Hope is not a strategy. Building new communities and neighborhood is. - by Caroline Glick

...We get it. The Obama administration and the EU aren’t attacking Israel because we did something wrong. They’re attacking us because they want to hurt us. That is their goal. Recognizing this sorry truth, the public elected the Likud and its coalition partners to defend our interests and our rights. Hope is not a strategy. Building new communities and neighborhoods, expanding the writ of Israeli law and curtailing the activities of subversive foreign agents is a strategy. And a good one.

Caroline Glick..
Column One/JPost..
28 January '16..

Our government is playing games with itself. And losing.

On Wednesday Chaim Levinson reported in Haaretz that for the first time in nearly two years, last week the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria approved new building plans for a small number of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Levinson also reported that last month Jerusalem’s municipal planning and building commission gave final approval to plans to build nearly 900 housing units in the southern neighborhood of Gilo. Initial approval was granted back in 2012.

But in the intervening three years, the commission refused to allow them to go forward.

From the report, we learn that the government’s critics in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria who claimed that it was barring Jewish building were right all along. Despite the government’s denials, the fact is that for at least the last year and a half, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers maintained an undeclared freeze on construction for Israeli Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

During this period, Jews have only been permitted to build in these areas either on the basis of plans that had received final approval before the unofficial freeze took effect, or in cases where refusal to approve building would have involved admitting that a freeze was in effect. So, for instance, in areas where the rights of Jews to their property in Judea and Samaria have been challenged before the Supreme Court by EU-financed Israeli NGOs like Yesh Din, the government has defended those rights and so given permission for Jews to exercise their property rights.

The government opted to enact this unofficial building freeze, and so trample the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, in the hopes of convincing the Obama administration to protect Israel from Palestinian efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.

It might have been possible to justify the government’s behavior – or at least to understand it – if it had brought about the hoped for benefits.

If President Barack Obama had responded to Netanyahu’s radical concession by burying the hatchet and supporting Israel at the UN and on the international stage more generally, then perhaps the move would have been worth it.

But that didn’t happen. Over the past 18 months, the administration – backed by much of the Israeli Left – has escalated its anti-Israel policies and rhetoric. Even as the government curtailed the property rights of Israeli Jews in the hopes of appeasing him, Obama along with Secretary of State John Kerry has led the charge in wrongly blaming Israel for the absence of peace with the Palestinians.

Obama and Kerry have engaged in acts of deliberate libel by falsely accusing Israel of institutional racism against the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

The healthy natural act of a sovereign nation on its ancestral land

...Building in Jerusalem is not a “proper response” to “the establishment of the Palestinian terror cabinet.” Building in Jerusalem is simply the healthy natural act of a sovereign nation on its ancestral land, and it will benefit Jews and Arabs, and all those who actually want to live in peace. There is no small-minded tit-for-tat in the rebuilding of the long-awaited Jewish state, and we must strive to make the message of our organic relationship to this land resonate louder.

Yishai Fleisher..
Eye on Zion/JPost..
19 June '14..

In recent days, after the announcement of the Hamas-Fatah union, Israel was quick to announce new building projects in Jerusalem and Judea. Immediately, this was interpreted as revenge and punishment for Palestinian misdeeds.

A New York Times headline screamed: “Israel expands settlements to rebuke Palestinians,” and the article itself was even harsher: “Israel says it is moving ahead with the planning and construction of hundreds of Jewish settlement homes, as retaliation against the Palestinian government... By presenting the new building in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a punishment over the newly constituted government of the Palestinians, who regard that territory as theirs for part of a future state, Israel set itself further apart from international consensus and drew criticism from foreign allies, including Britain, France and the US.”

So the three key words that describe Israel’s building efforts are “rebuke,” “retaliation” and “punishment.”

Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel’s own comments concerning the matter were cited as supposed proof that Israel is building just to spite the Palestinians. Ariel said: “I congratulate the decision to give a proper Zionist response to the establishment of the Palestinian terror cabinet.”

Now, did you hear Ariel say “rebuke” or “retaliation?” Did he present the building as a “punishment?” No, he said “proper response” (in Hebrew, teshuva holemet). But response does not mean punishment! For example: are first-responders, first-punishers? When a child is waiting for a response from a parent, is she waiting only for a punishment? What Ariel meant by “proper response” is simple: Just as the newly empowered Hamas wishes to destroy the Jewish state (“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it” – Hamas charter) Israel’s answer to that challenge is to keep building, and keep living.

Instead of punishment, the term “proper response” in this case was meant to be a life-affirming reaction, and the rest of Ariel’s statement makes that clear: “The right and duty of the State of Israel to build across the country in order to lower the housing prices is unquestionable, and I believe these tenders are just the beginning.” Does lowering the price of apartments sound like a punishment, retaliation or rebuke? Obviously not, but that was somehow missed by The New York Times.

This may seem like semantics, but underneath these semantics lies the very heart of the war against Israel.

To impute motives of retribution for Israeli building is to subtly undercut and distort the real motivation that Jews have in the Land of Israel in the first place. Israel is not building houses and kindergartens, getting married and having babies, as a punishment for any action or non-action of any other country, people or entity.

We are having babies and building in our capital city, Jerusalem, and in our ancestral highland, Judea, because, for us, it is the most natural and organic thing to do.

(Video) Building in Judea and Samaria - Building on solid ground

Moetzet Yesha..
10 October '12..






Judea and Samaria - Building on solid ground

This video reveals important facts about legal building in Judea & Samaria. Watch and share with friends!



Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Oeskxb-KrGs

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Building Israel

Israelis should return to construction.


JPost Editorial
15 June '10

In yet another attempt to solve Israel’s chronic housing shortage, the Treasury this week launched a program aimed at making more land available. The goal is to spark a resurgence of housing construction by issuing 140,000 new building permits in 2011 and 2012.

The Treasury’s program will make it more difficult for intransigent tenants to stop new projects and make it easier to rezone fallow land once used for agriculture. The Treasury’s is just one of many building reform initiatives that have been launched in recent months by the Interior Ministry, Bank of Israel governor and the Construction and Housing Ministry.

All aspire to solve an endemic market failure: Housing prices have steadily risen, yet demand continues to exceed supply. Housing prices are up 40% since the end of 2007 and 21% in the last year. This should have translated into a building boom as contractors scrambled to cash in. But building starts have remained static at about 30,000, lower than the natural annual growth of households, which is 35,000 to 40,000. This has been going on for at least five years.

WHILE THE different reforms deal with the myriad ailments of Israel’s housing market, they ignore one important component. Who precisely will build those 140,000 new housing units in the Treasury’s plan?

The Association of Contractors and Builders (ACBI) has been complaining that there is a shortage of workers in the most labor-intensive aspects of construction, such as pouring concrete and laying floor tiles, fields presently dominated by foreign workers and Palestinians. As a result, instead of it taking 12 months to build a house, it now takes 30 months. And the situation is about to get worse.

At the end of the month, the 8,000 limit on foreign construction workers – most of whom come from China – will be cut to 5,000. The plan is to phase them out altogether by 2012. Contractors say that stiff fines and government crackdowns have practically eliminated illegally employed foreigners.

Back in April, meanwhile, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced that by the end of the year Palestinians must stop working in settlements in the West Bank – defined to include Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem – or face up to five years in prison and a fine of $14,000. In 2009, there were about 25,000 Palestinians legally employed in the building sector; many thousands more are employed illegally.

(Read full editorial)

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