"That's no coincidence" he said. "The same Ottoman architect planned both. He cut corners by removing the minaret and using the plans for the Hurva Synagogue".
That exhilarated me then, and still does.
@Istanbultelaviv On a bleak, hopeless gut-wrenching night like this, a story like this is therapeutic.
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It's even worse. The problem of the muezzin loudspeakers on the Mount interfering with the President's solemn speeches at the Western Wall was not new. There has been a longstanding arrangement between the President's office/police.
It was agreed that the volume on the two problematic loudspeakers on the Mount closest to the W. Wall Plaza would be turned down during the President's speech. It was an arrangement that worked to everyone's satisfaction.
This year, the Police showed up on the Mount and without warning, and demanded that the waqf turn down the volume on two additional loudspeakers to the east, that were nowhere near the plaza. The waqf officials refused, saying it was contrary to the existing understanding.
Thread. 1/ 1. On Monday evening, a Palestinian van driver in Jerusalem, was attacked by a lynch mob yelling “He’s an Arab, he’s an Arab”, just a few yards away from where Netanyahu was having a press conference.
2. Bruised and bleeding, the driver barely escaped with his life.
2/
3. In his attempt to escape the lynch mob, the Palestinian driver ran over an innocent Israeli, killing him.
4. The family of the man killed declared that the Palestinian driver was blameless, and to blame him would desecrate his memory. The ultra-orthodox mob was to blame.
3/
3. The Palestinian driver who they tried to lynch was detained and interrogated by the police, and released after 24 hours.
4. In spite of a wealth of video footage, no one in the lynch mob was detained.
More than example of apartheid, Israel’s failure to provide vaccinations to the W. Bank and Gaza is the embodiment of toxic occupation, where the Oslo Accords have become the foundations of occupation, rather than an engine to ending it.
2/
Even as late as last year this could have been different - even without an end to occupation.
Palestinian and Israeli medical care providers know how to work together, and are the most egalitarian in each respective society.
There is no excuse for not providing vaccinations
3/
Why didn’t it happen?
2 reasons.
Because 53 years of occupation have instilled in many Israelis that we’ve nothing to do w/ Palestinians, & they’re imbued w/ a diminished humanity anyway. Occupation denial.
1. I know that I am the occupier and not the occupied. But occupation is the greatest existential threat to the long term viability of Israel.
Israel will end occupation, or occupation will be the end of us.
2/
2. Anything that perpetuates occupation is bad. It is devastating to the Palestinian people, their dignity &their rights to self determination, and very harmful to Israel.
3. The goal of the Trump Plan is to denationalize the Palestinians, creating occupation with deodorant.
4/
4. Palestinians across town despair of ever ending occupation; my Israeli compatriots are in deep denial, sipping cappuccino on the edge of volcano.
5. The Trump Plan tells Palestinians to abandon hope, and Israelis not to worry about an occupation that does not exist.
"There are moments and situations in the life of a nation, as in the life of a person, when you find yourself standing in awe.
@LeeKoren2 3/
And you don't understand how this happened, and who could have thought, and how is it and you try to enlist explanations from various fields, economic, social, anthropological, philosophical and psychological explanations, and you once again don't believe how is this possible
3. The plan keeps being ressurrected because it is the darling of the ultra-Orthodox. The land reserves in Jerusalem have been pretty mmuch exhausted, and the haredim are leaving for Beit Shemesh and the settlements of Beitar and Modi'in Illit.
They are pushing.
3/
44. There is even talk of a surrealistic plan to build a tunnel under the Qalandia Refugee Camp, linking the planned Atarot settlement with the exisiting West Bank settlement of Kochav Yaacov.