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Archives Prove Israel Levelled Palestinian Mosques

AFP | 08.07.2007 13:27 | Anti-racism | World

These actions were carried out in order to erase Palestinian history, as Zionists have done since arriving from Europe with a plan for colonization, of which Revisionism is an essential part.

Archives show Israel levelled mosques: report Fri Jul 6, 8:50 AM ET

JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel destroyed more than 100 mosques in Palestinian villages incorporated into the state, including the site where the head of Imam Hussein was allegedly buried, a daily wrote on Friday.

According to archives quoted by the Haaretz newspaper, Israel's legendary general Moshe Dayan -- himself an avid amateur archaeologist -- gave the order to blow up the mosque while he was a young lieutenant colonel.

Haaretz said the Mashhad Nabi Hussein in Majdal, now Ashkelon, dated back to the 11th century and was where tradition had it that the head of Imam Hussein, killed in 680 by armies of the Sunni caliph Yazid in Karbala, was interred.

Around 9,000 Arabs who lived in Majdal fled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and 3,000 who remained in a ghetto were subsequently forced out by Israel.

The Mashhad Nabi Hussein mosque was blown up deliberately as part of a broader operation that included at least two additional mosques, one in Yavneh and the other in the nearby Mediterranean city of Ashdod, Haaretz said.

Of the 160 mosques in Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 are still standing, the newspaper quoted a Tel Aviv University study as showing.

Various holy sites were levelled despite protests from the then head of the Israeli antiquities department, Shmuel Yeivin, who believed that ancient sites and holy places needed to be preserved whoever they were sacred to.

news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070706/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflicthistoryrelig

The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict
Published by
Jews for Justice in the Middle East

As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational "terrorists" who have no point of view worth listening to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland for over a thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during creation of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes—on both sides—inevitably follow from this original injustice.

This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how this process occurred and what a moral solution to the region's problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the historical record.

www.wrmea.com/jews_for_justice/


AFP