PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 208

1.  A few days after the Israeli army had tak-
en control of East Jerusalem after the Six-Day
War. On June 29, 1967, the Knesset (the Israeli
parliament) made Jerusalem the eternal and
indivisible capital of Israel, and declared it uni-
fied: the city thus fell under the exclusive sover-
eignty of Israel. The UN Security Council and
the great majority of the world’s governments
consider that the unilateral decision violates in-
ternational law because the final status of Jeru-
salem must be the result of negotiation between
Israel and the Palestinian authority.
2.  The Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem, Harat
Al Maghariba, was located within the walls of
the old city of Jerusalem and it had the status of
a religious endowment, or waqf (see the chapter
about Umaima Mohtadi al Alami). It should
be pointed out that the act of founding a waqf
expressly forbids the disposal of any of its as-
sets. The residents of this quarter were mainly
descendants of Maghreb Muslim pilgrims. To
understand the history of waqfs in Jerusalem,
see Musa Sroor, Fondations Pieuses en mouve-
ment: De la transformation du statut de propriété
des biens  waqfs à Jérusalem (1858–1917), Da-
mascus, Ifpo, 2010.
3. Irène Salenson and Vincent Lemire, “La
destruction du quartier des Maghrébins: en-
tre histoire, urbanisme et archéologie (1967–
2007)”, Les Cahiers de l’Orient, n°130, 2018/2,
pp. 129–146.
4. Tatiana Pignon, “Jérusalem au Moy-
en-Âge  : de Saladin aux Mamelouks (1187–
1516)”, Les clés du Moyen Orient, May 24,
2012. The first people to settle in the quarter
were volunteer soldiers who had come to help
Saladin during the reconquest of Jerusalem in
1187; pilgrims then followed who, over the next
eight centuries, fell in love with Jerusalem and
stayed there with the permission of the waqf.
5.  The wall is called Al Buraq by the Muslims
in reference to the place where the prophet Mo-
hammad mounted his celestial horse, Buraq,
represented as a winged mare. For the Jews it is
the Kotel or Western Wall, the first few courses
of which are part of what remains of the Sec-
ond Temple (rebuilt after the return from exile
in Babylon, and later restored and enlarged by
Herod).
6.  See the interview of Vincent Lemire by Piotr
Smolar in Le Monde: “Guerre des Six-Jours  :
l’histoire d’un quartier qui a été rayé de la carte
206
Memories of 1948
de Jérusalem”, published on June 30, 2017. See
also Vincent Lemire, Jérusalem. Histoire d’une
ville-monde, Paris, Flammarion, 2016. The Is-
raelis entered the old town on Wednesday, June
7, in the morning. On the Saturday evening,
after shabbat, the 700 residents of the Moroc-
can quarter were ordered to evacuate the area
in a few hours. The Israelis had a deadline, the
Shavuot feast, on Wednesday 14, which was
the time for praying at the Wailing Wall that
had just been captured. Historians have not
found any written documents of the orders is-
sued. This brings to mind the Nakba of 1948
when many Palestinian villages were evacuated
simply on verbal orders.
7. The Tijaniya brotherhood (tariqa) was
founded by Ahmad Tijani in 1782, in an Al-
gerian oasis.
8.  Tissili is in the Dades governorate in Mo-
rocco.
9. The fiqh (Islamic law) is a temporal inter-
pretation, in the judicial sense, of the rules of
sharia.
10. After Mecca, some pilgrims would stop
in Jerusalem to sanctify their pilgrimage even
more: it was called “Qades al Hajj” in Jerusalem.
11. According to Louis Massignon, “Doc-
uments sur certains waqfs des lieux saints de
l’Islam, principalement sur le waqf Tamimi à
Hébron et sur le waqf tlemcénien Abu Madyan
(also spelled Abu Median) à Jérusalem”, extract
from the Revue des Études Islamiques, Paris,
Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1952,
a waqf is given in perpetuity for the good of
the community. The most typical type of waqf
assets are those consisting of sacred places, for
the pilgrims as well as for their defenders. The
author explains (p. 85) how, directly after the
reconquest of Jerusalem by Saladin from the
Crusaders in the twelfth century, some Mo-
roccan Muslims settled in this quarter. See
also Henry Laurens, La question de la Pales-
tine, vol. II, 1922‒1947. Une mission sacrée de
civilisation, Paris, Fayard, 2002, pp. 156–159,
on the subject of the Wailing Wall which, since
1918, had been a major issue in the relations
between Jews and Arabs. The author explains
that the wall belongs to the Muslim waqf of
Abu Median, endowed by a descendant of the
Moroccan Muslim saint of the fourteenth cen-
tury. The Mehdi (redeemer) of the last days is to
appear in Al Aqsa mosque. Since the end of the
Middle Ages, Jewish believers have gradually
transferred their place of special prayers from
the Mount of Olives to the Wailing Wall. The
waqf authorities permitted them to pray, but
forbade them to bring objects there (since the
permanent installation of objects would gradu-
ally lead to the transformation of the place into
a synagogue). It seems that during the great-
er part of the Ottoman era, Muslim believers
had seen no danger in the coming of Jewish
pilgrims. Things changed with the attempts
by Edmond de Rothschild to acquire the wall
and its surroundings, a move strictly forbidden
by the founding act of the waqf. Concern in-
creased with the Zionist attempt to acquire it
in 1918.
12. On the Ottoman Empire, Jamal Pasha
and his long lists of those condemned to death,
Sykes-Picot, the British promise to the Arabs
and the undertaking of Lord Alfred Balfour
to uphold “the establishment of a homeland
for the Jewish nation in Palestine”, see Sari
Nusseibeh and Anthony David, Once Upon A
Country: A Palestinian Life, New York, Halban,
2011.
13.  In 1921, Khirbet Abu Jaber was part of the
Emirate of Transjordan; today it is within the
conurbation of Amman, the Jordanian capital.
For the history of its innovative development
of agriculture at the time, see Rauf Abujaber,
Pioneers over Jordan, London, IB Tauris, 1989.
14. The Hauran plain was known as the
bread-basket of the region.
15.  Qutaa turuq means literally ‘one who
blocks the road’.
16. A dunum is a unit of measurement dating
from Ottoman times, equal to 919.3 m 2 , but
during the British Mandate in Palestine (1917–
1948), the metric dunum, measuring 1000 m 2 ,
was adopted.
17.  Jericho, on the banks of the Jordan, is 300
metres below sea level, and thus the lowest town
on earth. It was founded around 9000 BCE.
18.  See Hugues Vincent, “La chronologie des
ruines de Jéricho”, Comptes rendus des séances
de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,
1930, pp. 50–55. Ancient Jericho, to the north
of the modern town, stood on the site known
today as Tell Al Sultan. The main spring of the
area, Elisha’s spring, is there and, according to
the Bible, Elisha purified its unhealthy water by
throwing salt into it.