One of the great surprises of my recent visit to Israel and Palestine was the morning I stood on a hillside south of Gilo in the Palestinian village of Wallajeh and gazed over at the settlement with its fancy red tile roofs. We were in a rural area 10 or 15 minutes south of Jerusalem. Palestinians were being forced off their land to make way for more settlers. And this was East Jerusalem??? But Jeffrey Goldberg had lately written, "Everyone knows" that Gilo is part of Jerusalem and will be an Israeli neighborhood after the two state solution comes into being (in his grandchild’s lifetime).
Standing there, I realized that this was pure Israeli propaganda to justify an ongoing landgrab. And the same holds for the rural suburb of Ramat Shlomo, where Netanyahu has announced more settlements, spitting in our president’s face.
When will American reporters cover the maze of colonization that is greater Jerusalem? When will they interview people like Michael Ratner, who saw this maze and said, the two state solution is finished?
Here Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann (who don’t think it’s finished) have a great post exploding the widespread American misconceptions of Jerusalem:
Those peddling this rubbish are guilty of transparent manipulation. Those buying it are guilty of having short memories and an excess of credulity.
In 1993, when the peace process was taking off, the settlement of Ramat Shlomo — which last week caused such a headache for Vice President Biden — didn’t exist. The site was an empty hill in East Jerusalem (not "no man’s land," as some have asserted), home only to dirt, trees and grazing goats. It was empty because Israel expropriated the land in 1973 from the Palestinian village of Shuafat and made it off-limits to development. Only later, with the onset of the peace process era, was the land zoned for construction and a brand-new settlement called Rehkes Shuafat (later renamed Ramat Shlomo) built.
If in 1993 you had asked what areas "everybody knows" would stay part of Israel under any future agreement, the area that is today Ramat Shlomo — territorially distinct from any other settlement and contiguous with the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuafat — would not have been mentioned.
The same can be said for the massive settlement of Har Homa, for which Israel issued new tenders in the past few days (sometime after the Ramat Shlomo-Biden fiasco). Here, again, the argument is that "everybody knows" this area will forever be part of Israel. But here again, we are talking about an area that at the outset of the peace process was empty land — devoid of Israelis, belonging mainly to Palestinians, and contiguous entirely with Palestinian areas — that anybody drawing a logical border would have placed on the Palestinian side.
I had the exact same reaction in 2001, when a Palestinian friend brought me to the “settlement” of Har Homa, then under construction in Palestinian territory southeast of Jerusalem. I had vaguely imagined “settlements” as a couple of trailers in a desolate landscape. Here, instead, was a gigantic, multi-story complex, something like Coop City up in the Bronx — with the new Israeli-only road leading up to it.
I suspect the Jewish-only tenants have moved in by now. Can anyone really believe they will turn their complex over to Palestinians as part of a 2-state solution?
The short answer to the question in the headline is, regardless of anything else, “Never.” The media only started reporting on the atrocities of the Iraq war when the foreign media picked it up and there was no reasonable way to justify not talking about it. The media all collectively ganged up to punish Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson when they were trying to save the US from the utter mistake that was the Iraq invasion. The media was invested in the rally call for war with Iraq.
The media is ten times more invested in Israel. I think the way the Goldstone report has been treated in US media, compared to how its been regarded by the rest of the world, shows us that the US media will never be in touch with the truth when it comes to Israel. Who owns controlling shares in the various blocks of media, after all? Not to be crass, but as someone who’s a digital arts / media student, it’s rather hard not to notice that my activism for human rights for the Palestinians has effectively torpedoed my chances of employment in the television, movie or broadcast industries in the United States. (Which suits me just fine, incidentally.)
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I listened to Zeev Moaz debate Omar Barghouti a few weeks back. He is known as a Zionist that supports the peace process and the two state solution. He basically warned Omar that today the Palestinians will get less today then they could have gotten in 2000 and will get even less in the future if the Palestinians do accept what Israel is willing to give today. He is asserting that each of settlements already belong to Israel. And he is considered a peace advocate.
Everybody, except the American sheeple know what the game is.
what they could have gotten in 2000 from israel wasn’t worth shit. israel as a jewish state going to end up the looser if it keeps this up which is the rational solution anyway. racist states are so last century.
Israel can’t stop building settlements. There is a dynamic of ultra Orthodox housing that won’t be tolerated in West Jerusalem that is moved to East Jerusalem and it can’t be stopped. Part of the problem is the Zionist/Messianic view that history has ended with the Jews as the winners. Another angle is general Israeli ‘it will all work out’ sloppiness.
Israelis are not ready for the inevitable endgame in the occupation- the binational state. Equal rights for Palestinians are simply not part of the Israeli discourse, a tragic mistake for Zionism.
East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and, for a time, Gaza, are Israel’s lebensraum. The constantly expanding state of Israel is as essential to the survival of Zionism as was the constantly expanding state of Germany essential to the survival of Nazism.
A major factor is the cost of land. Land and housing in Israeli Jerusalem are quite expensive, partly because of rich US Jews who buy up apartments for the holy days. The haredim feel they need to live close to all the holiness of Herod’s old retaining wall to survive, but they don’t have the money to buy apartments for all their burgeoning broods.
Land on the WB, including E Jerusalem, is cheap because all Israel has to do is confiscate it from the Palestinians. No Israeli government is capable of saying No to the haredim in any way.
In the mid-70s the mantle of Zionist pioneer passed from the Labor Zionists (which had included the likes of David Ben-Gurion) to the Modern Orthodox. Shimon Peres and Yizhak Rabin signed off on the beginning of the settlement movement because they recognized that the Modern Orthodox embodied the dynamism of their youthful Zionism. This is explored thoroughly in the excellent Lords of the Land.
What is remarkable about the last 10 years or so is that now the black-hat ultra-Orthodox supply a similar dynamism to settlement activity. These Jews from around the world, have become staunch Israel supporters. They move there, study there and Israel has become central to their ideology. This is a spectacular reversal since one of the defining tenets of Ultra-Orthodoxy had been its vigorous opposition to Zionism.
Netanyahu’s focus on Jerusalem feeds off that. Instead of harping on the West Bank – which is such a drag – he’s talking up Jerusalem. The magic word works wonders with Jews and Christians.
And now, the entire Orthodox camp is creating this new reality in “Jerusalem”: in Har Choma as in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. As Jerusalem becomes increasingly Orthodox, other of the so-called “new” neighborhoods, aka settlements are predominantly Orthodox.
The New York Times (in a break from its standard) carried a map of Israeli land grabs in East Jerusalem and the adjacent area of the West Bank. The Times, which these days usually does a sterling job with its information design, played down the Green Line (almost camouflaged by the other colors of the map). Nevertheless, the map makes quite clear the lies of the Jeffrey Goldbergs.
link to nytimes.com
More notable facts on the NYT-map: the enclave by wall to the north of Ramat Allon (what should that be?), and the huge walled peninsula into the West Bank. And, no small thing but I almost thought it self evident, the apartheid wall following the city borders.
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