California Armenians will not be voting for Joe Biden next November because he declared that he was more Zionist than the Zionists themselves, which means that he approves of the land theft and ethnic cleansing by Israelis of the Armenian community as well as other non-Jewish communities in Palestine.
The "civilized" world is silent over what the Israeli Zionists have been doing to the Palestinians. The argument goes that since some Palestinians espouse Islamic fundamentalism as their resistance platform (e.g. Hamas), this is therefore a sufficient pretext for Israeli Zionists to hate, murder and ethnically cleanse all the Palestinian people, with weapons supplied by their dogs-on-a-leash Americans.
But what about the Armenians of Jerusalem who have been there since the 4th century, long before the fake German and Eastern European Jews invaded Palestine in the middle of the 20th century? These are the same Armenians who lost 1.5 million of their people to the terror, deportation and killing by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. Ans now, as they are murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians in what remains of Palestine, the Israeli Zionists - the poor victims of the German holocaust - are set on stealing land and property belonging to the Armenian community and driving its people out of Palestine, just as the Germans did to their own Jewish community.
In the Old City in Zionist-occupied East Jerusalem, Israelis are trying to bulldoze a parking lot near 80-year-old Garo Nalbandian's house in the Armenian Quarter. “We won’t leave,” a determined Nalbandian said gruffly in between snapping photos of Armenians on one side of the makeshift barricade and Israeli police and hired security on the other.
On October 26, the leader of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem
announced it was canceling a once-secret 2021 land lease deal with a real
estate company with links to Israeli Zionists. This sort of corrupt under-the-table land theft is how European Jews embezzled Palestinian land owners of their property in Palestine in the early 20th century.
The real estate company, Xana Gardens, retaliated by sending armed Israeli settlers and bulldozers to seize the land which includes Armenian Church property and the homes of Nalbandian and four other families. The 1,600-year-old Armenian community is concentrated in the confines of the Armenian Quarter, occupying 14 percent of the Old City of Jerusalem at its southwestern corner.
“You know all your neighbours. If I don’t have milk at 1am, I just knock on their door. If I don’t have bread, I call my friend,” said Setrag Balian, 26, one of the leaders of the current movement to reverse the land deal. “We take care of each other’s kids, of our families.”
This Armenian community – the oldest Armenian diaspora in the world – has seen its population decline from some 27,000 people a century ago to about 1,000 today thanks to constant harassment and threats by Israeli Zionists determined to take their land and expel them, as part of the Zionist plan to judaize all of Palestine by expelling anyone or any community that is not Jewish.
Yet, with each attempted demolition, the community flocks in numbers at a moment’s notice, standing in the way of bulldozers while withstanding threats of arrest and armed intimidation. Nalbandian’s family risks losing the home they’ve lived in since 1969. Garo’s wife, Hrout, whose family has been in Jerusalem as far back as the 8th or 9th century, describes her sweet memories of the decades of getting engaged, married and raising kids in their modest one-storey home.
“Wherever we walk, it’s like we are in Armenia,” she said. “We have like a big family for the Armenians. After so many years … to become homeless, this is very hard.” Garo’s studio in Wadi al-Joz is adorned with breathtaking photos he has taken of streets and cities around the world, from Athens to Alexandria. “But our beautiful Armenian Quarter is like nowhere else,” Garo remarked. “We must protect it.”
The Armenian community’s suspicions of Israeli Zionist aspirations in the courtyard of Cows’ Garden started in 2019 when an Israeli company began construction on that same parking lot. At the time, the patriarchate told the community the aim was to renovate the lot, nothing more, but the parking lot’s April 2021 inauguration was curiously attended by Moshe Lion, the mayor of Jerusalem, and bedecked with enough Israeli flags to raise eyebrows.
The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem – the community’s spiritual leadership, biggest employer and de facto landlord – struck a deal in July that year with Xana Gardens, a company incorporated that same month and led by the Australian Israeli investor Danny Rothman.
For two years, church leaders kept the community in the dark about the terms or even existence of the deal, despite persistent rumours. On April 1 this year, witnesses say, Rothman – also known in documents as Danny Rubenstein and Danny Kaufman – came to the Cows’ Garden parking lot with security, breaking security cameras and dismissing patriarchate guards, claiming he was taking over.
As years of rumours and suspicions about the deal spilled into the open, Setrag Balian and Hagop Djernazian, 23, led the younger generation of Armenians in fighting the land takeover. Balian, who works for his family’s ceramics business, joined Djernazian, a student at Hebrew University, for months of protests near Armenian Patriarch Nourhan Manougian’s offices.
“I see myself creating my future here,” said Djernazian, who also leads the Armenian Scouts. “I study here, I work here, I live here. And this is my plan to continue living here. The deal threatens our continued existence here.”
A report in July this year by an international team of Armenian lawyers finally exposed the deal publicly. In it, the patriarchate agreed to give Xana Gardens a 49-year lease – with an option to renew another 49 – of the Cows’ Garden to build a luxury hotel.
Only Xana Gardens could cancel the agreement, which was for at least 11,500 square metres (123,785 square feet), but Xana could include “adjacent properties in the project”.
A plan submitted by Danny Rothman to the Jerusalem Municipality in May sought 14,500sq metres – not 11,500 – for the hotel, with a “target area” of 16,000sq metres (172,222sq feet), according to the report on the deal. Such an area would encompass 13 percent of the entire Armenian Quarter.
For this large swath of prized land on contested Mount Zion, Xana Gardens would pay only $300,000 in yearly rent. Miran Krikorian, 40, a restaurant owner born and raised in the Armenian Quarter, says he pays nearly a quarter of that amount for only 30 square metres (323 square feet) he rents nearby for his small restaurant in the Christian Quarter.
“Either somebody got money under the table to pass this deal, or it’s just our people are so dumb that they don’t know the prices in this country,” said Krikorian.
For months, newly installed security guards from Xana Gardens threatened to ban community members from using the parking lot if they attended the protests, adding to threats church officials made towards individuals who protested. But the community refused to relent.
Pressure on the church to cancel the deal increased when Jordan and
the Palestinian Authority (PA) withdrew their recognition of Patriarch
Manougian in May, as they saw the deal threatening the status quo in the
Old City, and amid concerns that stakeholders had not been consulted.
The PA, Jordan and Israel are the three political authorities that endow
recognition to the patriarchs in Jerusalem.
“A lot of the younger [Armenian] generation had to learn through this ordeal why it’s important to stay in Jerusalem and why presence matters,” said Kegham Balian, Setrag’s brother and a Jerusalemite Armenian who has written and reported on the issue for Armenian news outlets.
Manougian’s decision to cancel the deal on October 26 put to rest the Armenian community’s internal divide on the issue. Later that same day, however, Israeli heavy machinery arrived at the disputed site to try to begin demolition. Armenians rushed to the Cows’ Garden, standing in front of machinery that was tearing up a pavement and a wall separating the patriarchate parking lot from the community parking lot.
Ten days later, on November 5, representatives from Xana Gardens, including Rothman, returned. This time, they brought about 15 armed Zionist settlers with them with leashed dogs.
“This is our land,” the Jews reportedly told local Armenians. “Leave now.”
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