By Barry Shaw
So where is the ethnic cleansing? It is against Jews by the Palestinian leadership supported by the BDS activists and now with the help of the United Nations.
On a visit to Cairo in July of 2013 Mahmoud Abbas said that “no Jew, civilian or otherwise, would be permitted to live in the future Palestinian state.” He repeated it several times to his own people before someone whispered in his ear that this was being construed as anti-Semitic and not helpful to their cause, so he switched the word “Jew” to “Israeli.” But it was too late. He had already set the marker. This Holocaust denier had said what he meant. Further proof that the main obstacle to a two-state solution is not the settlements, as UNSC 2334 would have us believe, but the absolute refusal of Abbas to acknowledge the presence of the Jewish state of Israel. This is too abhorrent a reality for Mahmoud Abbas and certainly also Hamas on the other side of the Palestinian political divide.
The most egregious errors of UN Resolution 2334 is that it attempts to replace Resolution 242 with a demand that all of the territories, known as Judea & Samaria in Israel but defined as “illegally occupied Palestinian territory” dated 4 June 1967 by the Security Council, must be considered as “Palestinian.”
As both sides of the Palestinian divided leadership demand that a Palestine must be Judenrein – cleansed of Jews – this UN resolution by default calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews and is therefore an anti-Semitic decision in the spirit of the notorious Nuremburg laws of Nazi Germany.
Further evidence of this was the inclusion of “east Jerusalem” into 2334. Putting aside that an undivided Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel but a working municipality, by calling for splitting the eastern side of the city and calling it Palestine cuts out the central beating heart of Judaism and hands it over to a malevolent and proven anti-Semitic entity.
East Jerusalem means the Old City that contains most of Judaism’s precious treasures. The Kotel (Western Wall), the Temple Mount, the Jewish Quarters with its numerous synagogues and study centers, the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives as well as major institutions such as Hadassah Hospital, Hebrew University, the Rockefeller Museum and of course the archeological discover of David’s City, including the palace of the Jewish King David of biblical fame.
People should be made to understand, as the Palestinians and their followers clearly do, that by removing the most holy Jewish sites from Israeli possession would leave Israel spiritually bankrupt and unable to call itself a Jewish state no matter how many Jews are its citizens.
The anti-Semitism of the Palestinians, and the Muslim world as a whole, is undeniable, but this is not a new phenomenon. Ethnic cleansing by Arabs has being going on for a hundred years in this part of the world.
My upcoming book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel’ reveals the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1914 and 1917. It details the background to the Nebi Musa Arabs riots in Jerusalem in 1920 that left Jews killed, raped and wounded. That was before the 1929 wholesale massacre of Jews by local Arabs in Hebron. All this before there was a state of Israel.
When Israel was established in 1948 the first act of the Arabs was to invade the nascent state in a multi-force war of aggression. One consequence was the expulsion and murder of Jews by the Jordanians in Gush Etzion, Kalya and other places. The ethnic cleansing of Jews by murder and expulsion from the Old City of Jerusalem added to the destruction of all its synagogues by the Arab Legion remains a car on our collective memory.
No Jews remained in Judea & Samaria, called the West Bank by the occupying Jordanians, or in east Jerusalem. It was ethnically cleansed and the United Nations had little concern. Only now do they agitate to remove Jews from Judea & Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem, once again turning our ancient heritage into Judenrein territory as demanded by the Palestinians – and they think they are doing this in the name of justice and human rights. For shame!
Jordan occupied territory captured from the newly-born Israel from 1948 until they lost another aggressive war in 1967. Nothing was said in the United Nations. No outcry from Palestinian supporters because there weren’t any. No Palestinian leaders pressed claims of Jordan illegally occupying Palestinian land because there weren’t any Palestinian leaders and there wasn’t any Palestine to lobby for.
What we are witnessing is a continuation of the evil Arab tradition of murdering and expelling Jews. When we see the hand of Britain approving of its implementation we are reminded, as I have laid out in my book, the duplicity and moral corruption of the British government when it came to Jews in Palestine and now to Jews in Israel.
This has to be a time when Western nations in particular rediscover their moral compass. It does not lie in appeasement of the grievances of haters and anti-Semites.
We cannot expect better from the Arab world with its ancient culture of violence and Jew hatred but we do expect better from a democratic world that has lost its tradition of enlightenment and replaced it with a misguided sense of secular morality that has allowed those who do not share once cherished values to make our world a far more dangerous place.
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Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of the upcoming book 1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel.