op-ed: Systemic Judaization of Jerusalem

The intimidation of Judaization of Jerusalem has not stopped since the first day of the occupation of East Jerusalem. When the eastern part of the city was occupied in 1967, the Zionist Moshe Dayan, with the support of the occupation leaders, instructed the engineers and planners to work on creating a new reality in Jerusalem for the benefit of the Jews. Within a few days after the occupation, the entire Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem was demolished, nearly a thousand Arab citizens were expelled from their homes, the Al-Buraq Wall square was established, and 17,700 dunums of land were confiscated, according to the Israeli policy aimed at controlling the largest possible area of land with less possible number of Arab residents.

When Golda Meir entered Jerusalem after the occupation of Jerusalem in the year 67 AD, she and all her ministers were walking behind the rabbis barefoot weeping as they walked towards the Al-Buraq Wall, which they call the Wailing Wall in East Jerusalem. In 1967, the occupation government issued a decision stipulating the annexation of 70,000 dunums of Jerusalem lands to the occupying state. This was followed by the dissolution of the Jerusalem Municipal Council and its annexation to the West Jerusalem Municipality. After the occupation of the city of Jerusalem, the occupation resorted to enacting laws aimed at speeding up the Judaization and control of Jerusalem.

The occupation has succeeded in imposing its control over the Holy City by confiscating the homes of Jerusalemites and seizing their lands under false pretexts, such as the property of absentees and others. The visitor to the city sees the extent of the destruction that befell the city, its markets are empty, the doors of the shops in the city open in the morning and close in the evening, without achieving commercial movement that benefits the owners, and there is no one to move those markets in light of the harassment of the occupation. The occupation has succeeded in directing the trade movement out of the city, and the Jerusalemite citizen has found what he is looking for outside the old markets of Jerusalem, specifically in cities close to Jerusalem, such as Bethlehem and Ramallah. This is due to the obstruction of Al-Maqdisi’s access to shopping within the alleys of the Old City, the imposition of restrictions on queuing up vehicles, and the imposition of heavy fines on those who park their vehicles at the entrances to the Old City.

Israel used its security presence in Jerusalem to exercise its influence in and around Jerusalem. However, in recent years, the seizure of Islamic religious and archaeological sites has escalated. Such as the attempts of the occupation to exhume a cemetery in the vicinity of Al-Aqsa Mosque and other religious places. The occupying power has sought to preserve its plans by strengthening the settlers' presence and offering financial inducements and establishing them in Jerusalem at the expense of the indigenous population. The idea of the entity state was to establish settlement population centers in the vicinity of the Holy City and link them with internal and external bypass roads, to isolate them from their Palestinian depth first, and secondly to isolate them from nearby Jerusalemite villages such as Al-Eizariya, Abu Dis, Al-Ram and other Palestinian villages that were administratively affiliated to it. The occupation government is trying to change the compass towards directions related to the biblical religious dimension, and that Jerusalem is the city of David and the capital of their southern kingdom after the Prophet Solomon.

The intransigent and arrogant policies of the policy makers in the Israeli governments did not create a reality that deals with their false Torah. It is true that there is a Judaization of Jerusalem, but the falsity of the claims of the Israeli rabbis is exposed. Despite what the Israeli Antiquities Authority is doing to excavate antiquities proving the Jewishness of Jerusalem, it has failed to do so. There is an explicit admission by some Zionist scholars such as Thomas Thompson, who said in one of the interviews that none of the archaeologists, diggers, or prospectors, throughout Palestine, was unable to obtain a single proof confirming that the Jews had a presence in the land of Palestine before the first hundred of Christ, peace be upon him. As for the second scholar, it is the American archaeologist "Keith Whitlam," who wrote a book entitled: "Theft of the Land of Palestine," who said, "The picture of Israel's past, as it appeared in most chapters of the Hebrew book, is nothing but a fictional story, a fabrication of history."

Religious Zionism does not care about what is said about the invalidity of their biblical account of the city of Jerusalem, and the falsity of what the Torah brought about their entitlement to Jerusalem. They are continuing to Judaize Jerusalem at a very high rate, and this is represented in the policy of harassing the residents of Jerusalem, imposing more taxes on them, and unleashing settlers to criminalize the rights of the Palestinians in and around Jerusalem. Despite this, the Jerusalemite citizens are steadfast in the face of the fierce winds, in addition to the deterioration of their economic and financial situation, they are still clinging to their land and defending their houses with all the means available to thim.