JW:
Book Review of Linda Sarsour's
We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love and Resistance
Chapter 2 El Bireh to Brooklyn
The West Bank, then under the control of Jordan, lay an hour north of the bitterly contested city of Jerusalem, which had been split into East and West, segregating Arabs and Jews.
This is a recurring fault of Sarsour's, failing to mention that her fellow Palestinians/supporters are guiltier of everything they falsely accuse Israel of:
- Jordan took the West Bank including most of Jerusalem (including East Jerusalem).
Jordan annexed the West Bank.
Jordan expelled all Jews from the West Bank.
Jordan destroyed all Jewish symbols in the West Bank (including all synagogues).
Jordan desecrated all Jewish symbols including using Jewish tombstones as latrines.
Jordan did not allow Jews to visit the West Bank.
Jordan had a defense treaty with Britain and its military was led by an active British officer.
The actual ethnic cleansing that Sarsour has been so desperate to find.
Even the constant military skirmishes, with Israeli security forces pushing against the borders of the land now designated as Palestine,
The real history is that Jordan supported Palestinian terrorist incursions into Israel which forced Israel to periodically attempt to control.
The Six-Day War with Israel erupted a year later. By the time it ended, Israel had seized Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan and, in violation of international law, began constructing settlements on the newly occupied land.
Regarding Israel seizing the West bank, you can easily read the Truth on Wikipedia. Israel's primary threat was from Egypt and Israel had no intention of attacking Jordan (West Bank). Israel offered Jordan to maintain the status quo but Jordan refused. Israel was attacked by Jordan and started out totally defensive. Read the related Wikipedia articles and you can see the related exponentially higher Israeli morals and ethics compared to the Jordanians. The Jordanians deliberately targeted civilian areas while Israel deliberately avoided targeting West Bank civilian areas and incurred unnecessary casualties due to prohibiting heavy weaponry for fear of damaging holy sites.
Finally a bit of truth from Sarsour, I supposed it's the Law of Averages, Israel did start to build settlements in the West Bank in violation of International Law. But. A common response of Palestinian supporters when asked to comment on Palestinian Terrorism is "You shouldn't be surprised." So too, when Israel has won a war forced on it by those who want to remove it and Jews are still swarming to Israel to escape their attempted extinction in Christian Europe and Muslim Middle East, regarding Israel making room - You shouldn't be surprised.
Often, students were simply traveling home from school and they’d get swept up and arrested with the crowd.
Palestinian Media Watch documents multiple Palestinian lies every day. If "Resistance" includes murdering innocent women and children then lying falls well within the range.
a Palestinian exile whose original village of Lifta had been seized by Israelis during the war of 1948
.
How bout some more truth. Lifta was an all Arab village strategically located on the road to Jerusalem. Years earlier it had played an important role in the Arab Riots (murder, theft, rape). During the War of Independence the Arab military had ordered most of the population out in order to use it as a chokepoint. The village was defeated and abandoned by the Arab military.
Yumma explained that my uncle had been married for exactly three weeks when Israeli soldiers swept him up with about fifty other young Palestinian men whom they claimed had been involved in an uprising against the Jewish state. My uncle tried to tell them he’d simply been walking home to his new wife, but his explanation fell on deaf ears. He was found guilty in a military tribunal and incarcerated. The length of his sentence we did not know. This was not unusual. With the continued expansion of Jewish settlements on land seized from Palestinians in the West Bank, young Arab men were routinely arrested to thin the ranks of protestors and break the back of the resistance. These men could be held for years, released only when the Israeli civil authority decided to let them go. In my uncle’s case, the jail sentence would last for another year.
Israel has a functioning democracy and judicial system which includes at every level, Arabs or at least those sympathetic to Arabs. It's the Palestinians and their supporters, who lack democratic institutions and freedom of the Press that act like Sarsour is describing or worse.
For my people, Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, had been the destruction of our homeland. By the next day, Nakba Day, three-quarters of a million Palestinians had been forced to abandon their homes and the lands their families had occupied for generations. Their mosques were razed to the ground, their houses demolished, their possessions taken, their cemeteries and olive groves destroyed.
Again, not what the Jews did to the Palestinians but it is what the Palestinians and their supporters did to the Jews.
Joseph
The New Porphyry