Bernard Avishai, in interpreting leaked documents from the Palestinian Negotiating Teams ("A Plan for Peace That Still Could Be", Feb. 7) suggests that former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in referring to Jewish property in the former Jordanian-occupied section of Jerusalem, had "implied, but did not say, that these neighborhoods had been inflamed by Jewish settlers" who had "moved into expropriated apartment blocks there".
Whether or not any Jew is guilty of "inflammation" by residing in the Jewish people's 3000-year old capital, where our Temples were and where still is the center of our religious, national cultural and political ethos, can be a matter of opinion but the apartments and houses he refers to were purchased and in many cases re-purchased from persons who had gained entrance to those properties as a result of an ethnic-cleansing operation in the city in 1947-1948. For 19 years, Jews were banned from residing in those neighborhoods. All those purchases were then subject to rigorous judicial review. Opinions and facts should never, even by an academic, be interchanged.
^
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment