By Ted Belman
Israel is not serious about abrogating Oslo. In reality she clings to it. The PA has been in fundamental breach many times since the inaugaration of the Oslo Accords. It has always incited Palestinians to hate and to commit acts of violence, both of which should have been deal breakers. It failed to have the Charter of Fatah amended as agreed. And now it threatens to go to the UNGA fo recognition as a state with ’67 borders.
If Israel was really serious about demanding compliance with the terms of Oslo, she would not be saying she might abrogate Oslo if the PA gets the UN vote it seeks. She would put the PA on notice that simply requesting recognition of statehood at the UN will result in Israel abrogating Oslo. This she won’t do.
If she was really serious, she would have put the PA on written notice that if the PA failed to enter negotiations within 30 days, Israel would abrogate Oslo. You can only reach agreement by negotiating. Failure to negotiate fustrates the Accords and opens the door to abrogation.
Israel is also not serious about building in J&S. If she was she would not have agreed to the 10 month freeze. There was no quid pro quo. It was gratuitous. Netanyahu said it didn’t apply to Jerusalem but in practice it did. Then when the 10 month period was over, Israel refused to extend it but in practise imposed a defacto freeze including in Jerusalem.
Occasionally a few hundred units are released in order to somewhat pacify those clamouring for unlimited building. These units are nothing compared to the 35,000 units we are told are ready to go, in the next 12 months or the 100,000 units ready to go in the next three years.
Even the housing crises isn’t enough for Netanyahu to open the floodgates.
The Law Forum wrote to Netanyahu and put the blame for the housing construction on the defacto freeze.
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In his letter to the Prime Minister, Legal Forum chairman Nachi Eyal wrote, “Like many others, we listened attentively to the plan you presented today with the Finance and Housing ministers to solve the housing shortage in Israel.
“Unfortunately,” wrote Eyal, “the complex solutions and measures presented did not make one reference to an existing problem: the lack of construction in Judea and Samaria.”
Eyal added, “A plan which ignores the housing shortage in Judea and Samaria and the cessation of construction there solely for political considerations of the defense minister is a plan that is lacking. If the government really wanted to lower the housing prices it would allow construction and promote construction in Judea and Samaria.”
The letter adds that the U.S.-imposed construction freeze which began in September 2010 led to a deepening of the housing crisis. It notes that a large part of the housing shortage in Central Israel is due to the Israeli government’s “no-build” policy in Judea and Samaria.
It makes me sick.
If Israel eliminated burdensome taxes and much of its meddlesome bureaucracy, it would set off an Aliyah boom! What Israel needs is not more of the same but rather the opposite.
The condition is perfectly understandable regarding “housing” and construction in general.
Jews must cease to look for “the government” to lead. Israeli unJews are there serving foreign interests, not of ours. We all know them.
Writing silly “protest notes” to the MK’s in the usual and worthless “from within” dance style will never produce true results.
WE must do as the US East Coast folk did way back then… “GO EAST… young men”. (Slight change of direction).
Truly settle our land in the 10’s or hundreds of thousands.
Oh, good grief! CIA? There is a general housing problem here for students and young couples. Look toward the NIF – not the Langley Spooks – for trying to light this fire.
And people are realizing that the housing problem is a symptom, not the source of the problem, which is Israel’s ridiculously high taxes on everything and the ever-hungry government bureaucracy which it feeds.
The whole “housing” issue, complete with demonstrating hordes and tent cities, has nothing to do with housing. DEBKA has done a good exposé on this. The “movement” has CIA fingerprints all over it.
The Bedouin are allowed to squat on State Lands all over the Negev, The Arabs are building illegally wherever they Choose to build. Jews can’t build anywhere here legally or illegally because the government of Israel will bulldoze them within a year or so. Here in Dimona there is no shortage of land or demand for new housing yet since BB came to office not one housing start. Why? In Y&S one give put a political reason for the building halt but in Dimona?
So few new housing starts increases demand and thus increases prices. Our housing bubble has been created intentionally by BB. Why?
To aid speculators in land and property and to create artificial pressure to break the entrenched vested interests of ILA, the Agricultural Lobby and the Ecology lobbies to agree to release otherwise land not zoned or approved for private and commercial construction.
Massive building in Y&S would lesson the pressure from below and kill BB’s plan which he tried to impose since 1996 to no-avail, first as PM, then as finance minister and again as PM.
I always had the feeling that the building freeze in Y&S was Olmerts and BB’s grand plan to break the land monoplies here giving their moneyed friends and backers most of he freed land to speculate on.
The suckers in Y&S and the Israeli people have been used in a great land grab plan by BB and friends for the benefit of BB and friends.
As Shy Guy would say, Israel’s Stupid Jews never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I’m not holding my breath waiting for the Israeli government to abrogate Oslo in the foreseeable future!
The continuing housing freeze not only in Shomron and Yehuda but also in Jerusalem, should indeed make you sick. That is a healthy response, assuming you are not driven by masochistic tendencies.
You chose to move yourself from Canada, where you as a Jew could build a house more or less anywhere in the second largest country in the world, to Israel, the supposed Jewish state and which is one of the world’s smallest states, where you as a Jew can reside only in those parts of the ancient Jewish homeland where your diminuative surrenderist defense minister determines that you should be permitted to live.
Aside from the fact that our fellowship-based tuition grant had run out in summer 1974, Stefi and I determined we would not take up permanent residence in Israel for precisely the reasons cited in your post today about Netanyahu and Barak. The same self-destructive Jewish trends were evident in 1973-1974, under a completely different cast of characters, with the execrable Heinrich Kissinger pressuring the leadership continuously not only to lose the then-recent war restarted by Egypt, but also to pull Israel’s defense lines back eastward from the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the Mitla Pass.
This is why I encourage hard-edged Zionism from halfway around the world, in the woodlands and farm country of southwestern Wisconsin. It sre as hell isn’t Zion. But nobody in 35 years has tried to tell me or my wife we can’t live around here because we are Jewish. And one thing I’ve never set myself up for has been personal martyrdom in the service of a bunch of losers.
Get your national act together over there in Jerusalem. Then maybe — just maybe — you will get more than the usual annual handfull of Jewish Americans to come there and settle in. And maybe — just maybe — they will be the kinds of Jews who will want Israel and the Jewish nation to be victorious, and not just part of the social backdrop of what many of your Americaiim treat as little more than a Middle Eastern version of Hawaii.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI