Sunday, March 07, 2010

Leftists Raise PLO Flags at Rally in Eastern Jerusalem


Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

More than 3,000 Arabs, radical leftists and anarchists, waving Palestinian Authority flags, took advantage of a court order Saturday night that permitted them to protest against another court order allowing Jews to live in the Simon the Just (Shimon HaTzaddik) neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. They hurled rocks and wounded nationalists who were praying in the community, also called Sheikh Jarrach. It is located near Mount Scopus.

National Union Knesset Member Aryeh Eldad pointed out the "chutzpah of the Israeli left” who complained when the court criticized the police for banning their demonstrations because of ensuing violence. MK Eldad said that the same radicals “are lawbreakers who prefer to hide behind the courts only when it acts against Jews.”

The rally at Sheikh Jarrach protested a court order that several Arab squatter families leave homes that are owned by Jews from before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Eldad charged the demonstrators with being "collaborators with the enemies of Israel.”

The court condemned the police for restricting the pro-Arab groups rally to a nearby soccer field, allowing them to march in the streets. It rejected police arguments that they have to battle stone-throwing Arabs and anarchic leftists virtually every day.

Waving PLO flags featuring hand-clenched rifles, the demonstrators shouted, "There is no sanctity in an occupied city.” The Jews who owned homes in the area were forced out under the British Mandate. The area was under Jordanian rule from the 1948 War of Independence until the 1967 Six Day War when Jerusalem was re-united under Israeli sovereignty.

National Union chairman and Knesset Member Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz "welcomed" the pro-Arab rally, “Wherever Peace Now demonstrates, Jews end up making the area a Jewish neighborhood,” he explained, citing the Jewish Har Homa community as an example of Peace Now failures to stop a Jewish presence in another area of Jerusalem.

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