When she is surrounded by a swirl of conversation she cannot understand, my two-year-old granddaughter turns to me expectantly: "What they talking about, Bubbe?" Right now, I would have to confess to her that the hubbub over 1,600 new housing units in Jerusalem defies rational explanation. Of the children of Abraham, the descendants of Ishmael currently occupy at least 800 times more land than descendants of Isaac. The 21 states of the Arab League routinely announce plans of building expansion. Saudi Arabia estimates that 555,000 housing units were built over the past several years. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced during a meeting in Baghdad last year that "Some 10,000 units will be built in each province [of Iraq] with 100 square meters per unit" to accommodate citizens whose housing needs have not been met for a long time. Egypt has established 10 new cities since 1996. They are Tenth of Ramadan, Sixth of October, Al Sadat, Al Shurouq, Al Obour, New Damietta, New Beni Sueif, New Assiut, New Luxor, and New Cairo.
In 2006 the Syrian Prime Minister, Mohammad Naji Atri, announced a new five-year development plan that aims to supply 687,000 housing units. Kuwait expects to have a demand for approximately 100,000 private housing units by 2010. Last year Jordan's King Abdullah launched a National Housing Initiative, which aims to build 120,000 properties for low-income Jordanians.
Arab populations grow. And neighborhoods expand to house them. What's more, Arab countries benefited disproportionately from the exchange of populations between Jews and Arabs that resulted from the Arab wars against Israel. Since 1948 upward of 800,000 Jews abandoned their homes and forfeited their goods in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Yemen. In addition to assets valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, the property deeds of Jews from Arab lands is estimated at a total area of 100,000 square miles, which is five times the size of the state of Israel, and more than Israel would include even if it were to stretch over all the disputed territories of the West Bank.
These preposterous disparities are a result of contrasting political cultures. The Arab League was founded at the same time as Israel with the express aim of undoing the Jewish state's existence. Although much has changed over the ensuing decades, opposition to the Jewish state remains the strongest unifying tool of inter-Arab and Arab-Muslim politics. Trying to eliminate the Jews rather than compete with them has never benefited nations.
It is unfortunate that Arabs obsess about building in Israel rather than aiming for the development of their own superabundant lands. But why should America encourage their hegemonic ambitions? In December the White House issued a statement opposing "new construction in East Jerusalem" without delineating where or what East Jerusalem is.
Ramat Shlomo, the neighborhood at the center of the present altercation, is actually in northern Jerusalem, west of the Jewish neighborhoods of Ramot, home to 40,000 Jewish residents. Why does the White House take issue with the construction of housing for Jewish citizens within the boundaries of their own country? The same White House raised no objection when Jordan recently began systematically stripping citizenship from thousands of its Palestinian citizens rather than providing new housing units for them in a land much larger than Israel.
Perhaps Israel has been at fault for not doggedly insisting on unconditional acceptance of its sovereign existence, and for not demanding that Arab rulers adhere to the U.N. Charter's guarantee of "equal rights of . . . nations large and small." Preposterous as they would have thought it, perhaps Israelis ought to have called for a freeze on Arab settlements to correspond to unreasonable Arab demands on them.
Any peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict will begin with a hard look at the map of the region in which 21 countries with 800 times more land are consumed with their Jewish neighbors' natural increase.
Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "Jews and Power" (Schocken, 2007).
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March 16, 2010
Tormenting Israel
By David Suissa
http://www.jewishjournal.com/ david_suissa/article/tormenting_israel_20100316/
I’ve never understood why the world goes absolutely bonkers when Jews try to build homes in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Take the latest brouhaha about the announcement by Israel’s Interior Ministry that it had approved a planning stage — the fourth out of seven required — for the eventual construction of 1,600 units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.
Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority, is not known for being too accommodating during negotiations. And yet, when negotiating a two-state solution two years ago with Ehud Olmert, Abbas agreed that several neighborhoods in Jerusalem would stay in Israeli hands in any final settlement. And guess which neighborhood was on that list?
That’s right — Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood made up mostly of religious Jews with big families and a shortage of housing. Abbas was surely aware that, as analyst Evelyn Gordon wrote March 14 in a Commentary blog post, “Its location in no way precludes the division of Jerusalem, which is what both Washington and Europe claim to want: Situated in the corner formed by two other huge neighborhoods to its west and south, it [Ramat Shlomo] does not block a single Arab neighborhood from contiguity with a future Palestinian state.”
Nevertheless, Israel was crucified when its Interior Ministry made the Ramat Shlomo announcement last week during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel — presumably because the timing was highly embarrassing. But really, what timing would have been more appropriate? An announcement two weeks later, when Israel would have been accused of being sneaky and deceitful during Biden’s visit?
After all, Israel had nothing to hide: It was in strict compliance with the 10-month settlement freeze, which specifically excluded East Jerusalem and which the Obama administration fully supported and even characterized as “unprecedented.”
In any case, Vice President Biden made a rare public condemnation of Israel’s announcement, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with an explanation and a rare public apology that Biden accepted. Normally, that is more than enough contrition to resolve misunderstandings.
But not in this case. The following day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Netanyahu on the phone for close to 45 minutes and followed that with public condemnation and demands for more Israeli concessions.
Ambassador Michael Oren has reportedly called this the biggest crisis between the United States and Israel since 1975. And why all this madness? Because Israel had this crazy idea to allow a zoning permit for housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of its capital city.
One wonders: What would have happened if Israel had done something really bad while Biden was in Israel? Like, say, announce a zoning permit for construction of a national memorial to a terrorist?
Well, it turns out that while the Obama administration was heaping abuse on Israel, the Palestinians were in fact dedicating a memorial to the mastermind of the worse terrorist attack in Israeli history. Now tell me, which act does more to undermine trust and the atmosphere for peace: a zoning permit for apartments or a memorial to terrorism?
The funny thing is, no administration official ever mentioned the terrorist memorial. As Barry Rubin, professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, reminds us: “Even though the Palestinian Authority has refused to negotiate for 14 months; made President Obama look very foolish after destroying his publicly announced September plan to have negotiations in two months; broke its promise not to sponsor the Goldstone report in the U.N.; and rejected direct negotiations after months of pleading by the Obama White House, not a single word of criticism has ever been offered by any administration official regarding the P.A.’s continuous and very public sabotage of peace- process efforts.”
Obama’s single-minded condemnations of Israel have done more than push Israel away; they’ve also emboldened the Palestinians to dig in their heels and pushed them even further away from peace talks of any kind.
My friend Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and political analyst who lives in Jerusalem, has a “strong sense that Obama was looking for a pretext. He’s turned an incident into a crisis.”
He adds: “If Obama thinks he’s going to win friends in the Israeli public by treating Israel more harshly than any other country aside from Iran, he’s going to have an even tougher learning curve than he’s had in this last year of failed Middle East diplomacy.”
According to Noah Pollak of Commentary, Obama’s priority is to stop Israel from attacking Iran: “Obama’s only option for restraining an Israeli attack is the one that we’re seeing unfold before our eyes: a U.S. effort to methodically weaken the relationship; provoke crises; consume the Netanyahu government with managing this deterioration; and most important, create an ambience of unpredictability by making the Israelis fear that an attack on Iran would not just be met with American disapproval but also a veto and perhaps active resistance.”
If Pollak is correct, then, the Ramat Shlomo crisis has clarified the stakes: The issue of Iran trumps everything.
Israelis understand that, compared to the threat of a nuclear Iran, an issue like building permits in Ramat Shlomo is a farce. By tormenting the Jews over such an issue, Obama is not just emboldening Israel’s enemies, he’s setting back the very peace process he so cherishes.
David Suissa is the founder of OLAM magazine and OLAM.org. You can read his daily blog at suissablog.com
and e-mail him at suissa@olam.org .
© Copyright 2010 The Jewish Journal and JewishJournal.com
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From: dsalem
Date: Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 8:32 PM
Enlightening?
Is Biden believes that Jerusalem has already been divided, he would call it East Jerusalem. HE DID!!
Don
The Middle East Peace Scam
by Daniel Greenfield
"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem"
Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden, March 09, 2010
For nearly twenty years the great sham of the Middle East Peace Process has dragged on. And this despicable scam has consisted of only one policy, only one platform and only one plan. Pressuring Israel for more concessions.
Year in and year out, new peace conferences were declared and new plans for peace were hammered out. All of them had one thing in common, they carved up Israel for a non-existent peace. When Arafat and his gang of terrorists made a concession, it was to demand 5 percent less of Israel in the current phase of negotiations. When Israel made a concession, it was to turn over another 10 percent of land to its worst enemies in this phase of negotiations... in exchange for them putting off their demands for that 5 percent into the next phase of the negotiations. And this sick charade in which Israel gave and the terrorists took was the peace process.
While this great surrender process was going on, outside the bombs went on exploding, tearing apart buses, restaurants, malls and families-- the politicians and diplomats in charge excused the terrorists and damned Israel if it so much as lifted a finger to defend itself, or erected a single checkpoint to catch at least one of the terrorists on the way to kill a dozen people in Jerusalem.
And now finally the Vice President of the United States arrives in Israel to reaffirm his absolute commitment to Israel's security, a commitment he and just about every other politician who let that phrase trip lightly off their lips, honors by pressing Israel to surrender again the terrorists. He arrives and condemns the greatest impediment to peace. Jewish families living in the capital of their own nation.
Biden did not take the time to condemn Abbas for his failure to hold elections, for his attendance at a funeral for the terrorists in his own militia who murdered an Israeli Rabbi, for his violation of the Gaza Jericho agreement or for his recent threats of a Holy War against Israel. Not even the Palestinian Authority naming a municipal square two days ago after Dalal Mughrabi, one of the Coastal Road Massacre bus hijackers, resulted in any statements of condemnation. Let us for a moment balance the horrifying scene of Jews moving into new apartments in Jerusalem, vs the Coastal Road Massacre in which Fatah terrorists murdered Gail Rubin, an American nature photographer, hijacked a bus, and murdered 38 passengers, 13 of them only children.
But the murder of Israelis never "undermines the trust we need right now". Only Jews living in East Jerusalem can do that. Not Israelis, Jews, for if Arab citizens of Israel were moving into new buildings in East Jerusalem, Biden and the media would not be condemning Israel for it. It is precisely Jews that are the problem for the Obama Administration and its Media-Government Complex. Just as they were a problem for Hitler and Stalin. Just as they have always been a problem for would be tyrants.
There are of course no worries about whether Israel will trust Abbas and his Fatah gang. As if anybody in their right mind would, after nearly two decades of terrorism that followed the ballyhooed signing of the Peace Accords and the famous handshake overseen by a smiling Clinton. After violating nearly every agreement he ever signed with Israel, Arafat unleashed a wave of terror, while pocketing a fortune in foreign aid. And after every bombing, the same despicable conglomeration of diplomats and politicians and diplopols that form the "World Community" pointed Israel to the negotiating table. Their only solution, then as now, was more concessions. By Israel to the terrorists-- of course.
And so here we are in the splendid year 2010, 5770 in the Hebrew calendar, and 1431 in the Muslim calendar. In a few months it will be 43 years since the Liberation of Jerusalem. Since Jews returned to the Old City they were ethnically cleansed from by Muslim soldiers. And today the Hurva synagogue, twice destroyed by Muslims, has been completely reconstructed. In 1948 the Jordanian command expelled the Jews from East Jerusalem and destroyed the Hurva synagogue, vowing that the Jews would never return. And today in the year 2010, the Vice President of the United States comes on a mission to carry on their work. That of the dynamiters and the bombers and the expellers.
This is where nearly two decades of negotiations have brought us. In the early nineties, Israel was discussing the status of certain West Bank towns. Today Israel is being warned against allowing Jews to live in Jerusalem. Tomorrow... I would dearly like to say that the possibilities are endless, but there are only so many parts of Israel where Jews still live, and no doubt the eager ethnic cleansers in the Obama Administration and the EU have plans for them too.
And so the Middle East Peace Scam marches on. There is a great deal of preparation for intense rounds of negotiations at which it will be determined what else Israel must give for there to be no peace. East Jerusalem will naturally end up on the table soon enough. Meanwhile the entire farce has less legal basis than a kangaroo court and all the consistency of a drunken liar on the witness stand.
Today there are three Palestinian states. One in Jordan, divided to create an Arab State in the bygone days of the Palestine Mandate. A second state in Gaza, which is ruled over by Hamas as part of the spoils from their war with Fatah. A third state in the West Bank ruled over by Abbas and Fatah, even though his term ended and there have been no new elections. Out of this hodgepodge, Israel is expected to negotiate even though Hamas refuses to negotiate any permanent peace agreement, and Fatah has no legal authority to represent anyone.
You will not of course here about any of this in the media, which is still busy being outraged by the thought of Jews living in Jerusalem. When they're not being outraged by the thought of Israel treating Rachel's Tomb as a heritage site. After all the Prime Minister of Turkey has declared that Rachel's Tomb is not Jewish, but Islamic. Just as all of Israel is Islamic. Just as all of the world is Islamic. But the world isn't paying attention. The world is certain that the rage and violence of a billion Muslims can be calmed with some Jewish land and Jewish blood. Just as the rage and violence of Nazism could be calmed with some Czech land and blood.
But why listen to me? Listen instead to the soothing words of Ahmad Bahar, the Speaker of the Palestinian Authority Parliament.
"Make us victorious over the infidel people… Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies¦ Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don't leave even one."
Ah, but you say it's about "the occupation". And there will be peace when the terrorists have all the land they feel they're entitled to. But... no.
"Our enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith, more than an enmity owing to occupation and the land."
Oh yes, there will be peace when they have all the land that they feel Muslims are entitled to. And this is the scope of their territorial demands.
"Soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, like Constantinople was conquered, according to the prophecy of our prophet Muhammad. Their capital will be the first post of the Islamic conquests that will spread all over Europe then it will turn to the two Americas and even to Eastern Europe."
But don't worry. Joseph Robinette Biden is deeply committed to fighting against Jewish families living in Jerusalem. And the Middle East Peace Scam marches on.
Daniel Greenfield
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