Entrance to the City of David, 2007. (Photo: Keren Manor/ActiveStills
Last week the Jerusalem municipality voted almost unanimously to bankroll a settler-managed sound and light show in the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The tourist site will be located in the City of David, a biblical theme park privately administered by the rightist Elad Association, also known as the Ir David Foundation. The theme park already offers an evening "sound and light show [that] is screened against the backdrop of the antiquities," as well as family-focused activities geared to visiting Jewish and Christian Zionists--3D movies, a Segway tour, "Jerusalem paintball," and a pine cone-decorating workshop.
The NIS 4 million ($1 million) project will be located in Jeremiah's cistern, the park's newly discovered ancient underground reservoir. Today, Haaretz's Nir Hasson reported on the decision to pump public funds into the project:
'The Elad Association is in charge of the entire area,' said Deputy Mayor Joseph ('Pepe' ) Alalo (Meretz ), the only council member who voted against the resolution, adding that the proposal was a 'trick' to benefit Elad, 'which is trying to take control of Silwan and destroy any possibility of coexistence' with the area's Palestinian inhabitants.
Since contracted by the government six years ago, the Elad Association built the biblical theme park by employing the Absentee Property Laws. The 1950 statute served as a clearinghouse to allow throwing Palestinians from their homes and replacing them with tourist attractions. But just weeks ago a wrench was thrown into the expropriation process when an Israeli court confirmed the settler group relied on false affidavits to carry out the evictions.
Under Israel's system, Palestinian properties in Silwan can legally be taken by the state, and then leased out to Elad, if the homeowners can be proven to have fled from Israel during the Six Days War. The court found the settler group bought fake statements from a Palestinian taxi driver who falsely claimed homeowners left the country in 1967. And although the court identified which families were evicted with erroneous affidavits, the Israeli judge that discovered the mistake has yet to reverse any of those eviction orders.
In total the Elad Association has Judaized 55% of Silwan through 30 home evictions and has moved over 300 settlers into the neighborhood, according to a video on Silwan by the Alternative Information Center (AIC). In addition to the biblical theme park, the settler group also constructed a Jewish-only housing corridor that connects the City of David to the Western Wall, or East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem.
“In total the Elad Association has Judaized 55% of Silwan ”
“Judaising” is the wrong term for a process that is essentially about ethnic cleansing.
What is jewish about ethnic cleansing?
If Judaism had a supreme authority who oversaw the moral side of things the soi disant “Jews” behind this could be excommunicated.
If you want a theme park, Allison, please go to Disney Land.
One day if you ever take the time to study up on the history of the Jewish people and their connection to the Temple Mount, you may feel differently, and slightly embarrassed with your theme park association.
That’s not fair. Disneyland isn’t the only theme park. Basically, a park with a theme, attractions and/or rides, oriented toward one subject (or in the case of Disneyland, broken up into several individual themes).
Also, if they knowingly relied on false affidavits, they should be prosecuted for it.
The connection of the Ashkenazim to the Haram ash Sharif is Haram!
The whole of Israel is a fantasy really. Nobody is allowed to question the ideology. History ends in AD 70 and starts again in the 1880s for ancient Zionism. And that’s before we get to those Lithuanian furry hats.
Does Egypt have a small sect that wears furry hats ?
@ Seafoid,
In Japan they’ve a sect that wears fluffy rats. They claim to be the lost 13th tribe…
What is it, then, giladg, if not a theme park? And if it’s related to religion, then it might be thought of as Fantasyland.
“If you want a theme park, Allison, please go to Disney Land.
One day if you ever take the time to study up on the history of the Jewish people and their connection to the Temple Mount, you may feel differently, and slightly embarrassed with your theme park association.”
Giladg, your “connection” is as false and manufactured as the fake fronts on Mainstreet USA in Disneyland. The Jews who had an actual connection to the Temple Mount are as dead as Julius Ceasar, and have been for close to 2,000 years. They had a connection to that land. You’re a bunch of Europeans and Americans who have a connection to a story about the land.
Kind of like the people who dress up to work at Frontierland. They don’t have a connection to the frontier; they have a connection with the cowboy and Indian stories they grew up with.
You see Woody, Jews are not asking you for permission to believe in what is foundational to the religion. There have always been Jews in the land now called Israel. This connection has never been broken. The Romans tried to do it. They failed. Where are the Romans today? The same Jewish people with the same language are around today as they were 3,000 years ago.
And then there’s all those European jews who decided that they could ignore 3,000 years of subsequent history, and that it was a good thing to murder steal and loot from the current owners of Palestine in violation of international law and all norms of decent human behaviour.
Not acceptable.
giladg, I never said that anyone is asking my permission. The connection that you talk about is fake, regardless of whether you think so or not.
“There have always been Jews in the land now called Israel. ”
So what? There have always been no-Jews there, too. And in the last few hundred years up, there have been many, many more non-Jews than Jews.
“The Romans tried to do it. They failed.”
LOL. If that was, indeed their intent (spoiler: it wasn’t), and considering the fact that the Jews were essentially powerless in the land from the time the land was made into a backwater province of the Roman Empire, through the time when the rabble-rousing hooligans were taken care of circa 70 A.D., on for the next 19 centuries, I’d say the Romans succeeded about as well as anyone could expect, given the circumstances. (Indeed, if one considers the Byzantine Empire as it did — as an extension of the Roman Empire — than that Empire controlled Jerusalem significantly longer than the Jews ever did. Not as long as the Muslims controlled al-Quds, of course.)
” Where are the Romans today?”
In Rome, where they’ve always been. True, they don’t control Colonia Aelia Capitolina any longer, but life goes on.
“The same Jewish people with the same language are around today as they were 3,000 years ago.”
Again with your delusions. There is no basis, genetically, culturally, religiously, linguistically or otherwise to think that there has been no change in the Jewish people over the last 3,000 years. Such a statement is so asinine it refutes itself. They are not the same people and they are not speaking the same language.
“your theme park association.”
To be more moved by such a comparison than you’d be by the fact that actual human beings were ethnically cleansed from their homes shows, exactly, the insidious transformative power of Zionism.. A power that alters normal feelings of empathy and sympathy towards fellow humans into a callous and cold self-obsession.
Vomit!
this land belongs to the Palestinians not the Israeli’s. Illegal and immoral
Of course Ir David is a theme park – part of the larger, Jerusalem theme park: a toxic mixture of crass commercialism, kitsch, propaganda, technology, religion, racism and belligerent nationalism. Mamilla, the Bible Lands Museum, the Cardo, the Kotel Tunnel, Ir David, the Midrehov – it’s all a playground for Birthrighters, Jewish kids on a one-year programme (the kind Max Blumenthal spotlighted in his “Feeling the Hate” video), Jewish and Christian Zionist tourists, class trippers, soldiers on indoctrination duty, etc. It is a caricature that has about as much to do with “the history of the Jewish people and their connection to the Temple Mount” as a “Museum of Tolerance” built on Muslim graves has to do with tolerance.
Welcome to Magic Mountain, or Holy Hill or 3Millennia Park or David Town or whatever the Ministry of Propaganda and the Diaspora chooses to call their ethnic cleansing fun park.
@giladg: In the words of Miko Peled, an Israeli:
“Israel is expelling 50000 residents from Silwan & destroying their homes because it claims that king David built a city there some 3000 yrs ago. Thousands’ of families will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king that may have lived there. Not a shred of historical evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men, women, children along with their schools, mosques, churches & ancient cemeteries & any evidence of their existence must be destroyed.”
So where is your evidence you claim? Sounds to me like you believe anything you have been indoctrinated with and do not know anything of your real history. An invented history is not factual history. Another case of a zionist pot calling the kettle black.
In 1979 at the excavation site at Tel Aphec, north of Tel Aviv, I worked with a team of Israelis that had changed remarkably little during the decade that I had been away. The same people came back to the digs summer after summer. I came into the office one day in the middle of the work day on an errand and found Moshe Kochvie, the director, sitting crossed legged on his desk carefully cutting his big toe nail with an enormous pair of wire clippers. He looked up at me sheepishly as I came in, and I saw his genius laid bare.
He was busy staying out of the way. Kochvie would walk slowly around the site at the end of the day, and every one of his area supervisors would be pleased to see him coming, so they could show him what had been accomplished. However, unless they needed him and sought out his advice, he stayed out of their way during the work day and let them manage their own areas. He did not order them around or criticize his supervisors in front of their subordinates, but quietly built the reputations and confidence of his people. He was the only other person on the site in the middle of the morning who was not busy. In the I Ching, the hexagram emblematic of a peaceful union of men has five strong lines with one yielding line one at its center.
I had reason to see that my understanding of Kokhvie’s success was correct when I watched the opposite leadership style at work on the ‘Eir David, City of David, Site that the Hebrew University in Jerusalem ran in occupied territory on the Ophel Ridge in Jerusalem. This was a controversial and high-profile excavation site that attracted a steady stream of reporters, and every time reporters arrived the supervisor of whatever area had the most to show off would be pushed aside, while the director would jump into the section and pose for the cameras and explain things for the visitors. Yigel Shiloh, who made a common practice of criticizing area leaders in front of their workers, wore a cowboy hat, and he liked to keep the prettiest girl on site in tow in case there were reporters about. I was told that his team changed every year, because few people could take him for long.
The Ophel Ridge was the site of the Jerusalem of Saul and David, a time when it was not much more than a large village. The site lies outside the Dung Gate of the Old City along a ridge overlooking the Kidron Valley and with higher mountain ridges all around it, protecting it from desert winds. Arab houses of the village of Silwan were removed to give access to the land, which had been part of Jordan until 1967. In the summer of 1979 the Israelis had just built, in occupied territory, a large, new, paved parking lot for tour busses. This was just up the hill from the excavation site near the Dung Gate, which leads into a large area that the Israelis have cleared so that large crowds can meet at the Wailing Wall, in an area that was once the Jewish Quarter in the Ottoman days of the Old City. The Israelis had also built a paved road up to this parking lot, and it ran along the ridge just above the excavations.
Most other archaeologists leave huge areas of every site unexcavated, but they also leave unexcavated areas between squares that are excavated. These thick walls of earth, called “balkhs,” are left by the Israelis as well, but only long enough for sketches to be made of the stratigraphy and levels to be measured again, then they take the balks down and open up the area and leave the entire Bronze age below unexcavated, so that the site will impress tourists with the extent of ancient Hebrew occupation. Work had begun high up the ridge, near the road, at the City of David Site and was progressing down the slope and down the valley. By late in the summer of 1979 substantial parts of the site, especially along the road, had been laid bare and had been cleared to the Iron Age level.
Then one afternoon in late summer the unthinkable happened: it rained. It did not rain long, but for a few minutes it rained quite hard, and a wall of water came down off the new parking lot, down the road, over the curb and across the excavated hillside. Within a matter of minutes a third of the entire City of David site, most of it unexcavated, was stripped all the way to bare rock by the rushing water and lost to history forever. That is what I was told by a badly-shaken area supervisor who was there at the time, I saw the site some hours later, but I was too numb to take it all in, and it was getting dark.
One of the most important archaeological sites on earth, a place of unparalleled cultural and intellectual and religious significance for hundreds of millions of people around the world was utterly destroyed by the stupidity and carelessness of a small, brash and arrogant clique who claim a right to those ancient lands on the basis of dubious assumptions about race. These were not religious Jews doing this; it was done by “secular Jews.” Excavating that site should have been the subject of decades of debate and preparation and the focus of immense international scientific, academic, and religious attention. It should have taken decades if not centuries to properly explore. This supreme example of cultural vandalism and religious desecration took place in occupied territory, and it has to my knowledge never been adequately reported much less criticized by the press or academia, even though reporters regularly swarmed all over the area every day looking for politically correct stories connecting modern and ancient Israel.
Superb , Mike. The ideology needs history. Fake plastic history.
I don’t know of any other country in the world where the only archaeology that matters is to do with sites that are more than 2000 years old.
“Come and see! The Burning Bush jr.. Our one and only Coin & Able phone company, Tungsten nails that’ll keep you stuck to a cross for ever. The parted sea; red to the left and dead to the right. IKOAH where Sweden’s manufacturing giant has teamed up with a local boat builder. We have it all. Come and see, come and see! The writing’s on the wall.”
I remember when 60 minutes did a piece on The Ir David Foundation. Bet Leslie Stahl raised a bunch of money for the project with that program
“giladg” the term theme park is completely logically when your dealing with a book like “The Bible” (or Tanakh to be specific in this case) link to webspace.webring.com that includes among other things talking snakes (Genesis 3:1) and a supposed “Tower” that was being built into heaven that apparently frightened Yahweh (Genesis Chapter 11). Similar things can be noted about the “Biblical theme park” in I believe Kentucky in the US that includes human beings riding dinosaurs and other “special” things.
Leaders who say they have been speaking to burning bushes who are god and claim that the Jews are the “chosen people” Encourage to treat goyim less respectfully, fairly than Jews. Ok to kill non Jews. A bunch of Jewish guys with an agenda and then sold to the public via fear and copy rights. How the hell did Bibles end up in hotel rooms.