Are Jews willing to fight for Jerusalem? Not the Leftists

T. Belman. The status quo is not sustainable. The Arabs are fighting to amend it in their favour. The Jews meanwhile only want to maintain it. This passivity is losing ground to the Arab aggression as Shragai points out. Jews must fight for Jerusalem even more vigorously than the Arabs do. It will boil down to the battle of wills. He, who wants it the most, will win.

Recently I watch MK Nir Barkat discuss his Sovereignty Plan in a ZOA webinar. I was very impressed by him. I think he will be Prime Minister when Netanyahu leaves the scene. During the question period he, being a former Mayor of Jerusalem, was asked what is position was on Biden’s plan to open a US Consulate for the Arabs in eastern Jerusalem. He said it was there for many years before Trump and he saw nothing wrong with it being put back there. His answer provoked the following comment from me; “Trump did us a great favour by taking Jerusalem off the table and it would be a grave mistake for us to put it back on the table by allowing the Consulate to return.

New Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev effectively supports dividing Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t define it that way. But first, he has to restore order to the city, where Hamas is digging in. 

By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM

During the First Intifada, then-Israel Police Commissioner David Krauss felt that Jerusalem – the city that had been brought together – was slipping away from him. Krauss, an Auschwitz survivor, didn’t know what to do. He swore that Jerusalem “would not fall” on his watch, and with great emotional devotion ordered his forces to “re-liberate Jerusalem.” Yes, in those words, which were considered completely politically correct at the time.

Current Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, who during the latest round of rioting talked about “terrorists on both sides,” apparently won’t be caught making similar remarks, but Jerusalem certainly “slipped away” on his and former Public Security Minister Amir Ohana’s watch.

Hamas, which in recent months has been upping both its presence and its influence in the city and on the Temple Mount, is repeatedly shaping Israel’s conduct in its own capital, in the most historic areas. The flag march story is just a symptom. It was preceded by the “stairs” in front of Damascus Gate, the closure of the Temple Mount to Jewish visitors for 19 days, and particularly long days of insecurity in the areas near the city’s seam line and in Jewish population clusters adjacent to Arab population centers. Jews and Arabs were exposed to harm, attacks, and sometimes even attempted lynches at each other’s hands, and like in Lod and Acre and in the Negev, the long arm of the law was too short in Jerusalem.

Now, at this time of ungovernability, a new guy has shown up in the neighborhood. Omer Bar-Lev, the son of former IDF Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, and himself a former commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal Unit. Bar-Lev Jr. has been appointed Public Security Minister, a post his father also held, and he has a completely different agenda for Jerusalem than the one to which we’ve been accustomed for so many years. It’s no longer “unified Jerusalem” or “forever.” The opposite. For years, Bar-Lev has been expressing in posts and articles he has published a totally different view about Jerusalem. As far away from former Prime Minister Netanyahu’s as could be. Much closer to those of former Prime Minister Olmert.

The new public security minister effectively supports dividing Jerusalem, even if he doesn’t define it that way. “Don’t let them confuse you,” Bar-Lev wrote in a forgotten post from 2014. “It wasn’t Beit Hanina or Silwan that we dreamt about for 2,000 years of exile. If the Palestinians want to build their capital there – there isn’t and we shouldn’t have a problem with it.”

The way he sees it, the insistence on including some 350,000 Palestinians within the municipal borders of Jerusalem is “a major mistake.” A mistake, he says, “whose base lies in a mistaken technical decision by a few generals who drew the borders of the city over 50 years ago and did not see what the future would bring.”

Bar-Lev thinks that “the artificial link of these neighborhoods [the Shuefat refugee camp and Kafr Aqab] to Jerusalem should be disconnected … and we should separate from 300,000 Palestinians who hold Israeli residency cards and could become Israeli citizens tomorrow. We, and apparently they, have no interest in that.”

If you want to know what Bar-Lev’s approach to the capital of Israel will be, go back to October 2014, when Israel was in the midst of a wave of violence and Palestinian-Hamas bloodshed very similar to the one that exists in Jerusalem today. Bar-Lev sketched out a two-stage plan: First, “the most elementary,” he called it, “aggressive and uncompromising handling of rioters and terrorists;” “an official declaration that Israel has no intentions to make changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount” (which Netanyahu indeed did); and “an immediate stop to right-wing groups taking over homes in Arab neighborhoods and living in them.” The effects of this policy are far-reaching, even today: government intervention and effective freeze on Jewish settlement in places like the City of David/Silwan, the Muslim Quarter, or Shimon HaTzadik.

For the second stage, Bar-Lev recommended (and repeated the recommendation two years later) bidding farewell to most residents of east Jerusalem, “updating the city’s municipal borders, and moving neighborhoods like Shuefat and Kafr Aqab to the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority in Area A or B, and later on as part of a Palestinian state, if and when one is established alongside Israel…”

This view of Bar-Lev’s, at least when it comes to the northern neighborhoods of Jerusalem that lie beyond the security barrier – which are home to about 150,000 people – is in line with similar views expressed in recent years by new-old Jerusalem Affairs Minister Zeev Elkin, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, and for a time, even Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. These three talked about removing these neighborhoods from the municipal borders of Jerusalem — albeit by establishing a separate Israeli municipal authority, rather than the PA, that would be responsible for them — but they too thought there was no justification to hold that section of Jerusalem beyond the security fence that had long since become a neglected no-man’s land, replete with crime and lawlessness.

<
>
<
>
Last April, immediately after the extremist group Lehava held a march across Jerusalem, Bar-Lev spoke in more “Shabtai-esque” language, calling them a terrorist group, and “the military arm of [MK Itamar] Ben-Gvir” and said they were “not very different from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, because terrorism is terrorism.” Bar-Lev demanded that they be treated “just like we treat Arab rioters,” and even demanded that the government be “more stringent toward Jewish rioters who are Israeli citizens than toward Arabs in east Jerusalem.”

This line of Bar-Lev’s meets the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Jerusalem at one of its most challenging points. Bar-Lev, who for years has opposed any change to the status quo on the Temple Mount, will discover that the reality there is not the one he aspired to: on one hand, there have been a series of major changes that have increased the Muslim side on the Mount, while on the other many more Jews are visiting and even holding “non-provocative” prayers, with the agreement of the police. Will Bar-Lev change that?

Recent events have cut off a process of Israelization that had been taking place among many east Jerusalem residents: government investment and huge sums of money poured into the east of the city to reduce discrepancies and improve infrastructure and services (government resolution 3790); the COVID crisis, which created close cooperation with the Israeli authorities; many more schools adopting Israeli school curricula, both for elementary students and higher grades; a somewhat eased process of applying for Israeli citizenship, which many east Jerusalem residents are officially eligible for, and more.

Bar-Lev will ask that all these processes be reexamined, but his first test will be what is expected of any police force – restoring law and order to the “Wild East” of Jerusalem, where Hamas is a key player.