Virtual Tour of the Shepherd Hotel Area

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
11 January '11

The other day a private developer destroyed a large Jerusalem building which has been empty for decades, so as to construct an apartment building on its site. The building, originally built by the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1930s, was confiscated during WWII by the British, while Husseini was hobnobbing with his Nazi friends in Berlin, then by the Jordanians when they conquered the area in 1948, then by the Israelis when they conquered it in 1967. It was sold to Irwin Moskowitz in 1985, but only recently did he manage to complete the legal process that would enable him to develop it. Along the way it became known as the Shepherd Hotel.

The move was condemned world-wide, by Hillary Clinton, Catherine Ashton, Ban Ki-Moon, and many others, and of course by the Palestinian leadership. The condemnations all claimed the new apartments will be in East Jerusalem, and thus part of Palestine, and therefore no Jews may be allowed to live there and if they are this will prevent the division of the city and peace.

Set aside the legal aspects of the matter, not because they aren't interesting, but because they've been set aside by all the negotiating parties for at least the past decade. When on December 24th 2000 President Clinton slowly dictated his terms for peace to a group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, he determined that Jerusalem would be divided along the lines of ethnic division, irrespective of which part of the town had been in which country prior to its unification under Israel in 1967; his proposed lines would have had some Jordanian areas incorporated to Israel, and some Israeli ones incorporated to Palestine. Ever since then the principle of division along the ethnic lines has been the single option discussed in all relevant forums, effectively overriding earlier discussions of history, legality, morality or what have you.

I have written repeatedly about how this practical solution is not practical, and indeed should anyone ever try to impose it, the imposition will inevitably lead to violence bloodshed and eventually back to war (here, for example, and here). I have demonstrated this on various parts of town. (Here, here and here, for example), Today I suggest we have a close look at the situation on the ground at the Shepherd Hotel compound.

(Read full "Virtual Tour of the Shepherd Hotel Area")

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WaPo expunges Israeli rule of Jerusalem -- an Orwellian ploy

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
11 January '11


At first, it seemed that it may just have been an oversight accounting for the fact that the Washington Post has turned Palestinian wishful-thinking about Jerusalem into actual reality. But it wasn't just a one-time mistake. It again pops up in a Jan. 11 dispatch by Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg ("Netanyahu rejects Clinton criticism" page A10).

What startled me in reading this piece was a reference to Adnan Husseini objecting to plans for 20 Jewish apartments on a Jerusalem spot where once stood a villa of the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who aligned himself with Hitler and fomented Arab pogroms that killed many hundreds of Jews;

The startling, surreal part is Greenberg's identification of Adnan Husseini, a descendant of the Mufti, as "the Palestinian Authority's governor of Jerusalem."

That can't be, can it? Does this mean that Nir Barkat is no longer Jerusalem's mayor, but has been succeeded by a Palestinian governor? From Greenberg's writing, it sure looks like a done deal.

(Read full "WaPo expunges Israeli rule of Jerusalem -- an Orwellian ploy")

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Quite Unsettling

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
10 January '11


It seems that

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said that “inserting settlers into Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem” undermined prospects for addressing the city’s status.

He has it backwards.

It is that Arabs had inserted themselves into Jerusalem, the 3000-year old capital of the Jewish nation and it was they who expelleds the last of the Jewish residents from the Old City in May 1948, refusing to allow them to return for over 19 years under an illegal Jordanian occupation.

Peace was undermined by the Mufti whose house was demolished to make way for the construction of a new residential project, one that will permit 20 families to live where just one lived previously.


That one was first the infamous Nazi-collaborator Mufti, Haj Amin El-Husseini. Then the Antonius couple. The widow, Katy, eventually taking into her bed there the British Military Commander of the Palestine Mandate, Evelyn Barker.

Isabel Kershner keeps up the propaganda by writing there:

Although it is mostly populated by Palestinians, nationalist Jewish Israelis have moved into a number of houses there in recent years, evicting the Palestinian residents after Israeli courts ruled that the properties had belonged to Jews before the establishment of the state of Israel and the Jordanian takeover of East Jerusalem in 1948.

That the Jewish residents of the area, who built their homes there beginning in the 1870s when it wasn't even a neighborhood, purchasing the land from Arabs, were evicted is missing. Somehow, these nasty verbs such as "demolished" and "evicted" never get applied to Jews. Nor "belonged".

(Read full "Quite Unsettling")

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The Crime of Building a House

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
10 January '11

In Niger, two Frenchmen were murdered by their Islamic kidnappers. Saudi Arabia sentenced a 23 year old girl who was gang raped to a year in prison and 100 lashes. Iran arrested two dozen Christians for the crime of being well... Christians. Which of these awful things did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the EU's Red Baroness Ashton forcefully condemn?

The answer is none of them.

Instead they forcefully and vigorously condemned the demolition of a hotel built by a Muslim Nazi collaborator and now owned by an American-Jewish businessman who bought it in order to build an apartment complex on the spot. An apartment complex for a mere 20 families that is somehow worse than all the aforementioned murders and atrocities. So much worse that they demanded the personal intervention of the highest diplomatic officials of the United States and the European Union.

The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem is not the Plaza Hotel. It is a dilapidated neighborhood eyesore that has been abandoned since the 1980's. No one lives in the Shepherd Hotel, a grim ugly fortress surrounded by barbed wire, that remains behind as a legacy of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who championed Hitler and helped recruit Muslims to serve in the SS. But with its demolition, people might actually begin to live on that spot. Children might actually play on ground that had been previously fenced off by barbed wire. And the worst thing of it all is that those people and their children will be Jews.

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, might have been displeased to look up from the netherworld and behold the demolition of his hotel, but to see the representatives of the United States and the EU taking up his work and treating the demolition of his hotel as the gravest issue of the day would surely have cheered him up. If he had ever been worried that his work would die with a bullet in Berlin or when his Holy War Army, even with the support of seven Arab countries and half the British officer corps failed to drive the Jews into the sea during the War of Independence, the statements of Hillary Clinton and the EUSSR's Red Baroness Ashton testify once again that the evil that men and muftis do lives on after them.

In her statement, Hillary Clinton said the United States is "very concerned" about the demolition of a Nazi collaborator's abandoned hotel. In a world where North Korea and Iran are racing ahead to build nuclear weapons, Russia and China are racing to outstrip the United States in weapons development and the economy is on the brink-- that is what the Obama Administration is "very concerned" about. That 20 Jewish families will be able to have homes in the capital of their own city.

Hillary Clinton chose to attack Israel from Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, a totalitarian regime whose own construction boom was built on slave labor imported from India. Where there are no political freedoms and where non-Muslim foreigners have few rights, if any. Where a video showed the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi torturing a man in ways too horrifying to describe, with the approval of the police and the judicial system over a debt. Where 42 percent of the prisoners are there for being indebted. The UAE is essentially a slave state, built on the backs of mostly non-Muslim migrant workers with no human or legal rights.

(Read full "The Crime of Building a House")

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Toppled Palestinian ‘Landmark’ Symbolized Hate

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
10 January '11

It says something about the way much of the world views the rights of Jews to live in Jerusalem that the erection of new homes in parts of that city is considered such a terrible provocation. Thus, the new housing project in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of the city is generally reported as an outrageous provocation, even though the only reason this area is usually described as “predominantly Arab” or, more outrageously, “traditionally Arab” is because from 1949 to 1967, when this location was illegally occupied by Jordan, Jews were prohibited from living there.

As to whether it is wise for Israel to allow Jews to live in all parts of their capital, that is something that Israelis can debate, though redividing Jerusalem and returning those parts handed over to the Palestinian Arabs to a Jew-free condition seems like a curious way to advance the cause of peace and mutual coexistence. But let’s leave aside the question of Jewish rights or even the strategic wisdom of putting more Jews in these neighborhoods. Let us instead examine the Palestinian claim and what it represents.

When the New York Times reported the fact that ground was being broken for the new housing in Sheikh Jarrah in a story published on Sunday, what it did was to focus on the destruction of what it claimed was a Palestinian “landmark.” What landmark, you ask? Was it a medieval structure that in some way represents the longstanding Arab presence in the city or its culture?

(Read full "Toppled Palestinian ‘Landmark’ Symbolized Hate")

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New York Times ignores an inconvenient truth

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
10 January '11

If the New York Times did some serious journalism about changing demographics in Jerusalem instead of focusing only on new housing for Jews, it would discover that Israel's capital is far more Arab today than it was in 1967 after the Six-Day War when Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City, ending 19 years of Jordanian aggression and occupation.

In the four decades since 1967, Arab population in the unified city has soared from 26 percent to 34 percent. By 2020, it is expected that Arabs will comprise 40 percent of the city's population. And demographic studies indicate that Arabs may reach population parity with Jews in Jerusalem as early as 2035. Why this Arabization of the capital ? Because of high housing costs and the lure of better jobs for Jews elsewhere in Israel, while hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority to bankroll construction of thousands of Arab homes -- many of them without legal permits.

The Times, however, is not interested in the steady Arabization of the capital, because this would contradict its make-believe agenda that Jews are proliferating in East Jerusalem, where supposedly they have no business to be, including in areas where Jews resided for many centuries before they were expelled by Jordan at Israel's founding.

So, the Times ignores the reality of Arabs building homes in Jerusalem at a far faster rate than Jews, and focuses only on political theatrics when leftists organize protests against occasional new Jewish developments in the city's eastern neighborhoods. The underlying premise of its reportage is that it was OK for Jordan to make East Jerusalem "Judenrein" for 19 years before the Six-Day War, but scandalous for Israel to let Jews recoup court-recognized property titles or buy residential properties from willing Arab sellers.

(Read full "New York Times ignores an inconvenient truth")

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This Is Our Place, So Mind Your Manners

Cherna Moskowitz
JPost
06 September 09

When my husband Irving was a young man he would go door-to-door around Milwaukee with a Jewish National Fund blue box collecting money to redeem property in the Land of Israel. Although it was during the Depression, everyone put in what they could afford: pennies, nickels and dimes.

In the 19th century, wealthy Jews like Rothschild were purchasing large tracts of land for Jews to settle in the Holy Land. The synagogue Ohel Yitzhak in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, abandoned in 1938 after waves of Arab violence - which we recently rebuilt - was originally built and paid for by European Jews in the 1880s. For thousands of years Jews dreamed of Israel and in the last centuries all Jews took part in the effort to reclaim the land and support Jews who lived there.

THIS IS a part of the Jewish tradition: charity for the poor and reclaiming the land of our country. It was perfectly normal for Irving and me to continue to fulfill these mitzvot. It was the driving force behind Irving's quest to work hard to continue the tradition.

How did this become world news, fodder for riots and outraged pronouncements from foreign leaders?

We were both born in the United States and experienced anti-Semitism while growing up. However, we were secure in the knowledge that our government would ensure our equal rights to live in any neighborhood in any part of the country we wished. We believed that if it was legal, the full force of the government would protect us regardless of the fact that we were Jews.

How is it then, that President Barack Obama demands that the Israeli government disallow the Shepherd Hotel a building permit because Jews would live there? Christians and Muslims yes, Jews no. This is clearly racist. Furthermore, this would deprive us as American citizens of our constitutional rights to equal protection of the law.

It seems to be a continuation of a 2,000-year-old habit of Jews being told where they can and cannot live. This spanned from the ghettos of medieval Europe, to severe zoning restrictions in czarist Russia and finally to the edicts of Nazism, where we were eventually told that we could not live at all.

Can it be possible that we will accept any part of that today in our own nation? Jews should be able to live anywhere in the world. The question should be: "Is the purchase legal and are the permits in order?" Not "what faith do the families living there follow?"

The British Consulate, located near the Shepherd Hotel, also objected to Jews building on our property there. This while construction on several nearby Arab-owned buildings is currently in progress. Someone should remind the British Consulate that there is no longer a British Mandate. I don't mind if they don't come over with a pot of tea, but at least they should remember that they are guests of the Jewish state and behave in a civilized and neighborly way.

The writer is the president of the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation and serves on the board of numerous prominent organizations both in Israel and abroad.
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Huckabee E. J'lem Trip Sparks Showdown

Abe Selig
JPost
17 August 09

(One thing about Peace Now. They're very clear about their objectives which is to see Jerusalem divided and to be the capital of a Palestinian state.)

A Monday reception featuring former US presidential hopeful and leading Republican politician Mike Huckabee at the Shepherd Hotel in east Jerusalem has turned into a hotly contested venue for protests both for and against Israeli policy in the area.

Two groups - Peace Now and Im Tirtzu - have called for a protest and counter-protest, respectively, on Monday evening, to coincide with the former Aransas governor's planned appearance at the disputed east Jerusalem landmark. The groups represent either side of the growing debate over Jewish building rights in the annexed parts of the capital.

While protesters from other groups, including foreign left-wing activists who have been increasingly involved in east Jerusalem, are expected to protest the event as well, Peace Now and Im Tirtzu are the only two organizations to announce formal plans to demonstrate for or against Huckabee's appearance.

The reception itself is private and will be closed to the public, but representatives from both groups told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that the event presented an important opportunity to make their voices heard, as the recent evictions of Arab families from their homes in the area and ongoing plans for the additional construction of Jewish housing in east Jerusalem have spurred a chorus of condemnation and thrust the area into the international limelight.

The Shepherd Hotel became the focus of American-Israeli tensions last month, after the US demanded that Ateret Cohanim - the group overseeing construction at the hotel and sponsoring Huckabee's arrival there Monday - halt its plans to build apartments at the site.

Peace Now secretary-general Yariv Oppenheimer said his group's view was in line with the American calls to halt construction in the area, as it was a "provocative measure" aimed at undermining Palestinian aspirations for the creation of a capital in east Jerusalem.

"Our protest is aimed at voicing our objection to the attempts of right-wing groups to exert control over east Jerusalem," Oppenheimer told the Post on Sunday. "We believe that these moves will only breed more anger and distrust among Arabs in the capital, and we see these attempts as nothing more than a provocation meant to undermine the possibility of a future peace agreement in the capital."

But Im Tirtzu (If you will it) - a student organization that promotes Zionist causes on college campuses nationwide - has called Peace Now's protest a "call for the division of Jerusalem," and the group sent out Facebook messages over the weekend encouraging supporters to come to the hotel on Monday evening to show support for Huckabee and for Israeli claims to all parts of the capital.

"We're going out there to show our support," Im Tirtzu's deputy director, Amit Barak, told the Post on Sunday. "We want to safeguard a unified Jerusalem and express that the vast majority of Israelis are against making concessions in the capital. We're talking about the Temple Mount, we're talking about the Old City, the historic sites in Jerusalem, because these are the places that the Jewish people have yearned for throughout thousands of years in exile. We're not talking about Malha Mall.

Oppenheimer rejected Barak's stance.

"The right-wing groups that are trying to change the reality on the ground will say that this is about Jewish rights to build anywhere in the capital, but this isn't Rehavia or Ramot. We believe that Sheikh Jarrah is a Palestinian neighborhood in east Jerusalem and will be part of the Palestinian capital there."

Oppenheimer's assertion is a cornerstone of Im Tirtzu's call to counter-protest, as the Facebook page announcing it states: "We will not allow Jerusalem to turn into the capital of Palestine."

"Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people," Barak said. "And what Peace Now doesn't understand is that the Jewish people are not willing to give away Jerusalem."
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