THE GUARDIAN: Residents of al-Bustan district told to make way for Kings Garden, with knocking down own houses cheaper option
At the bottom of a steep and densely populated valley just below Jerusalem’s old city walls, the earth has been shaken in recent weeks by jackhammers and bulldozers.
These have been the sounds of Jerusalem for decades as the Israeli state has relentlessly sought to stamp a uniformly Jewish identity on to the occupied east of the city, while erasing its Palestinian character.
Typically it is workers for the state and municipality at the wheel of the bulldozers, but in the al-Bustan neighbourhood, in the shadow of the 11th-century al-Aqsa mosque, the clamour is from a more recent development.
It is the sound of Palestinians demolishing their own family homes.
“This is something really hard. This is something bitter,” Jalal al-Tawil said as he watched a tractor he had hired, with a front loader at the front and jackhammer at the back, rip apart the last remnants of the house his father had built, which in turn had been on the site of his grandparents’ home. » | Julian Borger, Quique Kierszenbaum and Sufian Taha in Jerusalem | Saturday, May 16, 2026
One can but weep! How much more, and how much longer, must these poor, downtrodden people suffer?
Ironically, it was watching black and white documentaries on the Holocaust on BBC TV as a little boy in the 1950s that awakened my interest in, and later, love for, the German language! I wanted to understand how a people could commit such atrocities and such heinous crimes against their fellow man, against innocent, helpless and unsuspecting people?
Naturally, and unsurprisingly, my sympathies from that time forward were always with the downtrodden Jews. It goes without saying that I have loathed anti-Semitism ever since.
It took years for me to master German. It’s a very beautiful language, but with very complicated grammar, especially until the rules of the language all fall into place. But when I did master it, I found a people just like my own, the British. They had all the strong points and weaknesses that every other people have. I found a people capable of loving and hating, no different from my own compatriots. A people with all the same needs and aspirations as my own people.
I grew to love the German language, and by extension, the German people. In fact, I love all things German. The bottom line is this: Germans in the Third Reich were programmed to commit evil acts, led by a man who was without normal human feelings, without morals, and with an evil and wicked nature. This could happen to a people from any culture.
I never thought that all these years later, I would again have to watch documentaries and news footage about suffering of yet another people—this time the Palestinians—this time in colour, but this time committed by the very people I had watched on television being persecuted by the Nazis! One would have thought that having suffered persecution they would have known better.
There are common threads, though. Germany was led in the 1930s and 1940s by a megalomaniacal madman, who understood no limits and who understood no barriers to the fulfilment of his warped and twisted dreams. Now, Israel is led by such a ruthless person. The average Jew will surely be horrified by what is going on in Netanyahu’s Israel. Netanyahu has turned the dream of a homeland for the once suffering Jews into a nightmare for the longsuffering Palestinians. Surely, in the name of compassion and civility and decency, this persecution must STOP.
It defies comprehension that a once persecuted people could themselves persecute another people in this manner, bereft as it is of all mercy and compassion. One would have imagined that if any people would have mercy and compassion for the downtrodden, Jewry would.
It is high time that the civilized world put a STOP to the suffering of Palestinians, the majority of whom are fine people just wanting to live a normal, peaceful existence. Just like you and me. — © Mark Alexander
