By Jew-Free Jerusalem
FrontPageMagazine.com
"The rocket fire at the South is an obstacle [to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations], and so is construction in the settlements," said German chancellor Angela Merkel this week during her three-day visit to Israel.
A lot of anniversaries are in the air—Israel’s upcoming 60th anniversary, which Merkel’s visit was meant in part to mark; also, this month, the 70th anniversary of the German-Austrian Anschluss (unification) that was a major milestone on the road to World War II and the Holocaust.
Merkel’s words don’t indicate much progress in moral understanding over the 70 years; they draw a clear equivalence between attempts to indiscriminately kill Jewish civilians and the building of Jewish housing.
Put differently, her words reflect a modern-day diplomatic norm from which Germany hardly dissents: one no longer just condemns attempts to murder Jewish civilians (except, possibly, in the immediate aftermath of an attack when blood is still fresh on the ground) without an "even-handed twitch" of simultaneously condemning what has been given the status of an equivalent Israeli offense.
Israel’s ever-obsequious prime minister Ehud Olmert tried to assure Merkel that Israel no longer builds new settlements but only allows "natural growth" in existing ones, the latest "natural-growth" flap having centered on Israel’s plans to build 400 new homes in Givat Ze’ev, a community of 10,000 that is 5 kilometers north of Jerusalem.
Olmert, though, was dodging the fact that even Israel’s building within Jerusalem, as in the case of the Har Homa neighborhood, now draws international ire. Har Homa is in "East Jerusalem" or the part of the city Israel formally annexed after the 1967 war. In the previous nineteen years life in Israeli West Jerusalem was made hell by sniper fire and Jews were denied access to Jordanian-occupied East Jerusalem while their holy sites and synagogues there were destroyed and desecrated.
But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an official who is a good deal more important to Israel than Merkel, recently joined in with the EU and the UN and said "Har Homa is a settlement" and "the United States doesn’t make a distinction" between "settlement activity" in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
By 2008 standards, then, Yitzhak Rabin shortly before his assassination and George W. Bush four years ago were radical hawks when it came to Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice lines or what became known as the 1967 "Green Line."
In his last speech to the Knesset on October 5, 1995—one month before he was assassinated and two years into the "Oslo process" in which he had gone along with the Israeli doves—Rabin set forth his view of where that process should ultimately lead:
…these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:
a. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev—as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty….
b. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.
c. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the "Green Line," prior to the Six Day War.
d. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif [in Gaza].
As for Bush, he sounded a similar if less explicit theme in a letter he sent to then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon on April 14, 2004. Sharon was by then planning to uproot Gush Katif and evacuate Gaza, but he touted this passage of Bush’s letter as a major diplomatic achievement signaling that, as recompense, Israel would be able to keep crucial parts of the West Bank:
As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UN [Security Council] Resolutions 242 and 338.
In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Both Rabin and Bush were essentially reiterating what had been the legal basis for a final settlement since UN Security Council Resolution 242 was adopted in the wake of the 1967 war. As Eugene Rostow, the late U.S. legal scholar and State Department official who took part in drafting 242, explained in the New Republic in 1991:
…The British Mandate recognized the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" in the whole of the Mandated territory…. the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan river, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors. And perhaps not even then….
…This reading of Resolution 242 has always been the keystone of American policy…. President Reagan said, "…in the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again."
...the Jews have the same right to settle [in the West Bank] as they have to settle in Haifa. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were never parts of Jordan, and Jordan’s attempt to annex the West Bank was not generally recognized and has now been abandoned. The two parcels of land are parts of the Mandate that have not yet been allocated to Jordan, to Israel, or to any other state, and are a legitimate subject for discussion.
But the world of 1991, 1995, and even 2004 is not the same as the world of 2008—in which oil has hit $100 a barrel, the Gulf states are buying up more and more of the U.S. economy, and Israeli leaders are so pusillanimous that the Oslo-era, Labor prime minister Yitzhak Rabin appears, as noted, super-assertive in comparison.
In such a world the security needs mentioned by Reagan, the Jewish rights mentioned by Rostow, or even the "realities" mentioned by Bush no longer have any currency and anyone who refers to them is ignored as a presumed fanatic. Instead—whether one is Angela Merkel emitting pieties about German-Israeli relations, Condi Rice in her latest pilgrimage to the capital of civilization in Ramallah, et al.—what counts is bowing to the demands of Dar al-Islam and keeping the Jews from building even one more house in still-undefiled parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself.
(P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv.)
