Great Question, Yes? Can You Capture Your Home?

...But in 1948, that connection was disrupted. The city fell during Israel’s War of Independence to the Jordanian Legion. All the Jewish homes were destroyed, the synagogues burned down, and the surviving Jews were exiled....Only after the city was liberated by the Israeli Defense Forces 19 years later was the Jewish quarter rebuilt, and Jews allowed to once again live in their historical and spiritual capital. This is history. It is the key context, without which there can be no understanding of the “issue” of Jerusalem. Yet in almost every case when the media report on events in Jerusalem, this context is left out.

Yarden Frankl..
Honest Reporting..
21 April '15..

The historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem is a well-established fact. Jews have lived in that small area for thousands of years. It is the site of the ancient Jewish Temples as well as dozens of more modern places of worship. For most of recorded history, Jews have lived inside its walls.

But in 1948, that connection was disrupted. The city fell during Israel’s War of Independence to the Jordanian Legion. All the Jewish homes were destroyed, the synagogues burned down, and the surviving Jews were exiled. Watch our video where eyewitnesses tell what it was like for the Jewish refugees of Jerusalem to have to flee their homes. The military attack was an unprovoked assault, part of a wider campaign to destroy the nascent Jewish State.



Only after the city was liberated by the Israeli Defense Forces 19 years later was the Jewish quarter rebuilt, and Jews allowed to once again live in their historical and spiritual capital.

Ammunition Hill

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
11 May '10

According to the Jewish calender, tomorrow will be the 43rd anniversary of the unification of Jerusalem. Which means that tonight is the 43rd anniversary of the battle on Givat Hatachmoshet, Ammunition Hill.

Between 1949 and 1967, while Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Jordan, there was an Israeli enclave about a mile to the east of the border, in the Jordanian part of town. This was Mount Scopus, with the campus of the Hebrew university and Haddassh hospital. There was an agreement whereby every two weeks 200 Israelis would cross Jordanian territory to the enclave, and sit there until the next group replaced them two weeks later.

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, a very special video - Jerusalem Day: Reflections by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel

Throughout the whole period everyone knew that sooner or later the war would resume, and that when that happened Israel would try to reconnect the mountain with the city. To prevent this the Jordanians built a series of fortifications in that mile, and its centerpiece was Amunition Hill, an apt name borrowed from the days after the British conquered the city in 1917 and General Allenby stored his army's ammunition there....

....On the night between June 5th and 6th 1967 the paratroopers, backed by a few tanks, made their attack, directly on the Jordanian fortifications. The section of the battle on Ammunition Hill raged from about 2am to 5:30, early next morning. It was face to face combat, between the best forces each side had. 71 Jordanians were killed, and 35 Israelis: most of the defenders died, as did a quarter of the attackers.



(Click here for full post with lyrics, and history)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

The 28th of Iyar - Jerusalem Day

JINSA
Report #985
May 11, 2010

In honor of Yom Yerushalayim, a very special video - Jerusalem Day: Reflections by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel

The Jewish and Christian holy days of Passover and Easter have passed; Shavuot and Pentecost are coming. In between, the 28th of Iyar-corresponding to 7 June 1967 and 12 May 2010-marks the unification of Jerusalem in the hands of the State of Israel. The city has been occupied over time by the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British Empires; occupied occasionally by Egyptians, Crusaders, Mamluks and Jordanians. But the holidays remind us that Jerusalem has, from the time of the Bible, been the capital of the Jewish people and of no other people.

In 1947, the UN General Assembly partitioned the 23 percent of the British Mandate for Palestine that remained after the creation of the Kingdom of Transjordan into separate Palestinian Arab and Palestinian Jewish sectors, planning to create two new states. They took a pass on Jerusalem-voting to make it and Bethlehem corpus separatum, an area legally separate from its environs. "In view of its association with three world religions" it would be "accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control."

We will never know what "effective UN control" would have looked like.

In May 1948, the Jordanian Legion entered the UN zone, besieged the Jewish residents and annexed the eastern side of the city. Did you ever wonder why it is called "Arab East Jerusalem"? It is because they expelled the Jews and worked hard to erase the historic Jewish connection from the city. In the Ceasefire Agreement of 1949, Jordan promised to appoint a committee to discuss free access of Jews to the holy sites including (but not limited to) the Western Wall and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. It never happened. Instead, Jordan cut roads through the cemetery and used the tombstones for paving and latrines in Jordanian army camps. More than 50 synagogues, libraries and Jewish schools were deliberately destroyed or defaced. The Cave of Shimon the Just was used as a horse stable.

Appeals to the UN for "effective control" were not effective.

The wall that split Jerusalem, cutting Jews-not only Israelis-off from their heritage, was as effective as the Berlin Wall. In 1967, the King of Jordan miscalculated, shelling the west side of the city from behind the UN barrier. In response, Israel made it whole again.

It is right and crucial that unified Jerusalem be the capital of the modern State of Israel, precisely because the city holds sites holy to people of the Jewish, Christian and, much later, the Muslim faiths.

Only when the State of Israel has been the guardian of the unified city has it been-as the UN said it intended-a city open to all faiths. Today, the mosques are controlled by the Waqf, the Islamic religious society. Churches are maintained by various Christian denominations. The Western Wall, the Mount of Olives cemetery and the restored Hurva Synagogue are in Jewish hands. The Government of Israel ensures open access-and only the Government of Israel can be relied on to ensure open access to the Jewish people.

Why, we ask, does the Obama Administration insist that Israel find a way for Jerusalem to serve as the capital of the Palestinians when it has never been an Arab political or religious seat? Religious Muslims should be glad the Jewish people regard the Muslim right to reach Muslim holy places as an obligation of the State of Israel-when no similar right accrued to the Jews. And the United States should regard the reunification of Jerusalem under a tolerant and democratic government to be praiseworthy.

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.