Monday, September 07, 2009

That Film Boycott in Toronto

You did know
that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages

right?


No?

You mean you think that Tel Aviv was founded as Ahuzat Bayit in 1909 on land purchased and built up on sand dunes?

Even "themiddle" had to take an extreme stand, and present the real history:

The vast majority of Tel Aviv is built on what was empty land, purchased with Jewish money, built as part of a Jewish city and in large part driven to live there by Palestinian violence against Jews over the course of many years...Jaffa’s population included about 20% Jews...It grew rapidly as a center for the Jews in Mandatory Palestine over land that was virtually entirely unbuilt and uninhabited. Before 1948, when the city grew to enclose an Arab village, it was done through legal instruments and overseen by the Mandatory authorities.

There are two other critical pieces of information that tell us a great deal about Tel Aviv and its growth. In 1921, it became a separate municipality from Jaffa. The reason? The 1920 and 1921 attacks initiated by Arabs in key areas of Mandatory Palestine against the small Jewish minority brought about a need to separate populations and establish defensive capabilities for the Jews who were still a small minority there. Jaffa was no different. In 1936, Tel Aviv opened its own port, again because of major complications with the Jaffa port and general Arab violence that became prevalent throughout Mandatory Palestine between 1936 to 1939. The result, of course, was that Jaffa’s economy suffered.

...By the time, 1948 rolled around, Tel Aviv had grown to 230,000 almost entirely Jewish residents while Jaffa next door was almost entirely Arab...The UN’s recommendation to partition Palestine in 1947, would have left Jaffa in Arab hands while Tel Aviv was a central part of the Jewish areas...the Arabs rejected UNGA 181, the Partition Plan.

He left out there the murder on May 1, 1921 of one of Israel's cultural literary icons, Yosef Chaim Brener.

----------------

UPDATE


A comment left at a Toronto paper:

Why don't they condemn Islam, for building the Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the ruins of an ancient Jewish Temple?

2 comments:

Real estate Toronto said...

Thanks for the article. As for the festival strike, it quite surprised me. I didn't really expect it. And we genuinely don't know much about Israeli history, thus boycotting is a little ridiculous.

Julie

Anonymous said...

TheMiddle wrote two more posts about this today...

www.jewlicious.com

put "toronto international film festival" in the search box if you can't find the posts.