were there first," I feel angry and frustrated with them.
While it's true that much land was legally bought from Palestinians (an argument made by pro-Israel lobbyists), a lot of that land was bought from absentee landlords, which meant that the Palestinian farmers actually living on and working that land were forced to leave. This is an interesting phenomenon where both the Jews and the Palestinian landlords were to blame for Palestinians' displacement.
Of course, in the 1948 war, displacement also occurred through forced expulsions: whole villages were destroyed or repopulated with Jews. Many Palestinians also fled their villages because they were afraid of a massacre like that of Deir Yassin. Benny Morris, a Jewish revisionist historian (who went to school with my mother, incidentally), documents statistics of a dozen cases of rapes and twenty-four instances of massacres as supporting evidence for a pattern:
"In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villages, expel them and destroy the villages themselves .... [There were] about a dozen rapes .... In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg .... That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."
(quoted in "The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village," by Susan Slyomovics)
I had no idea about that, Talia. It sounds awful... I would like to read that book.
Also, what is your opinion so far on the conflict? I know we haven't even talked about it in class, but you have researched it extensively. Do you believe Jews have any merit to stay in Israel?
Also, every time I forget to tell you: Shalem in Hebrew means 'whole, complete.' Therefore Shalom means to complete and therefore finish the work G-d. Judaism says that the purpose for which we were created was to complete the world, otherwise known as 'tikkun olam.'
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