Sunday, March 21, 2010

Jerusalem is Jewish!

It is a little known fact that Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since census figures have been taken as far back as 1896! So Arab talk of the "Judaization" of Jerusalem is so much biased nonsense. Jerusalem has been in essence a Jewish City even when it was dominated and controlled by the Muslim Turks. Note that it has never been the capital of a Muslim country nor has it ever been under Arab or Palestinian sovereignty. By contrast, Jerusalem was the capital of the Jews for centuries before the Arabs were ever heard of in history and is again. Incidentally, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran, and the identification of Jerusalem with "the northernmost Mosque" that Mohammed was supposed to have visited is nonsense, since in Mohammed's time there was no Mosque in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was built in 691 ce, sixty years after Mohammed's death.

In 1978 I published a pamphlet with graphics artist Avrum Ashery entitled "Israel: The Facts." From that I reproduce here a graph that I plotted of the census statistics for Jerusalem over many years. Originally there was no clear distinction between West (Jewish) and East (Arab) Jerusalem, but this separation came about as a result of the unfortunate division of Jerusalem by the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Transjordanian forces (it then changed its name to "Jordan"). This occupation was reversed in the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel reunited the whole of Jerusalem.


There are two main sources for this information: "Jerusalem, an illustrated history atlas," by Martin Gilbert and "Historical Atlas of Jerusalem," by Dan Bahat. Here are some statistics (from an article by Eli Hertz): In 1880, Jews constituted 52 percent of the Old City population in East Jerusalem and were still inhabiting 42 percent of the Old City in 1914. In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, with 65,000 Arabs. A joint Jordanian-Israeli census reported that 67.7 percent of the city's population in 1961 was Jewish. In 2007, 64% of Jerusalem's population was Jewish and 34% Arab (from Wikipedia).

Pres. Peres recently told the visiting EU foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton that Israel has been building Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem for 42 years, including under PM Rabin. Certainly there have been disagreements about this, but noone in the West has said that this must stop, until now! It is a national consensus that Jerusalem is Jewish and will remain Jewish and the capital of Israel forever.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home