A week back a friend sent me the picture above: An EU delegation went to a hilltop in the occupied West Bank to denounce building plans for a new Israeli settlement and got heckled so angrily by Jewish nationalists that they had to leave.
According to the Jerusalem Post, the people waved Israeli flags and screamed:
“You are supporting terror. You are antisemites. You are against Jewish building. Shut up and go home. According to the Bible this is Jewish land. This is the Jewish capital of Israel.”
Yesterday the Israel Policy Forum, an Israel lobby group, aired a briefing that gave a clear sense of just how evil this settlement is, extending apartheid in the West Bank. (My words, not theirs). And what a direct provocation it is to the Biden administration. Which will likely do nothing.
Let me try to convey this to you in as short and simple a fashion as my aging journalistic chops are capable.
When Israel took over East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, it came up with a “master plan” for “Jewish construction” that would cut off Jerusalem from Palestine, as Shaul Arieli, a retired military officer who’s an expert on the politics of expansion, explained yesterday.
Today that mission is all but accomplished. There’s a wide strip of settlements going from Nablus down to Hebron, with 650,000 Jews living in them; and around Jerusalem those settlements and the hateful wall cut off the large Palestinian urban centers, Ramallah and Bethlehem, from Jerusalem, the supposed capital of their state.
You knew that already. So did I. But it’s important to remind ourselves.
Israel has kept up this process by building out Jewish Jerusalem into the occupied West Bank to choke any connection between Palestinians in Jerusalem with Palestine in the West Bank. Back in the 90s, for instance, Rabin refused to allow construction of the settlement Har Homa southeast of Jerusalem, but Netanyahu went ahead and sheared off the mountaintop and now there are 30,000 Jews (or certainly almost all Jews) living in that city. The purpose of Har Homa is to block off Bethlehem.
Look at this map: Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, on the left, can’t connect to Bethlehem and Beit Sahour on the right, because Har Homa was stuck between them.
When there’s a “two-state solution”, Israel is supposed to remove Har Homa, so that the two Palestinian communities will be able to connect and Palestine will have a real capital…. Yeah right, imagine what army it would take to uproot those Jewish settlers.
Givat Hamatos is a whole new settlement to the west of Har Homa, closer to Jerusalem. Last week Israel opened the construction process, accepting tenders for 1257 housing units.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called it an attempt to kill the two state solution. The EU has said it’s an absolute red line. Givat Hamatos is obviously a last ditch effort by Netanyahu to create facts on the ground under Trump that Biden won’t be able to reverse (the IPF explained).
Givat Hamatos is part of that “master plan” of “Jewish construction.” Look at it on the map below. You’re looking at Annexed East Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank. That’s Palestine in red on the left, part of East Jerusalem. That’s the Green Line on the right. The yellow line through the center is Highway 60, which used to connect Bethlehem to Jerusalem but it’s a “Jewish-only” road. Only for Israelis.
Givat Hamatos is the yellow. It hasn’t been built yet. When it is built, it will turn the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa (red, center right) into a choked enclave.
And after Israel builds that new settlement, it’s going to build a new tourism complex on Highway 60 at the center left. Where the white arrow is.
Arieli says the whole point of this is to create a long spike of Israeli settlement jutting deep into the West Bank that will prevent Palestine from ever getting a viable state. That will prevent Palestinians from ever getting into Jerusalem.
You can see that spike in the map below of Israel’s proposed borders at the Annapolis conference in ’08. The west rejected this Israeli map. According to the Clinton parameters, the village of Beit Safafa is part of the Palestinian capital, connecting Jerusalem and the West Bank.
But 12 years on, and Givat Hamatos just makes the Israeli map a fait accompli.
The construction tenders will come in five days after Joe Biden assumes office. Then construction will begin in February, of a whole new Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
On the conference call yesterday the experts said that Biden is likely to do nothing about this latest bold move in Trump’s fire sale to Israel before he leaves office.
“People should be realistic about what they expect from [Biden],” Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama official, said.
Biden would have to spend a huge amount of political capital to protest Givat Hamatos or try and block it, and he’s going to have a lot on his plate when he gets on the job. This is just another “headache for the Biden administration,” Goldenberg said.
The best you can hope for is that Biden will issue a short statement that deprecates Givat Hamatos and says the only plan for peace is… Two states based on the Clinton parameters, or the ’67 line plus “landswaps,” with two capitals for two peoples in Jerusalem.
That jargon in itself is a cruel joke. When you see what Israel has done for 50 years to destroy Palestinian freedom, development, movement, planning, civilization in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank. The “Master plan” for “Jewish construction” that continues to this day.
And now Givat Hamatos threatens to end the “Zionist belief,” Arieli says, of a Jewish democratic state.
Tell me where such a place is now anyway. All I see is segregation.
P.S. Of course this has gotten scant attention in the U.S. press. Gershom Gorenberg rightly exploded it in The Washington Post five days ago, an opinion piece titled, “Netanyahu’s cruel boobytrapped inauguration gift to Joe Biden.” A New York Times report mentioned it only in passing, a week ago, saying that “critics” of Givat Hamatos say that it “undermines the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Thanks to Scott Roth and James North.
“An EU delegation went to a hilltop in the occupied West Bank…” Why do the words “hilltop” and “settlement” go together like peanut butter and jelly? Eyal Weizman explains all this (and more) in his book “Hollow Land – Israel’s Architecture of Occupation”:
After 67 Israel’s government wanted to steal more and more Palestinian land, and the typical ploy was to claim the land was needed for security/military purposes. But at some point the High Court of Justice wasn’t completely buying it, so a new justification had to be found: Israel decided to enforce the old Ottoman laws that once ruled the land! Under these laws any uncultivated land could be appropriated by the state – the point was to encourage maximum food production. But hilltops are often left uncultivated, because the richer soil tends to wash down into the valleys between the hills. This gave Israel an excuse to seize the hilltops and build there, and once infrastructure started to appear on hilltops annexation was sure to follow. Hilltop settlements!
“Master plan” refers to the horrific strategy used by racist, fascistic Zionists of foreign origin to dispossess, expel, and inflict endless accelerating horrors on the indigenous and essentially defenseless Palestinians!! There will be a day of reckoning!!
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As I warned the other day, Bibi will lean on Biden constantly to get what he wants, while Biden will try to appease him in hopes that Bibi will leave him alone. That won’t happen because bullies keep bullying until they are stood up to.
Will Biden finally stand up to Bibi and Israel? Not likely but, as I also say, there is always hope. Joe does have a temper, so he just might blow one day and say what he REALLY feels about Bibi and the Jewish state’s increasing – and very damaging – control of our foreign policy.
Something doesn’t make sense here. As far as I know, Phil Weiss and some of the commenters here do not support a 2 state solution; they support “one democratic state” . But if you’re for one state, you shouldn’t have a problem with the settlements. Under one state the settlements obviously get to stay.
I support 2 states. People who share that view, we’re the ones who have that problem, having to think of ways to overcome the obstacle of the settlements. One staters shouldn’t be concerned about that issue.
“And what will Biden do?”
Sod all. No-one expects anything else.