What Israel lobby? The NY Jewish Week says that Netanyahu’s use of the planned settlement in the former Shepherd’s Hotel in East Jerusalem is a stratagem aimed at mobilizing American Jews–who aren’t keen on settlements, but are for a Jewish Jerusalem. (Something like 58 percent of American Jews say Jerusalem should be Jewish.)
Don’t forget the Holocaust angle. Israeli embassies are circulating a photograph of Hitler meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who once owned the Shepherd’s Hotel and who opposed Jewish settlement in historical Palestine. Settler Avigdor Lieberman is behind this gambit. Well he would be. He’s a blood and soil man himself.
The new Israel lobby hits back. Peace Now savages the Shepherd’s Hotel plot in a great post saying it’s a knife to the heart of the two-state solution:
The current project is a direct challenge to President Barack Obama and his effort to launch negotiations that can lead to Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace. If Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sees sense and finds a way to back down and cancel/freeze this project, the chances for a serious peace process, with a credible result, may very well improve. Alternatively, Netanyahu and others may well have decided to do everything possible to use this project to deal a fatal blow not only to Obama’s efforts but to the two-state solution…
The site in question is the former Shepherd’s Hotel, located in the heart of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The site is not connected to any other Israeli settlement construction – if implemented, this would mean the establishment of a new settler foothold in this area.
