Destruction of the Old City.

The Arab destruction of the Old City when they controlled it between 1949 and 1967(when Israel took control of it) was indistinguishable from the troops of Charles V in 1527 run amok, or that of the German army in 1945 in Italy, or that of the British in 1945 in Germany: so many historical examples of victors raging against the vanquished. After having encircled the city, the Arab troops besieged the Jewish quarter, setting fire to the synagogues and deporting the women, children and the elderly. The men were arrested and sent to camps in Jordan, where they were kept as prisoners of war. In the torrent of refugees of the summer of 1948, there were also the 1,500 Jews from the Old City, who were forced to leave their homes, their traditions, their memories, and flee to the other side of the city, leaving behind everything: only a few managed to save their lives by fleeing through the sewers. They left behind for ever their nursery schools, schools, dispensaries, hospitals, orphanages, clinics, workshops, factories, and the thirty-four synagogues: destroyed, desecrated, blown up. On the site of the great synagogue of the Old City, built by the Italians and inaugurated in 1967, there was a henhouse; the Arab commander of the sector, Abdallah el Tal, had transformed the synagogue into a rubbish dump. A few hundred metres away, the beautiful synagogues of the Hurva and of the Tiferet Israel were transformed into stables. It was a strange sort of occupation, which destroyed the cultural and religious identity of a whole people: to think that, if they had won, the Jews would have been forced to live without ever having once set foot in the synagogue where their fathers and forebears had prayed. The city had ceased to exist; the Jordanians had even forbidden the Jews to even approach the churches, the mosques and the cemeteries. In the Jewish cemeteries the gravestones were used as latrines or as paving for the roads, or they were used to build the walls and floors of the barracks and the buildings of the Arab Legion. Just as the church of San Giovanni d’Acri, in Acri, had been transformed in 1291 into the headquarters of the Muslim troops. The destruction of the Old City was indistinguishable from that of the Temple of Solomon, which had been burned and reduced to ashes and rubble in 587 BC. The destruction of the Old City meant the erasure of the city from history, for the occupants it was as if nothing had ever existed. In fact, the Jordanians didn’t even want to hear anyone mentioning Jerusalem. Just as the city had disappeared in 70 AD, in 614, in 636, and in 1099. In the same way, in June 1948, the Jewish quarter had been erased.