Assistant Secretary of State Jeffry Feltman today summoned Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to protest the evictions of two families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The official condemned their ousters as a provocative and unacceptable act, adding that it violates Israel’s obligations under the “road map” plan.
Ambassador Oren claimed that the homes had been Jewish owned since long before Israel’s founding, and accused the evicted families of “violating the terms of their leases.” The claims seemed to run dramatically contrary to the details of the case as presented before Israel’s High Court.
The ownership of the homes was actually at the center of the case, despite Ambassador Oren’s claims. The Palestinians living in the homes bought them legally in 1958, when East Jerusalem was Jordanian territory.
The settlers whose claim the Israeli High Court upheld, however, claimed Jewish families had bought the property decades prior, during the Ottoman Empire’s control over the region. The homes will be used by the city of Jerusalem’s planned apartment construction to expand a settlement for religious Jews.
Stop this travesty! This is no such thing as “Palestine”, nor has there ever been a “Palestine” except in the fertile minds of Western colonial powers! This is what the Arabs themselves say about “Palestine”:
"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries a part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it".
– Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937 –
"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not".
– Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946 –
"It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria".
– Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956 –
"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity… yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel".
– Zuhair Muhsin, military commander of the PLO and member of the PLO Executive Council –
"You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people".
– Syrian president Hafez Assad to the PLO leader Yassir Arafat –
"As I lived in Palestine, everyone I knew could trace their heritage back to the original country their great grandparents came from. Everyone knew their origin was not from the Canaanites, but ironically, this is the kind of stuff our education in the Middle East included. The fact is that today's Palestinians are immigrants from the surrounding nations! I grew up well knowing the history and origins of today's Palestinians as being from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Christians from Greece, Muslim Sherkas from Russia, Muslims from Bosnia, and the Jordanians next door. My grandfather, who was a dignitary in Bethlehem, almost lost his life by Abdul Qader Al-Husseni (the leader of the Palestinian revolution) after being accused of selling land to Jews. He used to tell us that his village Beit Sahur (The Shepherds Fields) in Bethlehem County was empty before his father settled in the area with six other families. The town has now grown to 30,000 inhabitants".
– Walid Shoebat, an "ex-Palestinian" Arab –
Yeah I've seen your irrelevant quotes before. First of all the very fact that you think that it matters that these quotes come from people who happen to be Arabic shows that you're thinking in racist terms. I could probably go find a lot of quotes from people saying that all humans are one and are all equal. If I find more quotes than you will you decide a Jewish state was a silly idea and in an epiphany start kissing Arabs and inviting them into your home? Whether or not there was an officially recognized nation called Palestine has nothing to do with the morality of kicking people out of their homes idiot. Nor does it relate to the justification for a racist nation founded in an act of ethnic cleansing.
Barbarossa,
Your preoccupation with ethnicity and race reminds me of the Nazi mindset.