While walking around town, I noticed a small sign in Hebrew and English that announced the neighborhood of “Even Yisrael,” which translates to the Rock of Israel. The sign notes that the neighborhood was set up in 1875 and was the sixth community to be built outside of the Old City during the time of the “Yishuv Hayashan”, the Old Settlement. Using my ancient math skills, I concluded that the Even Yisrael neighborhood predates the modern state of Israel by 73 years. It was set up in West Jerusalem under the auspices of the Ottoman-appointed Arab mayor of Jerusalem. The area never fell under Jordanian rule between 1948 and 1967.

So, let’s do a thought experiment. A bunch of Jews, mostly religious, set up a kosher neighborhood in the new part of Jerusalem during Ottoman rule. That same neighborhood remained Jewish and thriving during nearly 30 years of the British Mandate. From there, it became a part of Israel, as did all of western Jerusalem outside of the Old City. The city was reunited in 1967 and, as they say, the rest is history. If CNN were to interview leaders from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran and ask point-blank: if Muslims took over “Palestine”, would you leave the Even Yisrael neighborhood to the Jews? It was never Arab, or certainly not since 1873, when Jews purchased the land where the neighborhood stands today. The dictator Erdogan would ostensibly have a better claim on the neighborhood, as it was a part of the Ottoman Empire before it fell under British rule after World War I. But the leaders of the Islamic terror front would claim even Yisrael as their own, just because, you know, and reasons. Jews have legally lived there under three different governmental bodies. And this gives the game away.

The Muslims, whether it be Islamic Hamas or Marxist PFLP or the irreligious Fatah, all wish to kill Jews and destroy Israel. This has nothing to do with a unicorn-level mythology of “Palestine”, a country........

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