The Knesset must protect Jerusalem from Lapid’s concessions to Biden

By Ezequiel Doiny, INN   21.6.22

On June 20, 2022 Arutz 7  reported “Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid have decided to dissolve the current government and hold new elections…The two will submit a bill to this effect for approval by the Knesset next week…Yair Lapid will become prime minister during the transition period as per the coalition agreement and will greet US President Joe Biden as Israel’s premier during his visit to the Jewish State on July 13.”

And Arutz 7 further reported that “US President Joe Biden still plans to visit Israel next month despite the collapse of the Israeli government.

“President Biden’s trip to Israel will happen as planned,” US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides told journalist Barak Ravid of Walla! and Axios.

This visit may include more than meets the eye. On May 31, 2022 Arutz 7  reported “Following reports that American plans to open a consulate to the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem had been shelved, for which former Bennett aide Shimrit Meir took the credit, senior American officials in the U.S. State Department have clarified that they remain “committed to opening a Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem.” “We continue to believe it can be an important way for our country to engage with and provide support to the Palestinian people,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a briefing to reporters Tuesday.”

Biden has been pushing to divide Jerusalem by opening a Palestinian Arab Consulate in Jerusalem since Bennett became PM. Caroline Glick wrote “The day after Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett formed their government, Biden administration officials threw a diplomatic hand grenade at them. Monday administration officials told reporters “unofficially” that President Joe Biden intends to appoint Hady Amr, his Assistant Secretary of State for Israel and the Palestinians to serve as U.S. Consul General to the Palestinian Arabs — in Jerusalem.”

“To deploy Amr to Israel’s capital as consul, the administration will first need to open a consulate in Jerusalem. In accordance with the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1996, the Trump administration closed the consulate and turned the building into the Ambassador’s Residence following the transfer of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in 2019. And under the Vienna Convention, the U.S. must ask Israel to permit the opening of the consulate and accredit the head of mission.

“The administration’s decision to deploy Amr to Jerusalem as ambassador-in-everything-but-name to a hostile, non-Israeli entity is a double assault on Israel. First, the sends the clear message that the Biden administration supports the division of Israel’s capital. Second, by sending Amr specifically to Jerusalem, the administration is making clear that it intends to legitimize and work with Hamas.

“Before joining the administration, Amr was a fellow at the Qatar-funded Brookings Institution. He was the founding director of the Brookings Institution in Doha. And from Brookings, Amr wrote and spoke in favor of legitimizing the Iranian-sponsored Muslim Brotherhood terror group. Amr advocated that the U.S. work to integrate Hamas into the PLO…”

On November 25, 2021 Arutz 7  reported “A high-ranking Israeli official has told i24news that the United States will be opening a consulate to deal with Palestinian affairs soon,” Asharq Al-Awsat reports. “According to the report, the Biden administration has already informed Israel of its intentions and plans to move ahead unilaterally if it does not obtain a response from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s government, which is no longer seen as under immediate threat of dissolving due to internal strife, now that the budget has passed…”

There is no explanation for Biden’s government insistence in opening the US Consulate for Palestine in Jerusalem instead of Ramallah other than that he is trying to divide Jerusalem and make part of Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, a move that contradicts the Oslo Accords and endangers Israel.

Palestinian Authority ontrol over half of Jerusalem would turn the other half of Jerusalem into another Sderot, a city in the border of Gaza that endures constant missile attacks from Hamas. How does Biden propose to prevent this?

Hamas is against the two State solution. On May 26,2021 MEMRI reported “Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahar said that the land of Palestine is not suitable for a two-state solution, and that the occupation should end and “each [Israeli] will go his way.” He made his remarks in an interview that aired on Al-Jazeera TV (Qatar) on May 25, 2021. Al-Zahar, one of Hamas’ founders, said that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu should go live in the U.S. and that former Foreign Minister Liberman should go live in Russia. He emphasized that Palestine is an Arab and Islamic land. Al-Zahhar went on to say that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah are enemies of Israel, and therefore they are the enemies of Hamas’s enemy. He said: “It is our duty to cooperate on all levels, in order to liberate the land and get rid of this cancer.”

The Palestinian Media Watch translated an interview by al-Zahar to the Palestinian Arab newspaper Al-Ayyam in which he said “transfer what it has [in Gaza] or just a small part of it to the West Bank, we would be able to settle the battle of the final promise [to destroy Israel] with a speed that no one can imagine…[Some] have said Hamas wants to create an Islamic emirate in Gaza. We won’t do that, but we will build an Islamic state in Palestine, all of Palestine…”’

What about the violation of the Oslo Accords? In 1995 when Rabin was campaigning for the Knesset to approve the Oslo Accords he gave a speech in the Knesset in which, among other things, he promised that “…The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines. And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:

“First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev — as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths…”

“…Mr. Speaker Members of Knesset,

“The agreement, with all its articles lies before you. There are no secret appendices or letters. This is the agreement that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civil servants, and IDF officers led by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres worked on, and to all of them I say — thank you from the bottom of my heart…”

The Oslo Accords were sponsored by Bill Clinton and signed in the White House. Declaring that Eastern Jerusalem (including Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall) are “illegally occupied Palestinian territories” violates them, not only endangering Israel’s security, but denying Jews their ancient connection to the Jewish Homeland.

Until 1948 Jews were a majority of the population in Jerusalem. On December 11, 2017 Amb. Dore Gold wrote in the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs “By the mid-19th century, the British Consulate in Jerusalem made the following determination, according to this report, which I found in the Public Record Office in Kew, it states that Jews were a majority in Jerusalem, when? already in 1863 – that’s long before Theodor Herzl, before the Britt’s arrived, or Lord Balfour.”

“See the guy on the right, William Seward, he was Secretary of State of the United States during the American civil war, under President Abraham Lincoln.

“When Seward’s term ended, he visited the holy land, he visited Jerusalem. And he wrote a memoir. And in his memoir, it is written, ‘There is a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.'” See William Seward, Travels Around the World (1873)

Correction: Jews were a majority of the population in Jerusalem until the Jordanian Arab Legion, in 1948, led by British General Glubb, expelled all the Jews from Hevron, ‘East Jerusalem’ and the ‘West Bank’. Not only they did ethnic cleansing but they destroyed dozens of ancient synagogues and thousands of Ancient Jewish Tombstones in the Sacred Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Mount of Olives to try to erase all evidence of Jewish History.

Jews have been persecuted and expelled from most Middle East Countries and they managed to find refuge in Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey. Jimena.org reported that since 1948, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lybia, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and other Middle East Countries. Israel is the only safe haven for Jewish refugees in the Middle-East, the one and only small Jewish State.

Biden may try to take advantage of Lapid’s interim government to divide Jerusalem. Lapid is unpredictable – he has already offered partial right of return to Arabs from two village. And Biden has said he will visit the eastern part of Jerusalem without an Israeli escort. The Knesset must protect Jerusalem from Lapid’s willingness to make concessions by cancelling the visits of foreign leaders until after the elections and also ruling that access roads to the parts of Jerusalem liberated in the Six Day War be blocked to foreign officials unaccompanied of Israeli officials.

Ezequiel Doiny is author of “Obama’s assault on Jerusalem’s Western Wall”