The Left is worried. They want to preserve the possibility of a two state solution by not building on what they consider Palestinian land. They know that a peace agreement is not possible now but want to preserve the possibility until the Arabs are ready to accept it, however long it takes.
The Right is glad. The Right wants to hold on to Jerusalem as annexed, as the undivided capital of Jerusalem. It doesn’t believe that a two state solution acceptable to Israel can be negotiated now or in the future.
Why should these projects or even the whole plan scuttle the two-state solution. Bush said we could keep the settlement blocs. Obama said we could swap land, They both said we could build a road connecting Gaza to Judea and Samaria so why not build another road connecting Bethlehem to Ramallah? In fact such a by-pass is already planned and I think built. Ted Belman
Givat Hamatos is the keystone of a plan that quietly, piece by piece, is unilaterally sealing the southern border of annexed East Jerusalem with Israeli construction.
By Sarah Kreimer, HAARETZ
We’re in the midst of a housing crisis, and our government has promised to build tens of thousands of new homes all over the country. So what’s wrong with the recent government decision to advance the construction of 2,610 apartments in Givat Hamatos in Jerusalem?
What’s wrong is that whether you call it a “neighborhood” ?(as most Israelis do?) or a “settlement” ?(as all other nations of the world do?), Givat Hamatos is the first new Jewish neighborhood to be built over the Green Line in East Jerusalem since Har Homa in 1997. Har Homa, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated during his first term as a kind of “price tag” for Israel’s withdrawal from parts of Hebron, has embroiled Israel in international controversy ever since. Is Givat Hamatos Netanyahu’s “price tag” for the Palestinian decision to apply for UN membership?
What’s clear is that Givat Hamatos is the keystone of a plan that quietly, piece by piece, with no Israeli public debate, is unilaterally sealing the southern border of annexed East Jerusalem with Israeli construction. In the last year, plans for building more than 5,000 homes in this southern area have been approved or advanced ? 2,000 to expand Gilo toward Wallajeh and Beit Jala, almost 1,000 to expand Har Homa toward Beit Sahur, and now more than 2,000 units to link Har Homa with Gilo. These plans are presented under many guises ? as an answer to the social protest, as an expression of Israel’s right to build in its capital. But never is the Israeli public allowed to see the full picture: that, despite its rhetoric, the Israeli government is working on the ground to scuttle a two-state solution.
Taken together, these expansion plans in southern East Jerusalem wreak havoc with the one set of principles agreed upon by most Israeli and Palestinian negotiators ?(including former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak?) ? the “Clinton Parameters.” Under these guidelines, Gilo would have been recognized as Israeli ? swapped for a commensurate piece of land from within the Green Line ? and the rest of the land on Jerusalem’s southern borders would become part of a Palestinian capital. Thus, through this construction, we are doing no less foreclosing on the option of a two-state solution. For, without an agreement on Jerusalem’s borders, there will be no Palestinian-Israeli peace.
In the meantime, Givat Hamatos, which has housed a prefab ghetto for immigrants from Ethiopia for much of the past two decades, will surround the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa with Israeli construction, eating up the last available land reserves that would let this rapidly growing neighborhood expand. Rather than providing land for Beit Safafa’s growth, Givat Hamatos chokes off the community’s expansion options. And this is happening on land that was, in part, expropriated from Palestinians after 1967.
Writing in Haaretz last Friday, Akiva Eldar reported that some of Givat Hamatos’ planned units will be made available to Palestinians. That would be a welcome change, if it in fact happens. However, these few units provided to Palestinians would come at the cost of detaching the Palestinian neighborhoods from Palestinian East Jerusalem, leaving Beit Safafa engulfed by Gilo, Har Homa and Givat Hamatos. It would not change the basic fact that Givat Hamatos is an attempt to claim another part of East Jerusalem for Israelis.
Givat Hamatos is slipping through the planning process at a time when the Israeli public is focused on the intense, exciting drama of Gilad Shalit’s return. There is great, tragic irony in this timing. In the very week that our government has made the difficult choice to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who embraced the path of terror, it is slamming the door in the face of those who have been willing to negotiate for a viable two-state solution. Just last month, Netanyahu spoke passionately at the UN about the need to forgo unilateral action and to return to negotiations.
He rallied the United States and several European governments to work against the Palestinians’ statehood bid, and they answered his call. Now, they see themselves betrayed by the Israeli government’s bald unilateral acts in East Jerusalem ? acts that contradict the spirit of bilateralism, and violate the Israeli government’s recent commitment to the Quartet to refrain from inflammatory action. Advancing plans to build Givat Hamatos is not just a matter of provoking ill will; it is an unwise policy for Israel.
Sarah Kreimer is associate director of Ir Amim, an Israeli NGO dedicated to creating a more equitable Jerusalem and reaching an agreed-upon political future for the city.
Davidka, well said!
All the land in question passed into Jewish ownership almost a century ago with the San Remo Conference and the subsequent Mandate for a Jewish state. The local Arabs are not entitled to a 23rd Arab Muslim state, and Israel has the right and duty to “closely settle the land.” The sooner Israel acts accordingly, the better off Israel, the Arabs and the world will be.
These three said it best:
A bald-faced lie. The land was part of Jerusalem until forcibly occupied by Jordan for nearly 20 years. Israel then liberated it. It was never part of a “Palestinian” state, other than the League of Nations Mandate for a Jewish State of Palestine.
Stan, you and Norman F must be reading prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures. What’s old is new again.
Well said. I hope you are enjoying Israpundit. You are a kindred spirit.
I am in complete agreement with NormanF. European demographics combined with Israeli demographics make his scenario almost certain. The only debate can be on what future decade this will come to fruition. Europe is destined to implode as it continues on the road to Eurabia. I personally think the tipping point is fifteen to twenty percent Muslim population in any given Europeannation, probably closer to twenty percent. At that point Europe will burst into flames as two cultures collide in chaos. The Jewish populations of France, Italy, Great Britain, and the Netherlands will have nowhere to go but to Israel giving that small secure country a huge demographic and intellectual surge.
Not only that but statistics are revealing that Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is now greater than that of it’s Arab population. The myth that time is on the arab’s side has been exposed as false. Arab fertility rates are decreasing all through the middle east. Rising rates are a sign of confidence and optimism in a nation (witness the study that Israeli’s are among the happiest people on earth). Lowering rates are a sign of depression, resignation from life and pessimism towards the future. Islam may point to it’s billions of adherents but the truth is very dark for the religion. In Africa Christianity is on the upsurge as it is in South America and Asia. In100 years Islamwill be but a shadow of it’s present self.
It is for these unstoppable reasons that Islam is desperately striking out at the world. But it will not help. Islam is doomed and the true Judeo-Christian ethos will survive to come out on top. Not only that, but the forces of the left, the progressives and collectivists are dying out demographically as well. Studies in Israel and theU.s. Show that the right are depriving far more effectively than the left.
We here in North America and there in Israel have one paramount task. We must not have a crisis of confidence. We must remain on the offensive at all times and not allow the forces of evil “talk” us into giving into their delusional demands. We are going to win. The only thing that defeat the voices of Freedom is a loss of confidence.
Fight on with all your might. I am an old man now, an old an who wishes he were young again, but I feel it in my bones, a feeling of excitement and joy that a greater future is in store for our People.
Nothing is going to be achieved as long as the Arabs are controlling ‘Har Habait’…
Har Habait in the hands of the Arab hands gives them a base to confront THE Israeli GOVERMENT who in their eye is considered temporary ‘CONQUERERS’ …
I am not a religious person but history has thought us that giving a finger to an Arabs forces him to demand the whole hand and extending a friendly ‘hand’ forces them to rip the whole Jewish arm…
To keep on demanding ‘PEACE’ with the Arabs is accepted as a sign of WEAKNESS from the Arab side.
ARABS UNDERSTAND ONLY BRUTE FORCE! ISRAEL WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!
Shy Guy, would you believe Netanyahu sent a minister to Germany to explain Israel’s position instead of telling the Germans to mind their own business!
After they killed 6 million Jews, they have no moral right to lecture to Israel about building in Jerusalem.
Israel’s supine leadership makes me sick!
How dastardly! Israel building in Jerusalem! Gad! What gall!
/sarc
Europe is getting its comeuppance for having incited Jew-hatred for centuries. Its fiscal house is a house of cards and when it collapses, the money for their Israeli Fifth column will vanish. This is the moment the last of Europe’s Jews will make aliyah to Israel. BB is a weak politician and a master demagogue. But even he cannot erase Israel’s destiny. The Arab World is imploding, Europe is fraying and Iran is beset by the contradictions of Khomeinism. Israel’s position has never been stronger. When we look back a century from now, we will know whether this picture I have laid out was the truth.
The fact that she is screaming gives me great pleasure. She knows as well as any one else in Israel that peace with the Palestinian Arabs is impossible. Their intransigence frustrates the Israeli Left to no end.
It is this Arab intransigence that remains unaltered by the Shalit capitulation. The Arabs will not negotiate and will not make peace with Israel in the future. No Israeli capitulation will induce them to accept a so-called two state solution.
The peace process is dead. And Jerusalem will never be divided again.
millions of $ and Euros are inseminated into every left wing NGO and to private activists bank-accounts. This is where avarice and ideology merge.
It’s the funding that greases the ideological activism. Stop the funding and you shut them down. Until a real right wing government takes the reins of power nothing will be done especially with Kapo BB ruling the roost.
For people like Sarah Kreimer of Ir Amim and other Israeli peace pushing NGO’s, fiction trumps reality in her maintaining that there are Palestinians, either leaders or leading influential voices, as she puts it, “who have been willing to negotiate for a viable two-state solution.”
Only a psychiatrist can possibly explain how these Israel NGO peace activists can manage to keep living a semblance of a an orderly life while living in their mentally disordered fictional world that denies and defies reality.