Shragai - The Mount of Olives under attack

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
18 May '12..

In the winter of 1948, driving to the Mount of Olives became dangerous because the route passed through Arab neighborhoods. The British allowed the Jews to hold burials on the mountain only twice a week, at night, and only with an armed escort. When the security situation worsened in the spring, burials on the Mount of Olives ceased entirely, and the burial societies were given plots of land in western Jerusalem.

Sixty-four years later, with the Mount of Olives under Israeli sovereignty, there is no escaping the painful comparison. The incidents that have taken place on the way to the Mount of Olives over the past several months are reminiscent of the British Mandate era. Almost every week, Jews are attacked on their way there. Families who wish to visit the graves of their loved ones or hold funerals there need armed security guards. As a result, the public has made its choice: many families who had formerly wished to hold funerals on the Mount of Olives now choose cemeteries in the city’s western section.

An Israel Hayom survey reveals that since the year 2000, approximately 3,500 Jewish burials have taken place on the Mount of Olives — a drastic drop of about 50 percent compared with the first decades following the 1967 Six-Day War. According to the cemetery council, demand for burial in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, the largest and most important Jewish cemetery in the world, is declining after 3,000 years. Taxi drivers from all over Israel sent a letter to the police commissioner stating that at certain hours of the day, the drive to the Mount of Olives endangers their lives, since vehicles belonging to Jews are pelted with stones and boulder fragments from both sides of the road. Several drivers have stopped taking families to memorial services there. One driver, Pinhas Saidoff, declared that he "won’t risk my life or the lives of my passengers."

"What is happening on the way to the Mount of Olives is a disgrace. If Jews were to throw stones at Arab cars, the authorities would put a stop to it quickly enough,” Saidoff said.

After a long period of dormancy, the authorities have finally started to wake up over the past few years, perhaps not a moment too soon. In an attempt to prevent vandalism and gravestone desecration, 123 cameras placed throughout the Mount of Olives transmit images to centers run by the Housing Ministry. Soon, the cameras will also be connected to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and to the new police station on the mount. As yet, no cameras have been mounted on the road where most of the Jews have been attacked — the road that connects Mount Scopus to the Mount of Olives and goes through the A-Tur neighborhood. Therefore, the police cannot ensure the safety of Jews driving to or from the mount.

Abdullah in Wonderland

Victor Sharpe
American Thinker
12 April '10

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, encountering situations that defied logic and characters who acted in bizarre ways, she was fortunate not to meet Jordan's kinglet, Abdullah II. Kinglet is an apt description for this monarch, first coined by columnist Ruth King.

Jordan's king, a member of the Hashemite tribe, is named after Emir Abdullah, who was assassinated on July 20, 1951 after leaving Friday evening prayers at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque. Abdullah was in favor of making peace with Israel but, like Egypt's Anwar Sadat, he was murdered by Islamic extremists for his moderation. The assassinated emir was accompanied at the mosque by his grandson, King Hussein, also the present Jordanian monarch's father. In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, King Abdullah II announced that at his forthcoming meeting with America's president, Barack Hussein Obama, he will ask the president to pile on yet more pressure upon embattled Israel over Arab territorial demands on Israel's capital, Jerusalem.

The kinglet stated in his WSJ interview that "Jerusalem specifically engages Jordan because we are the custodians of the Muslim and Christian holy places and this is a flashpoint that goes beyond Jordanian-Israel relations."

And here we descend the rabbit hole. Abdullah II chose to hide the unpleasant facts that under his father, King Hussein, not only did Jordan refuse to allow Jews access to their holy sites during Jordan's illegal occupation of East Jerusalem from 1949 to 1967 (including the Old City, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount), but it desecrated the ancient Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, ran a road through the cemetery, used many of the gravestones as latrines for the Arab Legion, deliberately destroyed and desecrated scores of ancient synagogues throughout the Old City, and used the Tomb of Simon the Just as a stable. The Jewish inhabitants of the Old City and areas of east Jerusalem, meanwhile, had been driven from their homes and forced to flee to safety in West Jerusalem.

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An Arab land

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
05 March '10

Were Israelis to unconditionally submit to ever-mutating Arab historiography, all attachments to the Western Wall and Mount of Olives would have to be abjectly relinquished.

Who says we’re not winning the war for the world’s hearts and minds? Even Arabs seem swayed by the argument that the oldest ties to this land are the ones that bind.

Apparently they were converted to the view that everything boils down to who was here first, who left all the place names of all this country’s towns and villages (including those which conquistador Arabs took over), who embedded this unlikely location in world consciousness and rendered it a cultural/religious byword in the farthest climes, whose national cradle this was, the hub of whose beliefs and aspirations this arid little territorial tract had been from time immemorial.

The Arabs, obviously, haven’t become overnight lovers of Zion. But despite their unabated enmity to the Zionist project – Israel – they commandeer Zionism’s logic and Zionism’s case and put these to their own use with a set of preposterous counterclaims that go spectacularly unchallenged in our postmodern existence. With moral-relativists throwing history to the wind, any absurdity can be propagated with colossal impudence and impunity.

The latest example was just furnished in the Knesset by Israeli-Arab MK Taleb a-Sanaa (Ta’al-Ra’am). In a plenum debate he embraced the premise that the land belongs to its earliest claimants: “You say that Abraham purchased Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, but the man who sold it to him was a Palestinian Arab. Consequently, we were here first and Hebron is eternally ours.”

Thereby a-Sanaa made a huge leap from traditional Arab portrayals of Abraham as an Arab. A-Sanaa now categorizes him as the Israelites’ father and stakes Arab claims on real-estate vendor Ephron the Hittite (although the mosque which Arabs constructed over the second-holiest Jewish shrine is called the Ibrahimi Mosque – Ibrahim being the Arabic pronunciation for the Hebrew Avraham).

THIS ISN’T an irrelevant frivolous footnote. A-Sanaa isn’t the first Arab to reinvent the past to suit current interests. Indeed, this is a long-established vogue. Way before the homicidal agitation of British-appointed Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, it was a widespread Arab sport to hurl human excrement from atop the Temple Mount at Jews praying below. But Husseini decided to usurp the wall’s sanctity for Islam, decreeing it to be the hitching-post where Muhammad tethered his super-steed al-Buraq. That presumably overrode and erased all Jewish associations to the site.

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