Total Pageviews

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Oh Jerusalem, Indivisible

Nadene Goldfoot
Nir Barkat is the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, a city of 800,000 Jews and Arabs.  He was interviewed about the possibility of Jeruslam being divided.

He explained that in 1967 when Israel was attacked by all the Arab nations including Jordan, Israel won and in doing so obtained East Jerusalem and the Judea Samaria area named the West Bank by Jordan.  It was Jordan's loss and outcome for having attacked their neighbor. 

200,000 Jews live in this post 67 land as well as 300,000 Arabs.  300,000 Jews also live in West Jerusalem.  This makes a half million Jews living in the post 67 Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria;  Not mentioned are the 15,000 Christians who live in Jerusalem, making up 2% of its population as of May 2009 statistics.  Actually, 150,000 Christians live in the state of Israel. If Jerusalem were to be divided, where would they live?  They would most likely suffer the same fate as the Jews, for the Palestinians want their Palestine to be only populated by Muslim Arabs. 

There is no way of dividing Jerusalem between Arabs and Jews, Nir explained.  Arabs have moved into Jewish neighborhoods and Jews are living in Arab neighborhoods.  Now there are no "Jewish neighborhoods." It would be impossible to divide it up. 

It sounds more like our indivisible North America. 

It seems like a moot question now as Hamas and Fatah have joined together and there's no way Hamas will accept Israel, so they have said.  Their joint statement concerning how they feel about Israel and Jerusalem is:
"The common national goal is to establish a Palestinian state, independent with sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as the capital, without settlements, without giving up a single inch of it and with the right of return" of Palestinian refugees, the Hamas leader said." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110504/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_palestinians_reconciliation

Resource: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110504/ap_on_re_mii_ea/ml_israel-dividing_jerusalem/print
http://www.prlog.org/10243328-number-of-christians-living-in-jerusalem-drops-to-only-2-of-the-population-from-20-in-1948.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGFDBmycm8M&feature=player_embedded

No comments: