"Jews destroyed the Arab character of the Jewish Quarter" (NYT, 1971)

From the New York Times, May 29, 1971:

It sounds ridiculous to claim that the Jewish Quarter had an "Arab character" after only 19 years, but isn't it equally ludicrous to characterize all of Jerusalem outside the Green Line as "Arab East Jerusalem"? Yet that is what is routinely written today.

Jews were a majority in Jerusalem since the 1860s. Since 1900, Jerusalem's Old City and its neighborhoods/villages in  the east, north and south have been under 18 years of Ottoman rule, 30 years of British rule, 19 years of Jordanian Arab rule and 47 years under the rule of the Jewish state. For some reason, the 19 years of illegal Jordanian occupation is considered the status quo, the anomalous 19 years that makes the entire area supposedly "Arab."

But it isn't. Jerusalem has never been an important city to Arabs or Muslims except during times that it was controlled by Jews or Christians. Jews didn't only live in the Jewish Quarter, but they lived throughout the city as well as in supposedly "Arab" neighborhoods like Silwan - a Biblical village later settled by Jews who called it Kfar HaShiloach. 

There were even synagogues and yeshivot in the Muslim quarter 150 years ago. 

As absurd as the headline of this story is, only a few decades later the world now believes the lie.

(h/t/ Ahron, YMedad)