Month: December 2017

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Israel must not divide Jerusalem

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An Israeli flag hangs outside a settler’s home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. (photo: Emil Salman)

Arbitrarily altering a city’s boundaries based on demographic forecasts is hardly the way to manage a municipality. Instead, all of East Jerusalem should be rehabilitated.

By Moshe Arens | Haaretz | Dec 3, 2017

Instead of fiddling with Jerusalem’s boundaries, the ministers and mayor should set in motion a plan to rehabilitate all East Jerusalem’s neighborhoods. That a Palestinian refugee camp, Shoafat, has existed for 50 years within Israel’s sovereign borders is inexcusable.

 

Ministers Zeev Elkin and Naftali Bennett are sponsoring legislation that would let the government change Jerusalem’s borders, making the Kafr Aqab and Shoafat refugee-camp neighborhoods that have been within the city’s  boundaries for 50 years separate municipal entities.

Both ministers have impeccable records regarding their opposition to the division of Jerusalem, but still the legislation they’re trying to move through the Knesset at lightning speed constitutes a shrinking of the municipal boundaries of Israel’s capital by separating off certain neighborhoods. Like it or not, this is a division of Jerusalem. No wonder Mayor Nir Barkat objects.

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Trump’s error on Jerusalem is a disaster for the Arab world . . . and the US too

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Palestinians protest against US plans to move its embassy to Jerusalem, Rafah, Dec 6, 2017. (photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters)

The president’s foolish move in recognizing the city as the capital of Israel will have negative consequences impossible to predict.

By Rashid Khalidi | The Guardian | Dec 6, 2017

It is now hard to see how a sustainable Palestinian-Israeli agreement is possible. True to Trump form, this is an entirely self-inflicted wound that will long echo in the annals of diplomacy. It will further diminish the already reduced standing of the US, complicating relations with allies, with Muslims and Arabs — and with people of common sense the world over.

Every time it seems Donald Trump cannot outdo himself, he does it again. Now he has announced that his administration will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, reversing nearly seven decades of American policy. This step will have multiple negative ramifications, many impossible to predict.

Jerusalem is the most important of the so-called final status issues that have been repeatedly deferred during the Israel-Palestine negotiations because of their extreme sensitivity. Trump has plowed into this imbroglio like a bull in a china shop, zeroing in on the most complex and emotional issue of all those connected to Palestine.

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Donald Trump’s Jerusalem statement is an act of diplomatic arson

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“The place that represents the nuclear core of this most radioactive conflict, the site Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif and Jews call the Temple Mount.” (photo: Jack Guez / AFP / Getty Images)

The US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel turns a naked flame on the single most combustible issue in the conflict.

By Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian | Dec 6, 2017

Here comes Trump, oblivious to precedent and indeed history — even in a place where history is a matter of life and death — stomping through this delicate thicket, trampling over every sensitivity. The risk is obvious, with every Arab government — including those loyal to Washington — now issuing sharp warnings on the perils of this move, almost all of them using the same word: “dangerous.”

Not content with taking the US to the brink of nuclear conflict with North Korea, Donald Trump is now set to apply his strategy of international vandalism to perhaps the most sensitive geopolitical hotspot in the world. With a speech scheduled for later today that’s expected to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and reaffirm a pledge to move the US embassy to the city, he is walking into a bone-dry forest with a naked flame.

For the status of Jerusalem is the most intractable issue in what is often described as the world’s most intractable conflict. It is the issue that has foiled multiple efforts at peacemaking over several decades. Both Israelis and Palestinians insist that Jerusalem must be the capital of their states, present and future, and that that status is non-negotiable.

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BREAKING NEWS: Trump recognizes Jerusalem as capital of Israel

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President Trump making his announcement at the White House with Vice President Mike Pence, Dec 6, 2017. (photo: Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images)

Defying near-universal opposition, Trump insists the move will facilitate peace.

By Julian Borger and Peter Beaumont | The Guardian | Dec 6, 2017

Q&A: Why would moving the US embassy to Jerusalem be so contentious?

Of all the issues at the heart of the enduring conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, none is as sensitive as the status of Jerusalem. The holy city has been at the centre of peace-making efforts for decades.
Seventy years ago, when the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Jerusalem was defined as a separate entity under international supervision. In the war of 1948 it was divided, like Berlin in the cold war, into western and eastern sectors under Israeli and Jordanian control respectively. Nineteen years later, in June 1967, Israel captured the eastern side, expanded the city’s boundaries and annexed it — an act that was never recognized internationally.
Israel routinely describes the city, with its Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy places, as its “united and eternal” capital. For their part, the Palestinians say East Jerusalem must be the capital of a future independent Palestinian state. The unequivocal international view, accepted by all previous US administrations, is that the city’s status must be addressed in peace negotiations.
Any move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would put the US out of step with the rest of the world, and legitimize Israeli settlement-building in the east considered illegal under international law.

Donald Trump has defied overwhelming global opposition by declaring US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but insisted that the highly controversial move would not derail his own administration’s bid to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In remarks delivered in the diplomatic reception room of the White House, Trump called his decision “a long overdue” step to advance the peace process.

“I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Trump said. “While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering.”

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Why the problem of Jerusalem is distinctly a 20th Century one

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An aerial view of Jerusalem’s Old City. (photo: Ariel Schalit / AP)

A history of the Jerusalem conflict.

By Sewell Chan and Irit Pazner Garshowitz | New York Times | Dec 5, 2017

“Paradoxically, [early Zionist immigrants] recoiled from Jerusalem, particularly the Old City — first because Jerusalem was regarded as a symbol of the diaspora, and second because the holy sites to Christianity and Islam were seen as complications that would not enable the creation of a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
— Amnon Ramon, senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research

In December 1917 — 100 years ago this month — the British general Edmund Allenby seized control of Jerusalem from its Ottoman Turkish defenders. Dismounting his horse, he entered the Old City on foot, through Jaffa Gate, out of respect for its holy status.

In the century since, Jerusalem has been fought over in varying ways, not only by Jews, Christians and Muslims but also by external powers and, of course, modern-day Israelis and Palestinians.

It is perhaps fitting that President Trump appears to have chosen this week to announce that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite concerns from leaders of Arab countries, Turkey and even close allies like France.

Conflicts over Jerusalem go back thousands of years — including biblical times, the Roman Empire and the Crusades — but the current one is a distinctly 20th-century story, with roots in colonialism, nationalism and anti-Semitism.

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Media run-up to Trump’s recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel

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Israeli flag flies overlooking the old city of Jerusalem. (photo: Abir Sultan / EPA)

Major print media coverage in anticipation of Trump’s announcement.

The New York Times:

“We believe that any action that would undermine these efforts must absolutely be avoided. A way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as a future capital of both states.”
— Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

Read the full article here →

The Washington Post:

Most important will be the language Trump uses in his announcement. If he repeats the Israeli line that Jerusalem is the “undivided” capital of Israel, Trump will run the risk of angering Palestinians who will view that as proof that the United States does not support their push for statehood.

Read the full article here →

The Guardian:

“A better prepared, less clumsy process could have produced an announcement to actually move the embassy to Jerusalem, which is where it belongs. Instead the president is leaving us half-pregnant. Israelis deserve to have their capital recognized and our embassy located there. Palestinians need to know that the capital of their state will be in East Jerusalem. Instead of being clear on both of these points, the President has chosen a purely rhetorical approach, changing nothing on the ground, but spinning up significant controversy for virtually no gain.”
— Daniel Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel

Read the full article here →

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Israelis urge UN to release “settlement blacklist”

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Construction workers begin work on the new settlement called Amichai, in Shilo Valley, West Bank, on Jun 20, 2017. (photo: Yonatan Sindel / Flash90)

A group of prominent Israelis petition the UN to maintain the Green Line no matter how hard the Netanyahu government works to erase it.

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man | +972 Magazine | Dec 3, 2017

“As loyal citizens of Israel, [we] believe that the international community has a crucial and urgent role to play in order to redress the Israel/Palestine fast deteriorating conflict. We believe that to serve that end, it is essential that the international community act against the settlement policy of the Government of Israel, which bars any resolution of this conflict.”

Over 400 Israelis, including a former attorney general, retired diplomats, ex-members of Knesset, and prominent intellectuals, sent a petition to the UN urging it to release a list of companies that do business in or with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Israel is reportedly doing “everything [it] can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day.” The UN Human Rights Council began compiling the list of companies last year and it was due to be published in March 2017, although political pressure at the time resulted in the publication date being delayed until December.

The database, or list of companies, has been referred to as a blacklist, and was one of the primary motivators behind the anti-BDS legislation currently making its way through the U.S. Congress.

The petition, authored by the Policy Working Group, points to the UN Security Council Resolution 2332, which called on the international community “to distinguish in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”

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Israel’s last chance to end the occupation

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BDS supporters protest in Paris, Oct 31, 2012. (photo: Jacques Brinon / AP)

Paradoxically, the anti-BDS bill could very well hasten the end of the repression and subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Ilana Hammerman and Dmitry Shumsky | Haretz | Dec 05, 2017

Only when all of us, men and women, Israelis who are partners in and responsible for the continuation of the occupation, begin to pay a real price for it will Israel receive a chance to be a sane and civilized country with diplomatically recognized and moral borders based on international law. Without that we will not have security or peace.

If the new bill is passed imposing a seven-year sentence on activists in the BDS movement against Israel and its products for harming the country and its foreign relations, it will mark a giant step in the constitutional revolution the right-wing nationalist government has been making in recent years.

This revolution is progressing at a terrifying pace under the patronage of a fraud that’s second to none. It’s as if the struggle for human rights (and not the attacks on them) could be considered harming the country; as if a country and its policies, citizenship and ideology were one. As if ideologies hadn’t yet brought about the destruction of countries in which power was awarded to the ideologues.

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A wary response to Trump’s expected recognition of Jerusalem

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The Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City. (photo: Bernat Armangue / AP)

President Trump is expected to break decades of precedent by declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

By David Halbfinger | New York Times | Dec 2, 2017

“Pushing this issue now, in advance of a peace process at a time when the administration has zero credibility on this issue, at a time when it wants to engage the Saudis, makes absolutely no sense. It’s a self-inflicted wound.”
— Aaron David Miller, former Mideast peace negotiator under past Republican and Democratic administrations

There were warnings of a new Palestinian uprising and calls for protests at United States embassies, dire predictions that hopes for peace would be dashed irretrievably — and expressions of relief from Israelis who have waited a half-century for the world to remove the asterisk next to this city’s name.

Yet on the whole, the responses in the region to reports that President Trump will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — something no president has done in the nearly 70 years since Israel’s founding — remained hedged, if not entirely restrained, on Saturday. Arabs and Israelis alike were impatient to see whether Mr. Trump would really do it, precisely how he would define Jerusalem, and what else he might say or do to qualify the change.

Mr. Trump’s announcement, expected in a speech on Wednesday, would amount to the not-quite fulfillment of a campaign promise to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a step for which many of Mr. Trump’s Jewish and evangelical supporters, and their allies in the Israeli right wing, have been clamoring.

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