TEL AVIV

Tel Aviv built on ruins of Sheikh Munis, courtesy, Zochrot

Tel Aviv is the second largest city in Israel after Jerusalem with a population (not counting the metropolitan area) of approximately 450,000. The city is an anomaly in Israel. It can more properly be called “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, having been built on stolen land. According to the Palestinian narrative, the Jews in Palestine committed many atrocities against the Palestinian people in 1948 in order to expel them and thus, create the Jewish State of Israel. Even though this narrative is as false as you can get, unfortunately as far as Tel Aviv is concerned, it is actually true.

The genesis of Tel Aviv goes back to 1909. In that year, a group of Zionist extremists in Jaffa got together and decided to build a new town in order to escape the high rents in the city. So they move to some empty land to the north, land that was actually owned by the Palestinian village of Sheikh Munis, and the settlement of Tel Aviv was founded. Since then and until Israeli independence in 1948, Tel Aviv grew into a full-fledged city, threatening Sheikh Munis as well as the surrounding Palestinian villages and by 1948, the same Zionist extremists the founded the city, as well as their descendants, embarked on a campaign of rape, plunder, destruction, and expulsion. Sheikh Munis was totally obliterated save for a single building which today, lies on the campus of Tel Aviv University.

The story of Tel Aviv belies one fact about the Israelis and the other indigenous peoples in the Middle East and North Africa. Not a single nation in MENA, and indeed the rest of the world, is innocent and comes out of history with clean hands, including, unfortunately, the Jewish nation. Such a nation just simply doesn’t exist. But the best we can hope for is that nations should learn from their past mistakes and perhaps rectify them as much as is possible. In that vein, it is hoped that Israel will do the right thing. Though Jews are indeed indigenous to the Land of Israel – Judea, Samaria, Galilee, the Negev, and Gaza District (the Jewish villages of which, were illegally obliterated by the Zionists) – Tel Aviv is not a part of Israel and has no business being part of Israel. It should be returned to the Palestinian people and the local Jews should be evacuated and returned to Israel proper.