Oh, wait - it was ARABS who cut off water to JEWS! Funny how that gets missed - thank you once again,
@CptAllenHistory
This day (May 12) in 1948: Arabs Force Water Rationing on Starving Jewish Jerusalem — After Cutting the Supply for Over a Month to force 90,000-10,000 Jews Into Submission or Death.
As the world screams that Israel “creates famine” & “cuts off water” in Gaza (redefining words to demonize the Jewish state), history records who actually used food and water as weapons of war — the Arabs against the Jews of Jerusalem, with zero mercy.
Just two days before Israel declared independence, Jewish defenders in Jerusalem had no choice but to impose harsh water rationing. The main pipeline had been cut for over a month. The April 8 sabotage at Ras el-Ain (see article) was only the beginning — by early May the supply was completely severed. Only ancient cisterns remained, and they were running dry.
The ration on May 12: just two gallons (7.5 liters) per person per day for everything — drinking, cooking, bathing, laundry, sanitation. Only four pints (~2 liters) for actual drinking. People stood in endless lines for their single pail. Fights broke out. The dead sometimes lay in the streets.
This was deliberate. Arab forces had already cut the only highway from Tel Aviv, ambushed every relief convoy, and shelled Jewish neighborhoods without pause. Their goal: strangle the city and starve its 90,000–100,000 Jews into surrender, death, or expulsion. When Jerusalem radio broadcast mallow-leaf recipes (donkey and cattle food), Radio Amman mocked them — proof the Jews were breaking.
The Jews survived through raw heroism:
- Ancient cisterns became lifelines;
- Residents foraged mallow from fields;
- A secret nightly cable car (“Avshalom Route”) smuggled food and evacuated wounded across the Valley of Hinnom; and
- The legendary Burma Road was built under fire to break the siege.
But the horror continued. The Old City Jewish Quarter — home to generations of families — fell on May 28 after weeks of artillery, street fighting, and starvation. The last 1,500–1,600 Jews (including 300 women and children) surrendered emaciated. Men, including elderly rabbis, were sent to Jordanian POW camps. Women and children were expelled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Then came full ethnic cleansing. Roughly 40,000 Jews — every last one in East Jerusalem and Judea & Samaria — were driven out by the Jordanians. For the first time in 1,000 years, not a single Jew remained in the Jewish Quarter.
The Jordanians boasted: “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return impossible.”
For 19 years — the only time in Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history the city was ever divided — the Jordanians destroyed 58 synagogues (some turned into stables), desecrated the 2,500-year-old Mount of Olives cemetery (tombstones used for paving and latrines), built a hotel over graves, and turned the Western Wall into a slum. Barbed wire, mines, and snipers completed the divide.
This was the real starvation siege. The real water cutoff. The real ethnic cleansing at the birth of Israel.
Every accusation is a confession.
The same side that tried to starve Jewish Jerusalem to death in 1948 now projects those crimes onto Israel with new definitions and fresh outrage.
The Jews didn’t break. They held the line, built roads under fire, and reunited the city after the 1967 Six Day War.