Remember Zachary Foster, the Israel-hating “historian” who I dubbed the Pelé of kicking own goals?
To paraphrase Britney Spears, oops he did it again.
Ya’akov Yehoshua, quoted in the first of Foster’s tweets, was born in 1905, so the events he described occurred after the the First Aliyah of Zionism (1881 to 1903) – in other words, well after modern Zionists had been living in the Holy Land.
If anything, the quote Foster provides disproves the exact thing he claims!
According to historian James A.S. Sunderland, it was not Zionism but rather the British, that led to an end to this:
After 1917, the western projection of a divided city was translated into a policy of segregation under the colonial power’s pre-existing assumptions about the existence of such divisions, and the belief that different ethnic and religious groups could not, and should not mix. It was a racial, confessional, and spatial policy divorced from reality. Indeed, so strong were existing identities that it wasn’t until the 1930s that the local population came to think of themselves as belonging to a “Jewish,” “Muslim,” “Christian” or “Armenian” quarter, by which time the British had cemented the idea into their administrative, construction and social policies.
But there’s more own goals.
The extract of his third tweet is taken from Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron by Menachem Klein. Foster did not include the full extract:
Besides providing the time frame – which again shows it was well after Zionists returned to the Holy Land – the extract recollects how Jews legally purchased property where they established the Shimon HaTzadiq neighborhood. This is the area where the Sheikh Jarrah dispute later arose. So thanks for the reminder, Zachary!
By the way, the following is Foster’s reaction to an Israel advocate pointing out that A.B Yehoshua was born in 1936, well after the Zionists had returned:
Besides sounding amateur (“I was speculating”), he misses the point that A.B Yehoshua’s birthdate and mother’s immigration date are not what’s relevant – his father’s birthdate is, since he is the one who recounted growing up in the mixed Jerusalem neighborhood.
Not that I needed this response to show me that Foster is a terrible historian.
