March 27, 2009, - 12:41 pm
About Those Israeli “Settlements” . . . Again (Groan)
By Debbie Schlussel
**** SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATE ****
A top American military official sent me an article decrying an alleged “secret plan” by future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to “expand Israeli settlements.”
The article goes on to talk about how Netanyahu supposedly plans to actually allow developers to build neighborhoods and housing in suburban Jerusalem. Yup, these so-called “settlements” are actually homes on Jewish-owned land in suburban Jerusalem, as they usually are–not some distant encroachment on land held by anyone else in the distant nomadic Arabian desert.
The nerve of those Jews actually wanting to live in and around their capital. You know, the capital that has that famous Temple envisioned by King Dawud? and ultimately built by King Suleman? for some religion that apparently must be anything but Judaism.
The military official asked for my response to the article, and here’s what I wrote. It echoes what I’ve repeatedly written on this site about this absurd apartheid-housing position that apparently the world believes must apply to the Jews and the Jews only:
Conventional Wisdom: This–BAD . . .
. . . This–GOOD, VERY GOOD:
I see no problem with this [the building of these homes] whatsoever. I don’t believe in redlining Jews and telling them they can’t live in certain neighborhoods. That’s, as you know, against the law here in America. So now that these Palestinians are supposed to be such “democrats” and “liberals” with their “free elections,” why are they are allowed to tell Jews where they can and cannot live?
In most of history, to the winners of war go the spoils of victory. As a military man, I’m sure you know this. Apparently, there is an exception to this rule when the winners of the war are Jews, since Israel has been forced to constantly give up land it won when i’s neighbors started wars against it. I don’t see us telling non-Hispanics they can’t live in certain parts of Texas and California, etc. These “controversial West Bank settlements” are actually neighborhoods in suburban Jerusalem. I don’t recall us telling the White gentrifiers of the Georgetown and Adams Morgan areas of Washington, DC that they can’t live there b/c it’s Black and Hispanic land. These “settlements” are homes within a stone’s throw of the Jewish Temple/the Western Wall and a little farther away, the cave holding the bodies/graves of the Jewish patriarchs. It’s incredible that anyone would claim they are not allowed to live there or that it’s “not their land.” Eugene V. Rostow, who helped negotiate various UN partitions and resolutions regarding Israel ,crafted language specifically vague on the so-called “settlements” (which weren’t called that back then) because he was afraid of the redlining against Jews that is now attempted to be exercised with protestations such as that implied in this article. [There is nothing illegal–contrary to frequent public outrage–about Jewish so-called settlements.]
I look forward to the day when people like you send me articles about the redlining of Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, where those that are allowed to live there are forced to live in refugee camps and can’t own land anywhere else in those countries. (The same goes for Kuwait where there are so many Palestinians and they are discriminated against by their fellow Arabs.) That’s what we should be concerned about. It’s the real reason there is even a “Palestinian problem” to begin with–that and the fact that they can’t stand any non-Muslims having a country in their midst, esp. the Jews.
If Israel would have immediately annexed all of this land, built homes on it, and expelled the Palestinians (as the Arab Muslim countries all did with 1 million Jews), it wouldn’t have this festering problem in its midst and this exploding birth rate bomb which will eventually explode from this enemy within. The difference is that Israel absorbed many of the million Jews and their families who were expelled by the Muslim countries and the Muslim countries used their Palestinians (whom they refused to absorb) as a political football stuck in refugee camps. That is other than King Hussein, whose Jordan is the real Palestine. The late King Hussein murdered, as you should know, 10,000 Palestinians (you’ve heard of “Black September”?) rather than give them their land. And the world allowed this, unlike the way they won’t allow Jews to live in Jerusalem and its suburbs without hassling them about “settlements.”
When we as Americans support redlining in a country not our own, we support it anywhere, including our own country.
When we support Nazi-style policies restricting Jews to certain ghettos, telling them where they can and can’t live, we’re on the path to more such fascism.
**** UPDATE: I forgot to link, earlier today, to Eugene V. Rostow’s important 1991 New Republic article, “Resolved: Are the Settlements Legal? Israeli West Bank Policies,” documenting how the Israeli settlements are completely legal and why. It is an important read.
If the Israelis had listened to Rabbi Meir Kahane, Z”tl, they wouldn’t be in this problem.
Self hatred, corruption, and guilt ridden squawkings will be the end of the Jewish people.
Underzog on March 27, 2009 at 2:10 pm