(Azure)
Sometime around 10:15 on the morning of June 7, 1967…
The first reservist paratroopers of Brigade 55 broke through the Lion’s Gate leading into the Old City of Jerusalem and reached the narrow enclave of the Western Wall. Having just fought a fierce two-day battle in the streets of east Jerusalem, they grieved for lost friends, and grieved as well for their own lost innocence in what for many was their first experience of combat. They leaned against the Wall, some in exhaustion, some in prayer. Several wept, instinctively connecting to the Wall’s tradition of mourning the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty—precisely at the moment when Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem had been restored.Several hours later, Yitzhak Yifat, a twenty-four-year-old reservist about to begin medical school, reached the Wall. As part of the brigade’s 66th Battalion, he and his friends had fought in the Six Day War’s toughest battle: Intimate combat against elite Jordanian Legionnaires in the trenches of Ammunition Hill, on the road to Mount Scopus.
“The Photograph: A Search For June 1967”
Yossi Klein Halevi
Azure
Summer 2007
On Wednesday, The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to hand over half of Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall, The Temple Mount, Old Jerusalem, and the tomb of Jesus Christ to the Palestinians.
The vote was 124-14.
The United Nations voted to turn over the holiest sites of Christendom to the Palestinians.
The UN voted to turn over the Jewish Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Chuch of the Holy Sepulchre, several synagogues, numerous Christian holy sites, the Wailing Wall, Solomon’s Throne, the Via Dolorosa, and much more to the Palestinian Muslims.
The UN ordered the Jews out of the Old City.
B’nai B’rith organization reported:
Jerusalem’s Old City, in addition to Judea and Samaria, must be Judenrein within a year, according to a Palestinian-drafted resolution, which the U.N. General Assembly passed on Wednesday.
The resolution, which passed by a 124-14 margin with 43 abstentions, is meant to give force to a July advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, which declared Israeli presence to be illegal in any area over the 1949 armistice line.
More than 40 countries sponsored the resolution, which was the first that Palestinians filed after being granted unprecedented privileges, for a non-U.N. member, earlier this year.
The resolution calls on the Israel Defense Forces to withdraw completely from Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip within 12 months, which means evacuating all Jewish communities beyond the armistice line, including Jerusalem’s Old City.
It also bans arms sales to the IDF of any equipment that would be expected reasonably to be used in the territory over the 1949 lines and calls for a boycott of all products produced by Jews in those areas.
The resolution text lacks any mention of Israeli security concerns, historic ties to the lands or Hamas’s terror attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.
