In a recent article for the New York Times, the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman criticized a plan to create a system of cable cars in Israel’s capital to alleviate some of the traffic on the Old City’s crowded streets. While there may be good reasons to oppose the plan on aesthetic grounds, writes Jonathan Tobin, Kimmelman’s real concern appears to be what he sees as an attempt to create a “Jewish narrative of Jerusalem.”
Kimmelman and the Palestinians opposed to the project are offended by the fact that the cable-car system is part of an effort to keep the city united and functional. But they also seem particularly disturbed by the fact that the route of the car to the Western Wall will celebrate the city’s Jewish history. . . . Palestinians and their foreign friends think every action that reinforces Jerusalem’s status as the center of Jewish life for the past 3,000 years is part of a Zionist plot to “Judaize” the city. A primarily Jewish city can’t be Judaized. But what Israel’s opponents want is to erase history, not to preserve it.
They claim that the new system will marginalize Arabs living in neighborhoods over which the cars will travel and allow travelers to ignore their people. But their real beef is with the excavations of Jewish history in the Silwan [neighborhood] and the City of David that they would have preferred to go undiscovered.
The resistance to the cars on grounds that they are solidifying the hold of the Jews—the one people for whom it has always been their capital and the focus of their faith—is not merely wrongheaded, but rooted in anti-Jewish prejudice.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/critics-deny-jerusalems-past-and-its-future/