Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Gerusalemme oggi

Bell'articolo di Gil Troy sul Jerusalem Post.
I hate disappointing the worrywarts, but today, Jerusalem Day, 2011,
44-years after its reunification, Jerusalem is a remarkably functional
city, a surprisingly peaceful city, a delightfully magical city. The
city I experience daily is not the city described in the headlines. It
does not feel like it is in eclipse, nor does it feel like a powder
keg. I absorbed New York’s fear of crime in the 1970s, Boston’s racial
tension in the 1980s, and Montreal’s linguistic complexity in the
1990s much more intensely. While jogging through the Old City daily, I
feel lucky to live in such a livable city.
Jerusalem invites time-traveling in profound ways while doing mundane
tasks. Every day, crossing the footbridge over the Cinemateque looking
toward Mount Zion, I observe a panorama of peace reinforced by a
symphony of silence, with the Tower of David crowned by its Israeli
flag and Muslim crescent, church spires and minarets, the new city’s
modern construction to my left and the older houses abutting the Old
City to my right. The sweeping Old City walls dominate front and
center.
These days, I confess, I think more about recent history than the
walls’ ancient history, built by Suleiman the Magnificent 500 years
ago but evoking Abraham binding Isaac, King David designating King
Solomon, thousands of years earlier. Mahmoud Abbas’s rewriting of the
history of 1947, which passed the New York Times’ editorial muster,
Barack Obama’s obsession with the 1967 lines, have me wishing
Jerusalem’s stones could talk, confirming what really happened when
Zionists founded Israel in 1947-1948, when Israelis liberated
Jerusalem in 1967, and during the difficult intervening years.
My daily plunge into this past begins with Jerusalem’s 19 years of
rupture, as I traverse what was the barbed-wire-and-mine-strewn No-
Man’s Land. To my right, the Cinemateque looms, a center of Israel’s
edgy, often critical, vibrant democratic culture, contradicting false
cries of McCarthyism. To my left, the red-roofed houses of Yemin Moshe
unfold, beside Moses Montefiore’s 1857 windmill. I think about the
poor people who lived in this, the first neighborhood outside
Jerusalem’s walls, during the State’s first years. And I wince
imagining their terror when, periodically, Jordanian snipers would
shoot. The Jordanian army always reassured the UN that a soldier had
gone crazy – again and again.
Scampering up Mount Zion, holy to us and our Christian brethren, I
wonder what the fifty soldiers following Captain Eli Kedar thought
while hustling along this alley on June 7, 1967. Did they remember the
failure to free the besieged Jewish Quarter from this alley in 1948?
Did they know the last Jew to leave the Jewish Quarter, headed to
Jordanian prison for nine months, was a 15-year-old, Eli Kedar? Did
they appreciate their commanders’ genius in mostly attacking from
behind, via Lions Gate? Did they know Israel began the war two days
earlier with only 71 troops in Jerusalem? Were they aware that, even
while the Jordanians shelled Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minster Levi
Eshkol offered peace to Jordan’s King Hussein, making the war one of
self-defense and any resulting territorial gains not an illegal
occupation? Did they sense they were about to correct the historic
mistake of the city’s division, returning the Holy Temple’s remnants
to Jewish sovereignty after 2000 years? Did they appreciate their
army’s sensitivity in deploying archaeologists to try preserving holy
sites? Probably, most simply thought about going home – which 759
Israelis after six days never did.
Entering the Jewish quarter I again ponder the nineteen years
preceding the Six Day War when Israel – living under Barack Obama’s
1967 borders – were banned from the Old City, although the UN never
validated Jordanian control. Those, ahem, illegal occupiers trashed
Jerusalem’s synagogues. Contrast that bitter past to the redemptive
sights and sounds of kids playing and praying, the burger bars
adjoining archaeological museums, the glorious dome of the Hurva
synagogue, which means ruins: bombarded by Jordan in 1948; rebuilt and
rededicated last year.
Crossing the Jewish Quarter, then the Arab market, seamlessly, safely,
I exit through Jaffa Gate. Sixty-four years ago, on December 2, 1947,
just days after the UN proposed partitioning Palestine on November 29,
Arabs shouting “Death to the Jews!” looted the Jewish commercial
center across the way, at the entrance to today’s David Village. This
was the Palestinian response to the compromise the Jews accepted.
Mahmoud Abbas’s recent New York Times column lied, claiming the
Zionists rejected compromise, then “expelled Palestinian Arabs to
ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state,” when the Arab
rejectionists chose violence – and continue to reject a Jewish state.
I also recall the first British census of Jerusalem in 1931, which
noted population growth since 1922 by 20,107 Jews and 21,282 Arabs. If
only both sides acknowledged that history flows, populations move,
borders shift, we could compromise.
As I finish by sprinting along the newly-restored century-old train
tracks, I toast the city’s dynamism. The 800,000 residents now include
268,000 Arabs. During these 44 years, as their population has grown by
200,000, many Arabs have appreciated Israeli rights and services. The
number of Arab Jerusalemites granted Israeli citizenship quadrupled
from 2006 to 2010.
In Six Days of War, Michael Oren quotes Arik Akhmon one of the first
Israelis in 1967 to enter the Western Wall plaza, as bullets whizzed
by. Although not religious, Akhmon recalled, “I don’t think there was
a man who wasn’t overwhelmed with emotion. Something special had
happened.”
Jerusalem is a real city which cannot “overwhelm” residents daily –
life intrudes. But every day I note something “special” about the
place, its history or mystery, its sights or smells, its old memories
or new achievements. Today, Yom Yerushalayim, let’s honor its secret
ingredient, the people it attracts, connected to Jerusalem’s lush
past, enlivening the city during its complex yet compelling present,
and shaping a safe, spiritually-rich, yet charmingly commonplace
future keeping the city magical and livable.

 city,
AHEM....

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se continui a leggere ti spiega persino il perche'.

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il problema è quello che ha deciso di tacere, non quello di cui
parla...

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ah gia' - le terribili conseguenze della sovranita' ebraica.

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i bus mehadrim non sono sovranità ebraica, sono dittatura di una
minoranza ostile alla democrazia

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perche' non ti occupi delle poche cose di cui capisci?