The minute the Palestinians recognize a Jewish connection to Jerusalem, he said, the whole edifice of Palestinian rejectionism would begin to collapse.
US President Donald Trump’s recent moves on Jerusalem constituted “shock therapy” against Palestinian rejectionism, which is the real obstacle to peace, Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said in Washington.
Dermer was speaking at an event in the Senate on Tuesday where former Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold gave a presentation to about 100 legislators, congressional staffers and think tank members titled “Jerusalem: What’s at stake.”
Dermer said that there is no peace today between Israel and the Palestinians because of a Palestinian refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the right of the Jews to a state in Israel within any boundaries.
“That is why the Palestinians try to deny any historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem,” he said. “Because to admit this connection is to admit that the Jewish people aren’t foreign colonialists in the Land of Israel; that Israel for the Jewish people is not India for the British, or Algeria for the French, or the Congo for the Belgians – but that this is the land of our ancestors.”
The minute the Palestinians recognize a Jewish connection to Jerusalem, he said, the whole edifice of Palestinian rejectionism would begin to collapse, because it would mean that the Jewish people are in Israel “not merely by might, but by right.”
“Dealing with this Palestinian rejectionism is critical if you are going to advance peace, and the rejectionism is strongest, and of course most absurd, when it comes to Jerusalem,” he said.
Dermer mocked the phrase that Palestinian officials often use – that Israel is trying to “Judaize Jerusalem,” saying this is akin to saying that the Chinese are “Sino-fying” Beijing, or the Russians are “Russo-fying” Moscow.
Dermer said that while he understands why the Palestinians are trying to deny a Jewish connection to Jerusalem, he does not understand why the world tolerates it and even applauds it, as it did when it adopted UN Security Council Resolution 2334 in December 2016, a resolution that essentially stated that the Western Wall is in occupied Palestinian territory.
“To advance peace, you must confront this Palestinian rejectionism,” he said, “and that is precisely what President Trump did when he recognized Jerusalem as our capital. It is shock therapy for Palestinian rejectionism. And it is actually, in my view, one of the first positive things that has been done to advance peace in decades.”
He said that by recognizing the Jewish people’s historical connection to Jerusalem, Trump “laid an important cornerstone for peace.”
Gold, the head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that Trump’s announcement also “effectively put to rest” the idea of a corpus separatum – or internationalization – of Jerusalem, an idea that he said has persisted up until today.
“When President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he effectively put to rest the internationalization idea,” Gold said. “He was also correcting decades of diplomatic distortions at the United Nations. Finally, he was fulfilling the Jerusalem Embassy Act from 1995, that bipartisan initiative cosponsored by senators Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, calling for moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
That was the accepted position across the American political spectrum and across our political spectrum.
“This,” he said, “was the greatest gift the United States could give to Israel on the 70th anniversary of its birth.”
@ EDDIE DEE:
The British are the cause of all the problems they left behind. They came to run Palestine in Trust for the Jews and “Perfidious Albion” as always , took it over as belonging to them. They had to be run out by LECHI and IRGUN.
In my copy of Meinertzhagen’s diaries, he recounts being there in Jaffa during that last IRGUN battle which was ongoing whilst the British were embarking for “Dear Old Blighty” and says he stopped in a trench beside some IRGUN men and fired off a few shots at the British retreating, just do as to feel that he’d been part of it. Then embarked onto the ship. It may be factual or he may have been romancing a bit, but there’s no doubt that a man of his character could easily have done as he described. He was a senior military officer with a swath of enormously important family connections, a personal friend of the British King, and Churchill also, but really had the make-up of a 17th century swashbuckling adventurer, born 200 years too late.
It was he, having shared a tent with Lawrence (of Arabia) for some months, said of him, that “he had a talent for modestly backing into the limelight”…described Lawrence perfectly I thought.
David:BRAVO/ENCORE
We remember when the brits wouldn’t let us run
our own lans….soon they won’t own or run Windsor Castle.
now it only needs the sitting (no sh) ISRAELI gov to recognize all the land (time to lay claim to eastern ISRAEL) between Jordan and the med is ISRAEL. no west bank, no arab gaza, do as did done before with The Golan, produce the lost/hidden Rothschild’s deeds to the area. wake up ISRAEL the terrorists, the e u, the u n are awake planning as you sleep.