Media Analysis

The bulldozers of Shavuot, 1967

In a few weeks, the world will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, which ended partition and began the occupation. Israelis will celebrate the “liberation” of Jerusalem. They will gather at the wide open plaza of the Western Wall. Before the war this was a neighborhood called the Mughrabi Quarter: 135 houses with 700 residents, many of them of Moroccan and Algerian ancestry.

Yesterday at the Center for Palestine Studies in New York, Vincent Lemire, a French scholar, told a story about the destruction of the Quarter and the expulsion of those residents that he heard from Haifa Khalidi in her family’s house next to the former Mughrabi Quarter.

Vincent Lemire, from his twitter feed

Lemire:

I would like to relate this visit and tell you how staggering was this discovery that led me to the archives. For several minutes I had many questions in my mind. Why Haifa Khalidi was sleeping in this tiny room, at the top of a small staircase, very narrow and very steep, at the top floor of this splendid Mamluk house in the center of the old city of Jerusalem, where she sleeps alone? Why is she sleeping in this tiny bed in this tiny room under the roof, overheated in summer and freezing during winter?

The answer was obvious. She was sleeping there because she is afraid. She was afraid that the settlers from the next door yeshiva could enter from the roof during the night to occupy the house, as they occupy several houses in the neighborhood. That’s why she is sleeping at the top floor– as the gatekeeper of the house.

And this scared– this frightness has direct connections with the destruction of the Mughrabi neighborhood 50 years ago.

Haifa Khalidi was born, as you know, in a prestigious Palestinian family in this very house in 1948 during the first war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And for 70 years she has never left this very place.

She wanted to take me on the rooftop. We switched from this tiny room to this boundless view… It was evening time. The night was wonderful. From there one can see Bethlehem to the south, the Mount of Olives to the east, and further, the desert and even see the first lights of Amman… The wailing wall– I have never seen in this light.

Haifa said, “Come with me downstairs to see from the bathroom windows.”

And here in the bathroom she told me the story– her story of the Six Days War and of the destruction of the Mughrabi neighborhood.

“It was from here that I saw the bulldozers raiding the Mughrabi neighborhood just at the end of the war. Sunday the 11th, Monday the 12th of June 1967. Two days and two nights… I remember the noise, the dust, the screams, the tears. The residents had two hours to collect their belongings and leave their houses forever. After the destruction, two old women were found dead under the rubble of their house.

“I was afraid that our house was going to crumble. Finally the bulldozer stopped just before the wall of our house. In front of this bathroom, just here–”

And she showed me the place with her hand. She was reviving the imagination from her mind. At that time she was 19 years old.

The Mughrabi Quarter before the Six Day War. View is from the west. Western Wall is in the middle ground.

Back home I looked for pictures of this destruction. I found some. Not so much. In these pictures, we actually see bulldozers, piles of rubble, trucks, and we see the crowd of Israelis beginning to gather in this place, to pray and to sing, on Wednesday, the 14th of June, for the celebration of Shavuot.

The French consulate archives reveal that 200,000 Israelis came to visit the wailing wall during these days.

We are historians. Our duty is to report and to tell the history. And more than that our duty is to identify the blind spot, the dark places of yesterday and to light them, to make it visible and accessible for this day.

Photograph of the Western Wall plaza today, on what was the Mughrabi Quarter. Photo from Jewish Federations of San Diego, from its page, opportunities to travel to Jerusalem.

Shavuot is a Jewish holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah to Moses by God.

The Mughrabi Quarter had been preserved, till its destruction, by a waqf— an Islamic philanthropic trust– maintained from Algeria, Lemire said.

Below is a map of the Old City showing the Khalidi library at the northwest corner of the plaza opposite the Western Wall. It is two doors down from the house in the story. Here is the website for the Khalidi Library, containing a description of the Mamluk house in which Lemire met Haifa Khalidi.

Map of the Old City showing Khalidi library at edge of the former Mughrabi Quarter.

Here is a photograph from that website of the Khalidi library, two doors down from the Khalidi house.

Khalidi library, in old city of Jerusalem, near Western Wall

 

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In more macro context: What say we all about “revisionist history”? In the context of “history is written by the victors”? Just asking. Further inquiry: Is it not the very job of historians to change the narrative depending on what is revealed, uncovered after the initial history is written? Again, in context, modern states classify data, with statutes pushing freedom of information access far in the future. Bush Jr said, to paraphrase, “history is made by me, they can write about it later, much later.” Those condemned at Nuremberg & Tokyo did get to do that. I’m afraid historical truth remains in the hands of the PTB, as always; of course, this changes, eh?
Case in point: How did folks look at the painting of Custer’s Last Stand in 1950? How do folks look at the same painting now?

A sobering reminder of the vicious and entirely planned destruction and theft of Palestine from the Palestinians that Israel chooses to ‘celebrate’. I think it’s the only way to properly ‘commemorate’ these sins that Zionists chuckle over while they continue to sin and break international law with alacrity and impunity.

Ilan Pappe seems to have the same idea:

“Jenin won’t forget Israel’s massacre

Fifteen years ago this month the Israeli army bombarded and assaulted the Jenin refugee camp for more than 10 days. This was part of Israel’s so-called Operation Defensive Shield, during which it sent troops into the heart of six major cities in the occupied West Bank and surrounding towns and refugee camps that were ostensibly under Palestinian Authority control.

In a report on the assault, the United Nations concluded that the Israeli army killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp that is just 0.4 square kilometers and hosts about 15,000 people.

After the assault, a long debate ensued about the number of casualties. In the immediate havoc that reigned in the camp, the numbers were thought to be very high.

Israel barred members of a UN commission of inquiry mandated by the Security Council from conducting an investigation, but a subsequent report compiled by the secretary-general concluded that at least 52 Palestinians were killed in Jenin refugee camp.

Almost 500 Palestinians were killed and another 1,500 injured in the course of Israel’s assault across the West Bank from March to May of 2002.

However, it was not just the numbers involved that shocked the world at the time, but the brutal nature of an Israeli assault that was unprecedented even in the harsh history of the occupation.

This brutality can be best appreciated when you visit the camp. This crowded neighborhood was assaulted from the air by helicopter gunships, shelled by tanks from the hills above it and invaded by monstrous vehicles – a hybrid of a tank and bulldozer which the Israelis nicknamed Achzarit, the brutal one, that razed the houses and made the alleys into highways through which tanks could pass.

The tanks revisited the camp after the operation, usually coming in the dead of night, traumatizing children for years to come with their roar.

“Geography of disaster”
I went to the camp last week as part of a visit to Al-Quds Open University’s branch in Jenin.

We rushed to the city and back from 1948 Palestine (present-day Israel), since the private company that manages the Jalameh checkpoint was to close the gates for the next few days so that Israeli Jews could celebrate Passover, while forgetting the besieged Palestinians in the West Bank.

The army imposed closure on villages and neighborhoods inside the West Bank and incarcerated millions of people in local enclaves so that Israeli settlers could move around as if this was terra nullius – a land without a people.

Al-Quds Open University caters for the children, among others, of political prisoners and martyrs. It is hosted in a rented building, with the hope that one day it will be moved to a proper campus – if the millions of dollars needed for its completion can be found. …

Clear view
However, there is something else you notice when you are on the hill. You can see the whole region stretching from Jenin, which is in the northern West Bank, down to the Mediterranean Sea. You can see through Marj Ibn Amr – the fertile region also known as the Jezreel Valley – to the city of Haifa on the coast.

The villages and towns that were there before 1948 were wiped out in the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias. Many of the people who used to live in them were driven to this area and could watch from the hill how their homes and fields turned into Jewish colonies and Jewish National Fund “forests.”

The connection between what you see from the hill and the horrors of April 2002 is clear. It is yet another reminder of what the late scholar Patrick Wolfe articulated so well when he noted that settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event.

In the case of Zionism, it is a structure of displacement and replacement, or to paraphrase Edward Said’s words, substituting presence with absence. It began in 1882 with the first Zionist settlements, reached a certain peak in 1948, continued with vehemence in 1967 and is still alive and kicking today.

The attempt to break down the resistance to the displacement is what occurred in the camp 15 years ago.

Pictures of the martyrs from 2002 and since cover the walls and streets. Beneath them sits a large number of unemployed youth – Jenin refugee camp has one of the highest unemployment rates of any camp in the West Bank.

Talking to them it is clear that they are determined not to succumb to despair or apathy. Education offered by Al-Quds Open University is one way of coping with life in the camp and under oppression. But resistance is still an option.

After all, this is the area from which the most significant anti-colonialist effort by the Palestinians sprang already in the early 1930s: the rebellion led by Izz al-Din al-Qassam.

It is symbolic that on this visit I met his grandson, Ahmad. We talked briefly about how his grandfather’s historical image is distorted by anyone who compares him to present-day so-called jihadists. He was very far from being one.

Had the British not killed him in 1935, he would have become the Palestinian Che Guevara. He was a charismatic anti-colonialist leader operating among the people who were the first victims of Zionism in the 1930s – the displaced peasants and tenants driven out of the lands which they had cultivated for centuries. …”

more @- https://electronicintifada.net/content/jenin-wont-forget-israels-massacre/20221

I wasn’t yet 12 when the 67 crisis occurred, culminating in the 6 day war. Though I had cousins in israel I had never met them. But I attended a religious Zionist summer camp in 64, 65 and 66. I knew the words to hatikva and Yad l’achim, the bnei akiva youth movement anthem.

Ben Gurion (in the run up to the war) scolded rabin for the attack on jordan the previous november.

One cannot say that Ben Gurion alone established the state, but his is certainly the essential personality for understanding the form israel took. ( I read somewhere that BG demanded an i.d. card or t.z. card without Arabic on it and though all other Israelis had Arabic on their teudat zehut, BG did not.) I wonder if sharett had been stronger if he might have guided israel to a compromise with nasser instead of the 56 war.

If religion x had been a religion of billions returning home in full belief of their religion and conquered the temple mount, the mosques would have been bulldozed.

But judaism is a religion of millions and not billions and the belief system of moshe dayan, who was the de facto leader of israel at the time, was not a belief in torah, but a belief in the new hebrew man of action, so instead of bulldozing the mosques, the neighborhood by the wall was bulldozed. A type of conquering not as obtrusive as my hypothetical bulldozing of the mosques.

When I posit an alternate history of no 6 day war, my Zionist friend is appalled at the thought of jerusalem not in our hands.

When I visit the wall to pray or contemplate, or near the wall to tickle my brain with the heady view of past and present, I am hyper conscious of the occupation and what it entails in the current tense. But I do not dwell on the destruction of homes in the mughrabi quarter. I cannot go back to moshe dayan in his crib and teach him a different ethos. Soldiers conquered jerusalem. Thank God they were wise enough not to bulldoze the mosques. But they behaved like conquering soldiers regarding mughrabi, because that’s what they were.

The perpetuation of the occupation in the west bank, specifically a settler occupation that gives no vote to the people of the west bank is partially a result of the conquering soldier theme not realizing that it is a theme with limits. (It is also the result of people less secular than dayan and their ideas which complicate a military occupation with the settler occupation.)

The zionists have used the Holocaust for their own devious reasons, using it as an excuse to occupy, steal, and attack anyone who criticizes their policies, yet we have to wonder why, if they really cared for those who suffered this horrible time in history, they have been neglected, and treated badly for years. They have made a business out of getting aid and sympathy using that tragedy. Never again is not for everyone, and the Holocaust survivors deserve much, much more.

http://forward.com/fast-forward/369509/israel-admits-holocaust-survivors-in-dire-circumstances/

@Yonah
“But they behaved like conquering soldiers regarding mughrabi, because that’s what they were”

So that makes it all OK for you then – “conquering soldiers” have special privileges =

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_destruction_of_Warsaw