Deadly violence has now escalated into a Third Intifada over Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territories in Jerusalem. Israel claims Jerusalem as theirs because Jews were its first inhabitants. Too bad it's made up, says historian Juan Cole.
FAR RIGHT Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu commemorated Israel’s “Jerusalem Day” with a speech.
In the speech, he declared:
“Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people only, and no other”
and warned that Muslim terrorism menaced it.
Jerusalem, Daru Shalem, was founded sometime between 6500 and 5500 years ago, by the proto-Canaanite people long before Judaism existed. It was dedicated to the god of dusk, Shalem.
The first mention of it was after 2000 BC, again, before Judaism existed, in an Egyptian text.
So I think we may conclude that the City of Shalem the god of dusk was probably the capital of a lot of peoples long before there was any religion called Judaism.
The Greek Ptolemaic dynasty held sway over Palestine until 198 BC, when the Seleucids conquered it.
Tel Aviv: Israelis Rally against Netanyahu's Policies toward Palestinians - https://t.co/CIo7UNNO7B pic.twitter.com/NWFDZyZZei
— Juan Cole (@jricole) October 27, 2015
It was Jewish settlers in British Mandate Palestine who used violence to grab part of the city, disregarding international law and agreements. The city was mostly populated by Palestinians in any case, what with being a Palestinian city and all.
In 1967, the Israeli army took East Jerusalem, and ever since has squeezed the Palestinian population, driven them into poverty, usurped their property, and surrounded them by squatter settlements. There is no warrant in any part of any international agreement or law for the Israelis to behave this way toward the people who inhabited Jerusalem for over a millennium (and who are in any case almost certainly descendents of Palestinian Jews who converted to Islam). Violence is still a big part of the way Israel rules East Jerusalem, so Netanyahu warning of Muslim violence is rich.
Muslims consider Jerusalem the third holiest city of Islam. Despite Westerners constantly telling them they have no right to do that, they seem pretty attached to the doctrine. There are 1.5 billion of them, and their nerves are raw after centuries of Western colonialism during which they were told their religion was useless and backward.
The occupation of Jerusalem was given by al-Qaeda as one reason for its attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The insistence of Jewish extremists on angering the Muslim world by invading the Aqsa mosque from time to time, and threatening to demolish it, is like those old Warner Bros. cartoons where the foolish little boy keeps teasing a tiger in its cage
This article was first published on Informed Comment on 18 May 2015. You can read the original here. Juan Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. You can follow Juan Cole on Twitter @jricole.
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