Nadene Goldfoot
The Israeli-Palestinian relationship is fraught with conflict, with some of the disagreements stemming from who settled in the land thousands of years ago. International law considers East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza as occupied territory under United Nations Security Council Resolutions, though that characterization is disputed by Israel. I'm writing to disprove some of the biased statements about Jerusalem.
JERUSALEM
This city is also called the City of David. It was David, King of Israel, who actually took it from the Jebusites after his ancestors had been led to Canaan by Moses and Joshua at the end of their 40 year trek from Egypt-leaving 400 years of being slaves of Egypt.
Yes, they, meaning Joshua, took a town called Jebus from the Jebusites, a Canaanite people, who had settled in Canaan prior to the Israelite conquest of Joshua. Joshua defeated a Jebusite-led coalition. This doesn't conclude that it meant a bloody fight. The last Jebusite king was Araunah, as found in our Tanakh (Bible) in II Sam.24:15). Araunah (Hebrew: אֲרַוְנָה ’Ǎrawnāh) was a Jebusite mentioned in the Second Book of Samuel, who owned the threshing floor on Mount Moriah which David purchased and used as the site for assembling an altar to God. The First Book of Chronicles, a later text, renders his name as Ornan (Hebrew:
The Jebusites remained in this little city-state, as in those days they all were city-states, a state answering to themselves. King David allowed them, they didn't want to leave and so they became in time a tributary under Solomon, David's son and next king of Israel. "In the course of time, they appear to have been assimilated". Some Jews may be carrying a few Jebusite genes.
They were prior to the conquest initiated by Joshua (Joshua 11:3, Joshua 12:10) and completed by King David (2 Samuel 5:6–10), The Books of Kings as well as 1 Chronicles state that Jerusalem was known as Jebus prior to this event (1 Chronicles 11:4). According to some biblical chronologies, the city was conquered by King David in 1003 BCE. I disagree as David ruled from 1010 to 970 BCE; 1003 would come after David was king. The city was conquered by Joshua and the Israelites lived there.
David was King of Israel from 1000 to 960 BCE, 40 years. He was the youngest son of Jesse, born in Bethlehem, and had been as a teenager, a shepherd, tending sheep, and a member of the tribe of Judah. By age 25 he was King Saul's armor-hearer and best friend of Saul's son, Jonathan. He was a soldier fighting the Philistines, and wound up marrying Saul's daughter, Michal. The Bible depicts David's virtues and vices as it does with all of our heroes. In the course of time and his accomplishments, he became a religious symbol and the Jewish messianic hope was attached to his descendants. Jewish tradition has magnified him to the point of saying, "King David still lives!" We Jews attribute David as the author of the whole book of Psalms, many of which were certainly ascribed to him from a very early date. Christianity and Islam have derived from Judaism their admiration for David. Today a few historians, favoring the Palestinians over Jews of Israel, have shown their biased attitude in many ways, programs, BDS actions, marches, etc.
The Palestinians live in East Jerusalem and would like to formally announce their state of Palestine and use East Jerusalem as their capital. East Jerusalem is the sector of Jerusalem that was occupied by Jordan during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, as opposed to the western sector of the city, West Jerusalem, which was occupied; I'd say "freed" by Israel. Since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War,
East Jerusalem has been considered to be occupied by Israel by the international community. The international community has usually shown its anti-Semitic beliefs ever since Israel has been announced to the world as a state on its birthday of May 14, 1948. Though the UN accepted its birth with the President of the USA, Harry S. Truman recognized her first, and even before the UN, when the League of Nations was in existence and at the end of WWI in 1917, being accepted there, the rest of the world hasn't been as warm -hearted to the remnants of the once mighty empire of Israel of the Middle East. Five minutes after blowing the candles out on the birthday cake, Israel was attacked by her surrounding neighbors. What a welcome wagon that turned out to be!
Israel had to fight continuously from 1947 to 1949 to gain her independence. So she was born in defense of her waiting people, fighting, a rag-tag army of Holocaust survivors, rabbis, religious people and new immigrants, having never fought in their life,
Those Jews who could, came in illegally according to the Brits who did their best to keep all Jews out, looking for refuge from Nazis.
Jews had waited for their state ever since 70 CE when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the city and Temple were destroyed, and then since 1917, the end of WWII. From that time to May 1948 was 31 years of earnest waiting; since 70 CE-1,878 years of waiting to call Israel one's home. There were still the descendants of the remnant of Jews that survived Jerusalem's destruction in Palestine and they were also called Palestinians. There had been Jews making aliyah throughout the years living in what was then the Ottoman Empire. It was land occupied by the Turks in as far as having a force of some sort there, as told about in the book, The Settlers by Meyer Levin, a historical novel of heavy weight with 832 pages.
East Jerusalem Includes :This area includes Jerusalem's Old City and some of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such as the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as a number of adjacent neighbourhoods. The Temple Mount was the site of the the first and second Temples. Today, Jews are not allowed to pray on the site according to the Muslim Jordanians who run the site. The Western wall, built by King Herod,, is the only site left for Jews to pray that is special from our history. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, to be illegal under international law. Israel disputes this interpretation.
West Bank is: This is the land of Judea and Samaria, our ancestor's original stomping grounds. The tribe of Judah lived here. Transjordan, later named Jordan, is part of it.
Samaria had become the capital of the Northern kingdom of Israel after King Solomon had died in 932 BCE. it was the southern kingdom, Judah, who was able to keep Jerusalem as their capital. Both did not use it. Samaria was handier for them and suited their needs. This happened in 880 BCE by King Omri and was on top of a hill bought from Shemer as told about in I Kings 16-24. aThe site, near Shechem, dominated a wide countryside and occupied 25 acres. It withstood the siege of the Syrians but they with all the other 10 northern tribes fell in 721 BCE to Sargon II of Assyria who resettled it with Cutheans, who intermingled with the remnants of the former Israelite 10 tribes. These became the ancestors of the SAMARITANS, restored eventually by General Pompey of the Romans. By the Arab period, it had shrunk to a village.
Samaria is also applied to the entire northern region of the central highlands of Palestine. This would be today's area under Samaria.
In 1967 Israel was attacked by every Arab army, and yet Israel won the war-the defensive ones with odds of 1 to 100,000,000,000,000,000. That meant that Israel won back land that had been originally promised to Israel and then given away without a fight to King Abdullah who took the land of Transjordan without so much as a "we're sorry." The extra slap in the face was Britain keeping out all further Jews from gaining entrance to Palestine during WWII, and many of those that tried were killed.
Following the 1967 Six-Day War, the eastern part of Jerusalem came under Israeli rule, along with the entire West Bank. Shortly after the Israeli takeover, East Jerusalem was absorbed into West Jerusalem, together with several neighboring West Bank villages. In November 1967, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 was passed, calling for Israel to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for peace treaties. In 1980, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law, which declared that "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel", which is commonly called an act of annexation, though no such formal measure was even taken. This declaration was determined to be "null and void" by United Nations Security Council Resolution 478. I don't remember this group ever in Israel's favor, always voting against Israel, no matter what.
Professor Eugene Kontorovich, international Law expert, historian, has the reasons as to why land of this subject is not occupied territory and that Israel has every right to it. He's a legalist. Kontorovich studied law at the University of Chicago, and began teaching there at age of 26. He later clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 2011, he received a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was later awarded the Federalist Society’s Bator Award, given annually to a young scholar under 40. From 2011 to 2018, Kontorovich worked as a professor at Northwestern University. Listen to him on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB7LyPhzr0
Kontorovich: Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Kontorovich moved to the US with his parents at the age of three. He immigrated to Israel in 2013 with his wife and four children, and lived in the town of Alon Shvut. but he must be living in the US today. He is a proponent of using anti-BDS laws to combat the BDS movement. He has helped many US states draft such legislation. In 2016, Kontorovich served as an expert advisor to the group that sued the American Studies Association over its 2013 decision to boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Since then he has served as a Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School. George Mason University School of Law) is the professional graduate law school of George Mason University. It is located in Arlington, Virginia, roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) west of Washington, D.C., and 15 miles (24 km) east-northeast of George Mason University's main campus in Fairfax, Virginia. It was named for our Supreme Court Judge who has passed away and was so highly respected.
I'm interested in his professional background as i want readers to know he knows more than people in International law that are so biased against Israel. I swear, if I said Kontorovich was Jewish, they'd argue with me.
America Recognizes One Jerusalem-by Kontorovich: https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-recognizes-one-jerusalem-1526233843
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB7LyPhzr0--Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at Northwestern Law whose research spans the fields of constitutional law, international law, and law and economics. He has authored a series of papers that extend "transaction cost" analysis from private law to constitutional law.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem
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