It is not news that the Biden administration has fully embraced Trump’s Jerusalem policy in defiance of global opinion. “We are committed… to keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. The United States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,” the State Department spokesperson said on January 18.
What is news is that liberal American figures are now accepting the Trump policy too — and refusing to describe East Jerusalem as occupied territory.
NPR host Steve Inskeep left out the occupation on National Public Radio this morning (as he did yesterday too). After noting that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas “in Ramallah in the Israeli occupied West Bank,” Inskeep said:
Last week a Palestinian gunman opened fire at a synagogue in Israel, killed seven people.
In fact, that synagogue is in Neve Yaakov, an illegal Israeli settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.
The world does not recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. The U.N. refers to East Jerusalem as occupied. So do all the human rights groups. So does the European Union.
Even more lamentably, J Street, which knows better, yesterday characterized Neve Yaakov as a “Jerusalem neighborhood.” Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote:
On Friday, during Shabbat and on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Palestinian gunman killed seven Israelis and wounded three others outside a synagogue in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov, the deadliest terror attack on Israelis in years. Just a day later, on Saturday, an Israeli father and son were shot and wounded in East Jerusalem — by an attacker who was just 13 years old.
Ben-Ami’s statement repeatedly refers to the “occupation” or the “occupied West Bank.” His description of Neve Yaakov as an “East Jerusalem neighborhood” appears to reflect the U.S. and Israeli governments’ position that there are no settlements in occupied East Jerusalem (or as Israel’s Foreign Minister said in welcoming Blinken yesterday, the “eternal capital of the Jewish people”).
What is Neve Yaakov? “An exclusively Jewish settlement” that serves a military and demographic policy of imposing apartheid on Palestinians.
Here is a description by Jalal Abukhater, a journalist who grew up in Beit Hanina across the street from the colony.
The settlement we know today was established in 1972… built on lands stolen from Palestinians of two major towns and one village.
Beit Hanina where I grew up suffered greatly from Israel’s systematic encirclement with bypass roads & Jewish settlements meant to choke it, take its lands & divide into fragments… The settlement of Neve Yaakov served an important part in the belt of Jewish-only settlements in the heart of East Jerusalem, meant to limit and fragment Palestinian communities further. It is an exclusively Jewish settlement & only expands to host incoming Zionist immigrants.
Additionally, and equally important, the settlement of Neve Yaakov is home to Fort Nehemiah, the Central Command of the “IDF” Headquarters. Being home to Central Command meant that the settlement hosted the military body responsible for all military units, operations and activities of Israeli Occupation Forces in the occupied West Bank. Also, the HQ’s commander is the one authorized to declare new settlements in WB.
The settlement is strategic in heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem, it serves its purpose to stop natural expansion of Beit Hanina & Dahiyet Al-Barid. – The Israeli Military runs the Occupation from there. Here are pics of Israeli Def Min Yoav Galant in Neve Yaakov on 3.1.2023
American journalists and liberal organizations ought to be reflecting the views of the occupied people. That they are echoing the U.S. government on a point of great affliction for Palestinians is a sad reflection on establishment culture.
P.S. To his credit, NPR’s Daniel Estrin said today that Israel’s plan to demolish the home of the attacker, though the evidence is that he acted alone, “raises questions of whether Israel is carrying out a policy of collective punishment, and whether that actually can prevent violence of this nature.”
h/t Adam Horowitz.
National Public Radio is funded by $92 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB in turn scoops up a cool $445 million annually from Congress. That’s one-half of CPB’s budget. The other half comes from underwriting and donations, among them from wealthy partisans of Israel and their foundations. Inskeep and NPR are well aware that the US Congress is Israeli-occupied territory, as is a large share of its private funding, so NPR is careful not to stray from a pro-Israel line… or else.
If Inskeep and NPR truly served the American people and their democracy (and their tax dollars) with independent reporting, they would frame the Israel/Palestine conquest, landgrab, dispossession, violence and perpetual state of war more in line with that of the Israeli historian, author and political activist Ilan Pappé:
“Zionism [the movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine] is an active settler-colonialist movement or project. Settler colonialism is in a nutshell, a project of replacement and displacement, settlement and expulsion. Since this is the project, that you take over someone’s homeland and you’re not satisfied until you feel you’ve taken enough of the land and you’ve gotten rid of enough of the native people, as long as you believe that this is an incomplete project, you will continue with the project.
“Therefore, such a project is based on dehumanization and elimination. It cannot be liberal. It cannot be socialist. It cannot be anything universal because it is an ideology that wants to help one group of people get rid of anothr group of people. In most of the universal values, we are trying to offer guidance on how human beings should live together, rather than instead of each other.”
— Ilan Pappé, May 5, 2016
Neve Yaakov is an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, part of the Israeli-occupied territories, which happens to have been established in 1924 during the period of the British Mandate but vacated under duress in the 1948 war. It can therefore claim to be a legitimate and integral part of modern Israel.