Palestinian resistance against Israel’s monstrous Apartheid Wall continues
By Kaleem Omar
Friday, last week, was another day of Palestinian struggle against Israel’s monstrous Apartheid Wall, which is being built by the Zionist state on land stolen from the Palestinian people, and is intended, among other things, to turn the West Bank into a concentration camp cut off from the rest of the world, and to make Israel’s utterly illegal occupation of al-Quds (Jerusalem) permanent.
Demonstrations against the Apartheid Wall were held on April 21 in the Palestinian West Bank villages of Budrus, Bil’in and Um Solomoneh. In Budrus, the village youth led yet another protest against the Wall that is stealing their lands and livelihoods. Demonstrators marched towards the Wall and attacked parts of it. The Israeli occupation forces rushed to the area and immediately started firing live bullets at the demonstrators.
Fifteeen-year-old Mosab Sami Mustafa Awad was injured in both legs. He is now in the local hospital’s emergency room, with three bullets in his left leg and one in his right leg.
In Um Solomoneh, the villagers gathered in the morning to plant new olive trees along the path of the Apartheid Wall – a sign of resilience and a challenge to the Israeli occupation. Um Solomoneh is currently under attack by the Israeli military from all sides. While the Apartheid Wall isolates and steals land from the village to the west, in the east a series of house-demolition orders are preventing the natural growth of the village.
Six houses, each of them between 120 to 150 square metres in area, have received demolition orders. Two of the houses are already inhabited and are home to 10 people; the others are still under construction.
With the Israeli occupation’s relentless ghetoisation and expulsion plans continuing, Palestinian lives are doomed to be marked by ongoing resistance.
Jerusalem, known to Muslims the world over as al-Quds, has been under illegal Israeli occupation since 1967, in flagrant violation of the UN General Assembly’s resolution of November 29, 1947 which adopted a partition plan for Palestine that led to the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Under that plan, put forward to the UN in August 1946, Jerusalem was to become an international zone.
Following the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, however, Israeli military forces invaded and occupied Jerusalem. And it remains an occupied city to this day, despite the fact that, over the last 40 years, the UN General Assembly has adopted numerous resolutions demanding that Israel withdraw from Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights.
Karen Armstrong, who visited Karachi last year to deliver a lecture at the Aga Khan University, has written a magisterial book about Jerusalem. Titled “A History of Jerusalem – One City, Three Faiths”, the book begins in prehistory, lingers in the pages of the Bible and the Holy Quran, pauses to contemplate the role of Jerusalem in the growth of Christianity and Islam and then marches forward through two millenniums of world history, religion and politics.
Balancing erudition with clarity and elegance of style, Armstrong’s book is admirable for being concise and evenhanded in discussing the disputed terrain. Throughout, the author maintains her focus, never losing sight of the city as her subject. The historical details she cites are fascinating. Armstrong is a knowledgeable guide, and this is a sober and articulate tour of a complex subject and a city where, as she puts it, “history is a dimension of the present.”
Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, an experience she recollected in two volumes of best-selling autobiography: “Through the Narrow Gate” and “Beginning the World”. After leaving her religious order in 1969, she took a degree at Oxford University and taught modern literature. She is a teacher at the Leo Baeck College for the study of Judaism, and an honorary member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. She is widely recognised as one of the world’s foremost commentators on religious affairs and is the author of many books on the subject, including one titled “The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World”.
Armstrong writes that the Muslims’ arrival in Jerusalem in 638 A.D. was “an event of immense importance.” The Muslims established a system that enabled Jews, Christians and Muslims to live in Jerusalem together for the first time.
Armstrong writes: “Ever since the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, monotheists had developed a vision of the city that had seen its sanctity as dependent on the exclusion of outsiders. Muslims had a more inclusive notion of the sacred, however; the coexistence of the three religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), each occupying its own district and worshipping at its own special shrines, reflected their vision of the continuity and harmony of all rightly guided religion, which could only derive from the one God.”
Armstrong says: “The experience of living together in a city that was sacred to all three faiths could have led monotheists to a better understanding of one another. Unfortunately, this was not to be. There was an inherent strain in the situation. For over six hundred years there had been tension between Jews and Christians, particularly regarding the status of Jerusalem.”
In the 8th Century A.D. the Muslim caliphate decided to move its capital from Jerusalem to Baghdad, which became the new capital of the Islamic empire in 762 A.D.
Jerusalem still had a symbolic importance for the Abbasid caliphs, but they were not ready to lavish as much money and attention on the city as their predecessors.
Armstrong writes: “Where the Umayyad caliphs had regularly visited the Holy City and were familiar figures about town, the Abbasids were remote celebrities, and a visit from any one of them was a major event…As soon as Caliph al-Mansur finally succeeded in establishing his rule, he visited Jerusalem on his way home from the Hajj. The city was in a sorry state. The Haram and the Ummayad palace were still in ruins after the earthquake of 747…No sooner had the mosque been restored than it was brought down again by yet another earthquake in 771. When Caliph al-Mahdi came to the throne (in 775), he gave orders that it be rebuilt and enlarged.”
Jerusalem has been destroyed and rebuilt many times in its long and often tragic history. With the arrival of the British in December 1917, the city was about to undergo another painful period of transformation. Apart from the brief period of Crusader occupation in the 10th Century A.D., Jerusalem had been an important Islamic city for nearly thirteen hundred years. Now, following the collapse of the Ottoman empire in the closing months of World War I, the Arabs of the region were about to be given their independence.
Armstrong writes: “At first the British and the French established mandates and protectorates in the Near East, but, one by one, new Arab states and kingdoms began to appear: Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraq. Other things being equal, Palestine would probably also have become an independent state. But this did not happen. During the period of the British Mandate, the Zionists were able to establish themselves in the country and create a Jewish state.”
What needs to be remembered in this context, however, is that, at the time of the creation of Israel in 1948, there were 900,000 Arabs living in the territory as against only 600,000 Jews. Israel makes a great show today about being the only “democracy” in the Middle East, but if the democratic principle had been followed in 1948 and the future status of Palestine had been put to the vote in a referendum, the majority of the territory’s population would have voted to become an Arab state instead of a Jewish one.
At the present time, the Arab character of Jerusalem is only a shadow of what it was when Britain’s General Allenby and his troops marched into the city in December 1917. In 1917, Arabs formed 90 per cent of the total population of Palestine and 50 per cent of the population of Jerusalem.
At the start, the Palestinian Arabs were naively convinced of Britain’s good intentions towards them. As a result of their of-repeated veto op British proposals concerning the future of the territory, they were left with nothing, and with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the dispossessed, uprooted and wandering Jew was replaced by the homeless, uprooted and dispossessed Palestinian.
The Israelis drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land in 1948 and ’49, and Israel continues to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes and lands in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank even today. Israel has a great deal to answer for.