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The tragic events of 614 should be returned into historical narrative, for it will help the Jews to heal their paranoid delusion. Without this knowledge one cannot understand the provisions of the treaty between the Jerusalemites and Caliph Omar ibn Khattab, concluded in year 638. In the Sulh al Quds, as this treaty of capitulation is called, Patriarch Sofronius demanded, and the powerful Arab ruler concurred to protect the people of Jerusalem from the ferocity of the Jews.

The genocide of the AD 614 was the most horrible, but not the only, genocide wreaked by Jews in those troubled years.....

Modern Jews do not have to feel guilty for the misdeeds of Jews long gone. No son is responsible for the sins of his father. Israel could have turned this mass grave with its Byzantine chapel and mosaics into a small and poignant memorial reminding its citizens of a horrible page in the history of the land and of the dangers of genocidal supremacy. Instead, the Israeli authorities preferred to demolish the tomb and create an underground parking-lot in its place. That did not cause a murmur.

The guardians of the Jewish conscience, Amos Oz and others, have objected to the destruction of ancient remains. No, not of the tomb at Mamilla. They ran a petition against the keepers of the Haram a-Sharif mosque complex for digging a ten-inch trench to lay a new pipe. It did not matter to them that in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading Israeli archaeologist denied any relevance of the mosque-works to science. They still described it as ‘a barbaric act of Muslims aimed at the obliteration of the Jewish heritage of Jerusalem’. Among the signatories I found, to my amazement and sorrow, the name of Ronny Reich. One thought he might tell them who obliterated the vestiges of the Jewish heritage at Mamilla Pool.

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