[The following, by bataween, is crossposted from Point of No Return.]

With thanks: Independent Observer

The 19th century settlement of Yemenite Jews in Silwan was established on a bare hillside outside the walls of Jerusalem (Photo reproduced with help from Robert Avrech of Seraphic Secret)

The Observer is helping to spread the myth that Jews and Arabs lived happily together in the Jerusalem village of Silwan. In its obituary of 4 July 2010 of the PLO terrorist Abu Daoud, it wrote:

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh was born in the Silwan quarter of east Jerusalem, where he claimed to have mixed happily with Yemeni Jews. He taught mathematics and physics to Palestinian schoolchildren and qualified as a lawyer. He remained in Silwan until Jerusalem was occupied by Israel during the June 1967 war. Moving to Amman, he joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation, then followed a training course in Cairo to help form the PLO security apparatus in 1968.

But Abu Daoud would have been born just two years before the last of the Yemenite Jews of Silwan had been advised to evacuate the village by the British, following bloody disturbances during the Arab revolt and Arab attacks in 1921 and 1929. The Elder of Zion blog explodes the myth that Arabs mixed happily with Yemenite Jews, quoting this Wikipedia entry:

"In 1884, the Yemenites moved into new stone houses at the south end of the Arab village, built for them by a Jewish charity called Ezrat Niddahim. This settlement was called Kfar Hashiloach or the Yemenite Village. Construction costs were kept low by using the Shiloach as a water source instead of digging cisterns. An early 20th century travel guide writes: In the "village of Silwan, east of Kidron ... some of the fellah dwellings [are] old sepulchers hewn in the rocks. During late years a great extension of the village southward has sprung up, owing to the settlement here of a colony of poor Jews from Yemen, etc. many of whom have built homes on the steep hillside just above and east of Bir Eyyub,"^[15] The Yemenite Jews living in Silwan were evacuated on advice of the British authorities in 1938, during the Arab revolt.^[16] After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Silwan was annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.^[17] It remained under Jordanian occupation until 1967, when Israel captured the Old City and surrounding region. "

Elder of Zion rightly asks why the 19 years of Jordanian occupation give Arabs a greater right to Silwan than the 100 years when Jews lived on the site.

* On 23 June Ynet News reported that ten Knesset members from right-wing factions had expressed their willingness to join Jewish residents in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan and help them evacuate Arab families living in a building which previously served as a synagogue for Yemenite Jews.

The 11 MKs claimed : "Israel is not carrying out its duty according to a verdict of the head of the repossession department. We wish to inform you that we plan, together with the Temple-treasury loyalists, to implement the legal right to carry out the demolition and evacuate the squatters from the synagogue.

Yemenites have lived in Jerusalem since 1881