Here it is.
I spotted this bit there:-
James S. Snyder, director of the Israel Museum, said that if there were a peaceable state in Gaza and a museum here, “I see no reason we couldn’t arrange a long-term loan.”
Such warm talk between Israelis and Gazans is rare these days. Mr. Snyder said that under the current Israeli closing of Gaza, which bars all but humanitarian emergency cases from leaving, “there is the perversity that Gazans today cannot see their own heritage in our museum.”
I am not going to argue whether or not the museum prominently displays the Israelite past as well as the more recent Jewish past from around 1450 (*) but I am hopeful that Mr. Synder will make sure that no cooperation will take place as long as the continued destruction of Jewish artifacts (see here and here for examples) is stopped.
After all, we are dealing with culture.
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(*)
Gaza also has a long Jewish history which is, today, completely ignored by our mainstream media who tend to represent Gaza as if it had always been Arab Muslim territory. Besides its Byzantine-era Christian churches, archaeologists have found, in Gaza, evidence of a synagogue, ca. 508 AD.
Jews as well as Christians continued to live in Gaza after the Muslim invasions, despite severe oppression and persecution - there are records of their presence all the way through. In 1600 the Chief Rabbi of Gaza, Israel Najara, d. 1625, composed his famous “Sabbath Hymn”. In 1900 there were 50 Jewish families in Gaza; the Muslim Turks drove out Gaza's Jewish community during World War I; although those Jews returned, in 1929 the Muslim Arabs attacked them, killing 150 people, and driving out the rest. Such are the awkward little historical details that our main stream media now tend to gloss over.
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