Jeffrey Goldberg gives one of his Goldbloggers, Hershel Ginsburg, the space to explain to Goldberg’s unenlightened readers that Gilo, where the Israelis are now building another 900 housing units, is not a part of East Jerusalem, but in Jerusalem: "a neighborhood in the city, i.e., within the city limits, forming the southernmost part of the city (not in "east" Jerusalem as a number of ignorant journalists have reported)."
The use of the folksy term,"neighborhood," was slyly introduced a few years back, as British journalist Robert Fisk first pointed out, in a public relations effort to humanize what the international community and its laws had long ago determined were illegal settlements.
Even though every modern map of the city shows that Gilo is definitely in its Eastern portion, Ginzburg’s argument that Gilo is not in East Jerusalem, however, is legally correct. Until the 1967 war, the land on which Gilo now sits was part of the greater West Bank. After their rapid victory in 1967 the Israelis expanded Jerusalem’s area to three times its original size and promptly annexed it, a decision that angered the international community which has accepted it.
In fact, to protest the illegal action, all the foreign countries, including the US, moved their embassies from West Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. An " integral part of Jerusalem," as Ginzburg, Goldberg’s alter ego, would have us believe, it isn’t.
Ironically, a frank description of the annexation process and the building of Gilo and other settlements in the captured area that became today’s Jerusalem was provided by one of their most avid defenders, Moshe Elad, writing on Ynet, Wednesday:
"On June 27, 1967 [PM Levi]Eshkol decided to annex an area of roughly 70,000 dunams, only 10% of which was part of the Old City. The rest of the area included the land of 28 villages in the West Bank from the Bethlehem and Ramallah area.
"In three different stages of confiscation and construction, by 1970 the State of Israel built the following neighborhoods: Shapira Hill (known as French Hill,) Ramot Eshkol, Maalot Dafna, Neve Yaakov, Ramat Alon, Talpiot East, Gilo, and later on Ramat Shlomo – these neighborhoods were built on 23,500 dunams of the annexed territory."
Israel is not planning on giving any of them up .
