Basic Facts. Undisputed and Recorded Neutral History

In a previous article I recommended a small but powerful book, “Reply” by historian Eli E. Hertz. In it, the author refers to recorded history from neutral sources which validate Israel’s claims against the Arabs of former Palestine. In one brief word to the Arabs, the words of Hertz “hurts” the Arab false claims.

The first source is from the Hebrew Bible which mentions the words “Jerusalem” and “Zion” almost 500 times, whereas there is not one single mention of the city by those names anywhere is the Muslim Koran.

Facts on the ground, as Hertz clearly enumerates:

!). When Jews pray, they always face east to Jerusalem. And when Jews pray in Jerusalem they always face the Holy Mount where King Solomon’s Temple once stood.

2) When Muslims pray, they always face Mecca and when they pray in Jerusalem they pray with backs turned away from the Holy Mount. When a Muslim is buried, his face is always turned toward Mecca.

3) At the end of the Passover seder and again on the solemn Fast of Yom Kippur, Jews proclaim “l’shana ha ba’a b’Yerushalayim”… next year in Jerusalem.

4) At his wedding, every Jewish groom smashes a glass with his foot recalling the smashing of Jerusalem’s ancient temples.

Jerusalem was the holy and revered city to the Jews for three thousand years, while for Muslims it was always Mecca

From 1948 -1967 when east Jerusalem was conquered and occupied by the military forces and government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, NOT a single Arab king, ruler or potentate of any Muslim nation ever visited the holy places in the occupied city during the 19 years under Jordanian rule… Only one… King Abdullah I who was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab Muslim while the king was praying !

Recorded historical facts… undisputed:

Stephen M. Schwebel, a former Judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague since 1981 wrote: “Jerusalem was NEVER (italics mine) an Arab city; Jews have held a majority in Jerusalem since 1870”. In discussing the question of East Jerusalem for Arabs and West Jerusalem for Jews, he held the opinion that ‘east-west’ “is a geographic, not a political designation”.

In 1898, Edwin Wallace, former U.S. consul in Jerusalem, published a lengthy article in COSMOPOLITAN magazine, entitled “The Jews in Jerusalem”. He wrote that Jews comprised 75% of the population in Jerusalem’s Old City when the Ottoman Turks ruled. Of the 65,000 inhabitants, the Jews numbered 45,000.

In his article, Consul Wallace wrote “of the 80,000 Jews in Palestine fully one-half are living within the walls of Jerusalem… this number of Jews in Jerusalem is not an estimate carelessly made….” (1898).

Immediately prior to Israel’s declaration of independence there were 100,000 Jews living in Jerusalem compared to 65,000 Arabs.

The 1947 U.N. plan to partition Palestine into two separate nations was rejected by every Arab and Muslim nation. Exactly as they had objected to the 1922 first partition of Palestine in which the British Mandate tore away 77% of biblical historic Palestine and gave it as a gift to the Emir Abdullah to create a new Arab state, Trans-Jordan, which later became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The remaining 23% of the British promised land for a Jewish national home was left for the Jews.

The British Prime Minister at that time, David Lloyd George, wrote in anger of his country’s partition decision…… “the Balfour Declaration implied that the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, should ultimately become a Jewish state. Transjordan had, nevertheless, been severed from Palestine in 1922 and had subsequently been set up as an Arab kingdom. Now a second Arab state was to be carved out of the remainder of Palestine, with the result that the Jewish National Home would represent less than one eighth of the territory originally set aside for it. Such a sacrifice should not be asked of the Jewish people.”

Referring again to a proposal to eliminate western Galilee from the Jewish State, the British statesman declared that it was “an injustice and a grievous handicap to the development of the Jewish State”.

In my previous article I heralded Hertz’s magnificent book which cited by his research all the facts of recorded history in the matter of the never-ending Palestine-Israel “war”. To Eli E. Hertz we owe an immense gratitude for his scholarship and his devotion to search for truth. I will continue to quote from his detailed history to anyone who challenges our rights as Jews to all of our ancestral homeland… a homeland in which we lived for thousands of years before anyone known by the word “Muslim” or by the faith of Islam existed on the face of the entire earth.

In praise of it, the “small book which Arab leaders do not want their people to read” should hold a place of honor on the bookshelves of every Jewish home.