If there’s one thing we can rely on Australia’s left-legacy media (oops, a tautology?) for, it’s pandering to the worst people and peddling the most grotesque anti-Israel garbage.
Case in point: this mendacious piece from Melbourne’s lefty rag of record, the Age.
East Jerusalem: She could hear it any day now. The sound Najah al-Rajabi has been dreading. The thud on the door telling her that time is up: she is being evicted from the home she has lived in for the past 55 years.
It’s all cos of them wicked Joos, of course.
Al-Rajabi’s late husband Awad bought the house from a Palestinian owner in 1975, and she has the documents to prove it. Yet in the eyes of the Israeli legal system, they count for nothing. On June 22, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected her family’s final appeal against an eviction process that began a decade ago. Within 30 days, a Jewish family is set to move into her home, taking advantage of a law that allows Jews who owned property in East Jerusalem before 1948 to reclaim it.
Blah, blah, blah. And so it goes on, paragraph after paragraph: Jews bad, ‘Palestinians’ good.
But, buried deep, deep, in the bowels of the 2,000-odd words of ‘pro-Palestinian’ pearl-clutching is this pertinent little nugget:
Shiloach was inhabited by Yemenite Jews from 1882 until 1938, when rioting forced them out, and they were resettled in other areas. From this time, Palestinians – many of whom were fleeing conflict elsewhere – moved into the area, which they call Silwan.
So, Arabs violently drove out the legitimate Jewish residents and promptly stole their houses.
This means that al-Rajabi’s documents the Age trumpeted in the first couple of paragraphs mean absolutely nothing. Being in receipt of stolen goods doesn’t make you the legal owner of them. The thief who sold the house had no more right to it than Hermann Goering had to the trainloads of artworks he looted from French galleries and museums. And al-Rajabi has no more right to it than the children or grand-children of the Nazis have to the stuff their ancestors looted in WWII.
The Israeli courts have found that much of the land in neighbourhoods like Batan-al-Hawa belongs to a charitable trust formed by Yemenite Jewish leaders in the 1800s. This makes the Palestinian families living there today “illegal squatters” in [Daniel Luria’s] words, a view affirmed by the highest levels of the Israeli judiciary. “There’s no question about ownership in relation to deed and title,” he says. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying through their teeth.”
Luria is a Jewish Australian who moved to Israel 30 years ago.
For the past 25 years, the passionate Zionist has worked as the executive director of Ateret Cohanim, a group that says it “stands at the forefront of Jewish land reclamation in Jerusalem” […]
It’s a battle fought not only over bricks and mortar, but language. Luria calls Silwan by its biblical name of Shiloach, and flinches when the term Palestinian is mentioned. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times: there has never been a Palestinian people, nation, heritage, history. It doesn’t exist.”
He’s not wrong. Even the term ‘Palestinian’ only dates to the late 19th century – and even then, it was not used to describe an ethnicity, merely geography. The original usage of ‘Palestinian’ referred to both Jews and Arabs who happened to live in the province of the Ottoman empire dubbed ‘Palestine’. It was no more an ethnicity than ‘New Yorker’.
The idea of ‘Palestinian’ as an ethnicity was fabricated out of whole cloth by the Egyptian Arab terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat, in the 1960s.
At least the Israelis reclaim stolen Jewish property by legal means. ‘Palestinians’, as ever, simply resort to violence.
To limit the growth of the Jewish population in places like East Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority has made it a crime, punishable by death, for Palestinians to sell property to Israeli Jews. The Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem has also issued a fatwa forbidding Palestinian Muslims “from giving up, or selling Jerusalem and the land of Palestine to the enemy”.
But, then again, a previous Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem signed up for an alliance with Adolf Hitler. You could say these fellas have a bit of form.
