The Old City of Jerusalem’s “Settlers’ Quarter”

Anti-Semitism wears many masks, the most prominent these days is anti-Zionism. The malicious malady has related hats, including denying Jewish history, distorting Judaism and opposing the rights of Jews to live in certain places.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, has locked arms with alt-left Jews in some of these sinister proclamations, especially concerning Jews living over the 1949 Armistice Lines struck between Jordan and Israel. That “Green Line” was specifically defined as never to be regarded as a border, and the 1950 Jordanian annexation of the “West Bank” was deemed illegal by the international community, marking that invisible line as a footnote in history penned in disappearing ink. No matter, anti-Semites have a long history of dictating where Jews can and cannot live, whether the Pale of Settlement in Russia or ghettoes throughout Europe.

Consider the recent BBC coverage of the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.

The BBC using a map produced by B’Tselem, a group which markets itself as an “information center for human rights in the occupied territories.”

The dotted lines (at least they are dotted!) represent the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and Jordan, which disappeared in 1967 when Jordan attacked Israel again and lost the entirety of eastern Jerusalem and the “West Bank.” Note that the map’s legend refers to the dotted line as “pre-1967 ceasefire line,” which implies that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, as Jordan is not mentioned (this is deliberately misleading). The map’s purple areas are marked as “Israeli settlements.” Are they?

In the lower portion of the map is the Old City of Jerusalem. Marked in purple is the Jewish Quarter, a place with over 750 years of continuous Jewish presence except for the window of Arab rule when the Jordanians ethnically-cleansed all of the Jews from 1949 to 1967. According to this map, any JEW – not Israeli – living east of the Green Line (EGL) is a “settler.”

There are thousands of Israeli Arabs living in EGL including the eastern part of Jerusalem. Israel gave all the Arabs in the city permanent resident status in 1967 and has afforded them the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Thousands have already taken such citizenship and thousands more have applied. Yet the B’Tselem/ BBC map doesn’t mark the homes of Israeli Arabs in purple but only the locations where Israeli Jews live.

Jewish men, women and children living in the Jewish Quarter of their holiest city
are marked with the term “settler”

Adolf Hitler accused the Jews of being sly manipulators who steal, as he roused Germany to rout the Jews. He painted their stores with the word “Jude” and made them wear yellow Jewish stars with the word in the center, so they could be easily identifiable for insult and attack by passers-by, and interrogated and ultimately expelled for annihilation by government officials.

So it is today with the term “settler,” even in the Jewish people’s holiest city.

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Related First One Through articles:

Time to Define Banning Jews From Living Somewhere as Antisemitic

Antisemitism Includes the Denial of Jewish History

Rashida Tlaib’s Modern ‘Mein Kampf’

The United Nations and Holy Sites in the Holy Land

The Green Line Through Jerusalem

The Long History of Dictating Where Jews Can Live Continues

Linda Sarsour as Pontius Pilate

“Settlers” Now Means Jews Stepping Over The Green Line

To Serve Jews, United Nations Style

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