Sunday, 9 January 2011

Former Home of Pro-Nazi Mufti Makes Way for Jewish Building

by Hillel Fendel January 9, 2010

A new Jewish housing project in eastern Jerusalem, just about a half-kilometer from Ammunition Hill outside Ramat Eshkol has finally gotten off the ground – though not without loud Arab protests that required a police presence.

The old Shepherd Hotel, in the Shimon HaTzaddik-Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was brought down today (Sunday) by bulldozers in preparation for the construction on the site of a new, 20-unit housing project. The hotel was the former home of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem who engineered murderous riots against Jews in 1929 and 1936. During World War II, Husseini met with Hitler and mobilized Muslim support for the Nazis among Muslims.

"It is very symbolic," said Daniel Lurie, Executive Director of the Ateret Cohanim Association, "that the home of this former Nazi sympathizer is being razed – even so many years later – to make way for Jews to return to Jerusalem.

Watching the hotel go down, Lurie said, "This building is a symbol of genocide; Husseini was practically a full-fledged Nazi; the British arrested him for starting pogroms in the 1920's, and he established on his own a unit that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews in Yugoslavia during World War II… The Jews are now returning to our natural home; no one can claim that Jerusalem is not Jewish, and this particular spot is in the heart of Jerusalem. Some Arabs live here, but it is a Jewish area; Simon the Just is buried here, Jews live right below, the Police Headquarters are located nearby. The natural process of the Jews returning home is continuing, and with G-d's help it will pick up even more steam."

The Shepherd Hotel was purchased by Dr. Irving Moskowitz of the U.S. back in 1985. His plans to build Jewish homes there met up with various bureaucratic and political obstacles, but now – 25 years later – they have begun taking on physical shape and form. Moskowitz and his wife Cherna also purchased the land on which the Ma'aleh HaZeitim complex continues to be built, opposite the Mount of Olives.

Responding to international criticism, and especially from U.S. President Barack Obama regarding Jewish construction in the Shimon HaTzaddik area, Mrs. Moskowitz wrote in September 2009 that this "seems to be a continuation of a 2,000-year-old habit of Jews being told where they can and cannot live. This spanned from the ghettos of medieval Europe, to severe zoning restrictions in czarist Russia and finally to the edicts of Nazism where we were eventually told that we could not live at all." She added that "reclaiming the land of our country" is "part of the Jewish tradition."

Radical-left Peace Now, which objects to a Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem came out strongly against today's activity at the Shepherd site, as did Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat and MK Dov Henin of the Jewish-Arab Hadash party.

Israel demolishes East Jerusalem hotel wing to clear way for new homes
Bulldozers arrive in Sheikh Jarrah early Sunday to raze wing of Shepherd Hotel compound, where 20 new Jewish housing units will be built despite U.S. and British condemnation.

Israeli bulldozers cleared the way on Sunday for 20 new homes in East Jerusalem, demolishing a wing of a derelict hotel in a settlement project that has angered Palestinians and drawn U.S. objections.

Construction at the Shepherd Hotel compound, whose ownership is contested, was likely to deepen Israeli-Palestinian acrimony as Washington tries to revive peace talks stalled by a dispute over Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.

"We see this matter as extremely dangerous," said Hatem Abdel Qader, the Palestinian official who oversees Jerusalem affairs for President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement.

With direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at a standstill, Israel said an emissary of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a Palestinian envoy would travel to Washington in the next few days to seek ways to restart talks.

But Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said "the meetings, if they happen, will happen on a separate basis with the American administration: Palestinian-American, Israeli-American".

In the predominantly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, bulldozers tore into the decaying hotel built in the 1930s for Muslim grand mufti Haj Amin Husseini, who fought the British and Zionists and became a World War Two ally of Hitler. The construction is focused on a wing added to the hotel during Jordanian rule, leaving most of the building intact.

Israel, Abdel Qader said, was trying to "create a belt of settlements" around East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as the capital of the state they intend to create in the West Bank, where Abbas holds sway, and the Hamas Islamist-run Gaza Strip.

No violence was reported after the demolition in Sheikh Jarrah, where evictions of Palestinian families from homes that Israeli courts have ruled were owned in the past by Jews or purchased from Arabs has led to anti-settler protests.

The hotel was declared "absentee property" by Israel after it captured and annexed East Jerusalem. The title was transferred to an Israeli firm, which sold it in 1985 to Irving Moskowitz, a Florida bingo king and patron of Jewish settlers.

Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority-appointed mayor of Jerusalem, said knocking down the historic building was an "act of barbarism".

His family claims ownership of the property and had been using the Israeli courts to challenge the steps that had led to its sale.

The United States voiced its displeasure over the project to Israel's Washington ambassador in 2009 after the plan received the green light from Israel's Jerusalem municipality.

Netanyahu responded publicly at the time to the U.S. criticism by saying Jews have right to live anywhere in Jerusalem, a city that Israel calls its united capital, a designation that is not recognized internationally.

Some 190,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem and adjacent areas of the West Bank that Israel annexed to its Jerusalem municipality after the 1967 war. East Jerusalem has 250,000 Palestinian residents.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 21:51