Week two Response

Dumper, Mick, suggests a strong argument supporting International involvement in Jerusalem. What he believed to be a good approach of using a timeline to represent the history and conflict/fighting and recapturing of the old and new city, was a useless attempt to ask for UN or International accommodation in support of Palestinians. Though he makes little notion or mention at the beginning of Palestine and its slow removal of residents from Jerusalem, it makes it hard and barely credible for someone to make an argument when close to no correlations exist between Ottoman, British and especially, Roman culture. 5 pages were wasted in this aspect for his argument in the article. a different approach must be taken if his goal is to be accomplished. As for Rashid, immediately, he sets a tone for being biased against the Israeli dominant control over Jerusalem. This is not a bad thing necessarily. He makes a point that religion is misconstrued and commonly historically inaccurate, such as the beginning of time in the holy bible 6,000 years ago. I agree a lot with Rashidi in the sense that religious example in the form of monumental structures sets a foundation for occupying regions of Jerusalem in order to gain control as a side excuse to their Israeli beliefs. The point he is trying to make is that modern occupation of Jerusalem is contradicted by the Israeli Government because history of non-religious uses of monuments were set in stone long before Jewish authority. The problem I have with Rubin's article,is that he expresses a sense of peace at the end that denies going any further into the future past the mid-twentieth century. He makes extremely accurate claims to history and revival of each religious group, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but does not fully enter the realm of the modern problems faced with Israel today. Whether or not he wants to argue a point or not in the future of Israel is unknown to the reader, but it would have been wise for him to do so. What is confusing is the lack of connecting history of Jerusalem to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict it consumes today.