Tale of Two Cities

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." So begins Charles Dickens' novel of the French Revolution. In a modern version of Dickens' vision, the worst of the times -- or the Guardian of London in this case -- chooses to proclaim how Israel is "threatening the peace" by daring to claim all of Jerusalem as capital.

Threatening the Peace

Secret British document accuses Israel

FO paper says international laws are being violated and peace jeopardised
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian

A confidential [British] Foreign Office document accuses Israel of rushing to annex the Arab area of Jerusalem, using illegal Jewish settlement construction and the vast West Bank barrier, in a move to prevent it becoming a Palestinian capital.

In an unusually frank insight into British assessments of Israeli intentions, the document says that Ariel Sharon's government is jeopardising the prospect of a peace agreement by trying to put the future of Arab East Jerusalem beyond negotiation and risks driving Palestinians living in the city into radical groups.

Why does the claim to an eternally United Jerusalem threaten the peace?

I prefer to ask, why do the Palestinians specifically claim "El Kuds" as their capital, rather than Ramallah or Shchem? Of all places, this is the place that they want?

Why are they so insistant, so intransigent on this point? (Let's not ask the pposite question, are they flexible on any point? Let's not say that every single concession bar none that Israel has "won" from the Arabs has either been abrogated, or never even given a nodding attempt at fulfillment.)


The Prime Directive

The Palestinians, and their Guardian lapdogs, are so insistant for a very simple, but basic reason, and it is this motivator that explains much of the Palestinians' policies:

If it's something important to the Jews, then it's vitally important to conquor and overrun.

This is typical of historic Muslim imperialist techniques: after taking over an infidel's land, the first op consists of razing any place of worship, and then building a mosque over it.

One place this is blatantly obvious is in the building over the Cave of the forefathers, in Hevron.


The Ma'arah

Hevron, the city, has existed for thousands of years. In approximately 1677 BCE, Avraham, the acknowledged forefather of both the Muslims and ourselves, purchased the rights to a cave in the Hevron hills to bury his beloved wife, and our ultimate mother, Sarah. The agreement and deed is recorded publicly, and you need merely to open your bible to Genesis 23 to read it. Purchased. Not "occupied".

We have never relinquished our ownership of the area. In fact, to commemorate and immortalize this, the Jewish king Herod built a large building over the caves, in the form of the Temple in Jerusalem, during the Roman period, about 20 or so BCE.

Following the Crusades, with the ascendancy of Muslim rule over the Land of Israel, the ruling Mamlukes (13th-16th centuries) transformed this building into a mosque, removing much of its original Jewish nature, even though there were Jews living and thriving continuously in Hevron from the Roman period. During the Ottoman period, the Jews were allowed to use a couple of the rooms in this building for synagogues; to this day, you can see scrollwork in Jewish motifs (Stars of David, Menorahs) in the smaller Chamber of Jacob, and in various places in the large, central Chamber of Isaac.


Six holes

But also readily apparent in the large, central Chamber of Jacob, are fairly obvious attempts by the Arabs to remove these signs. In each of the three "chambers" in the building are representations of tombs of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, buried below in the caves. In the Chamber of Jacob, these block-like mini-buldings have brass grillwork gates, always kept locked. On each of these gates is a 6" circle -- with a crescent moon in the center.

But a closer examination shows two curious things: the moon is of different, less expensive metal; and there are six holes in the surrounding circle, even though the moons are attached by only four. Why six? What symbol was excised from the grillwork, that connected to the outer circle at six points?