Can you imagine? The BBC’s narrative on ‘East Jerusalem’ omits relevant context - by Hadar Sela

...Despite its public purpose obligation to provide audiences with “impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them” the BBC has not produced any content relating to the failure of the agreement that the Palestinians signed over two decades ago to guarantee freedom of access for Jews to religious sites under the control of the Palestinian Authority and to safeguard those sites. However, the BBC’s copious multi-platform amplification of the simplistic narrative according to which a Palestinian capital in ‘East Jerusalem’ is the “formula for peace” continues apace.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
19 January '18..

Although the BBC has been telling its audiences that “the Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state” for many years, since the US president’s announcement of recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on December 6th 2017 that messaging has been promoted on a variety of BBC platforms on an almost daily basis.

BBC portrayals of the topic usually include the narrative seen in a frequently reused backgrounder on Jerusalem produced by Yolande Knell in which audiences were led to believe that a Palestinian capital in “east Jerusalem” is an already agreed component of the two-state solution rather than a topic to be discussed in final status negotiations.

“Of course, Palestinians see things starkly differently. They want east Jerusalem as their capital.

And that’s part of the long-standing international formula for peace here, known as the “two-state solution”.

Knell also portrayed the two-state solution in terms that dovetail with the PLO’s interpretation of that term.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Cleaning-up and sewing-up eastern Jerusalem - by David M. Weinberg

...The application of de facto sovereignty and governance on the ground is the core of political action that can keep Jerusalem whole. The struggle for sovereignty in eastern Jerusalem has transitioned from ‘Jerusalem on High’ – meaning, high-powered political summits in Oslo and Annapolis, to ‘Jerusalem of Below’ – meaning, the decent conduct of daily life in the city for Arab and Jewish residents alike.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Jerusalem..
16 November '17..
Link: https://www.davidmweinberg.com/2017/11/16/cleaning-sewing-eastern-jerusalem/

This week, Jerusalem municipal officials and workers swept overnight into A-Tur on the Mount of Olives to clean up the neighborhood.

Under police protection, they hauled away abandoned vehicles, piles of garbage, and rubble from ruined buildings. They took down dangerously placed signs and illegal sheds. They erased graffiti, fixed broken street lights, and painted road safety markings. They enforced business codes by confiscating merchandise placed in public areas without permits, checked for violations of safety rules, issued fines for illegally commandeered parking spaces, and more.

The police also combed through the neighborhood with lists in hand to confirm that people under house arrest were really at home. They found an illegally held M1 rifle, and arrested 20 Arab residents of east Jerusalem suspected of throwing rocks and firebombs at civilians and police.

A similar “sweep and clean” overnight campaign in Isawiyah, conducted last month by tax and building code officials, bailiffs and police, culminated in 51 arrests.

“The campaign is designed to firmly handle anybody involved in criminal offenses, [violations of] public order and terrorism, while at the same time improving the lives of the regular, law-abiding residents of the neighborhood by arresting people who violate public order and break the law,” the police said in a statement.

At a conference on the “Challenges of United Jerusalem” conducted by the new Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Jerusalem District police commander Maj. Gen. Yoram Halevy said these operations are meant to create balance.

“We want to show the residents of eastern Jerusalem that those who’ve done wrong will be treated as such and those who’ve done good will be rewarded,” he said. He said this was part of the implementation of a new strategy by the Jerusalem District Police to shift from only “chasing the bad guys” to also “nurturing the good guys,” so that the latter “can help the police help them.”

It is quite clear to me that there is more to this strategy than just “nurturing the good guys.” The enforcement operations are clearly part of a broader plan to ensure effective and equitable Israeli rule over a united Jerusalem. They aim to push back against proposals for cutting Arab neighborhoods out of the Jerusalem municipality or for handing them over to the Palestinian Authority.

Memo to NPR: Jewish Ties to E. Jerusalem Didn’t Begin in 1967

Memo to NPR: The 19 years that Jerusalem was divided are a mere blip in the city’s and Jewish people’s thousands of years of history.

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting..
16 November '16..

National Public Radio takes a nice look at the issue of relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, Daniel Estrin’s dispatch assumes Jewish ties to eastern Jerusalem only began in 1967.

The western part of Jerusalem is almost entirely Jewish. The eastern part of the city was entirely Arab when Israel captured it in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Many Israeli Jews have moved into the eastern part of the city, and Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, though no other country recognizes this.

Talk about twisted context.

(Continue to Full Post and Video)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Sorry Folks, But Jew-Free Jerusalem Neighborhoods Won’t Bring Peace

...It wasn’t settlements that stopped them from grabbing independence but the fact that recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish no matter where its borders are drawn was still anathema in their political culture. Indeed, when Hamas, which commands the support of the majority of Palestinians and far more than the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas, speaks of the “occupation,” they are not referring to the West Bank but to all of pre-1967 Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
03 October '14..

At first it seemed as if Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu escaped his meeting in the White House with President Obama yesterday without a renewal of their long running feud. But before the day was over, it was clear that the administration’s predilection for picking pointless fights with the Israelis hasn’t faded away even as the president appears to be more interested in fighting ISIS than in brokering Middle East peace. By focusing once again on Jewish building in Jerusalem and representing Israel’s actions as an obstacle, the U.S. was not only allowing itself to be distracted from the real problems in the Middle East. By reaffirming its opposition to Jews living in part of their capital, the Americans are also adopting a standard that will make real peace impossible.

As Eugene Kontorovich wrote earlier today, the willingness of the Obama administration to use the essentially deceptive terminology of marginal Israeli left-wing groups about settlements distorts the discussion. If you count every apartment built as a “new settlement” you get the impression that Israel is building hundreds, if not thousands of new neighborhoods and towns every year. In fact all they are doing is building homes in existing Jewish communities, the vast majority of which are located in areas that would, even under the parameters that have been suggested by the Obama administration, remain inside Israel even in the event of a peace treaty with the Palestinians.

But the arguments raised yesterday by the administration about new Jewish homes in Jerusalem—which echoed widespread condemnation of these projects by most of the international community—is troubling for more than just the usual reasons. If President Obama and his State Department truly believe that the presence of Jews in some neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem is an obstacle to peace that must be removed in order for an accord to be reached, then what they are doing is tacitly endorsing an Arab demand for Jew-free zones in the ancient capital as well as a Judenrein Palestine.

West Longs for "Judenfrei" Zones in Jerusalem

P. David Hornik..
frontpagemag.com..
27 December '12..

Israel plans to step up the building of residences within the settlement blocs and—drawing particular ire—in parts of Jerusalem that were under Jordanian occupation from 1949 to 1967. The Jerusalem plans include housing for both Jews and Arabs.

In this holiday season, those plans should be cause for rejoicing instead of heightened rebukes. The city’s status as a hub of three religions, and also of tolerance, pluralism, and across-the-board demographic growth, is being strengthened.

Instead, official Western reactions have been harshly critical (reports here, here, and here).

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: “We are deeply disappointed that Israel insists on continuing this pattern of provocative action.” The French Foreign Ministry called the building plans “a provocation that further undermines…trust…and leads us to question Israel’s commitment to the two-state solution.” British foreign secretary William Hague called the plans “a serious provocation and an obstacle to peace.”

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton even hinted at repercussions, saying the EU would “closely monitor the situation…and act accordingly.”

And 14 of the 15 countries on the UN Security Council—with the U.S. as the only exception—issued condemnations as well. Four of them—Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal—said in a joint statement that they were “extremely concerned by, and strongly opposed, the plans…all settlement activity, including in east Jerusalem, must cease immediately.”

It should be noted that, except the U.S., all of the above mentioned countries either voted aye or abstained in last month’s UN General Assembly vote conferring a watered-down form of statehood on the Palestinian Authority. It was partly in reaction to the Palestinians’ move, which blatantly violated the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords that the EU once sanctioned, that Israel announced the new building plans.

Israel, though, couldn’t win. It couldn’t persuade the European states to oppose the Palestinian move; and once it reacted to the move, it was roundly condemned.

Israel was particularly disappointed by Germany’s abstention in the UN vote, after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government had seemed to be intending to vote nay. Germany, as already mentioned, then joined three other countries in demanding that even “East Jerusalem”—where 200,000 Jews now live, 40 percent of Jerusalem’s total Jewish population—be treated as a Jew-free zone.

Beyond these specific points, though, stands the ongoing spectacle of the world’s leading Western powers seeming to pine for a redivided Jerusalem, this time with the Palestinians ruling the Jew-free part. Even if a Palestinian sovereign entity were to arise in the West Bank, “Ramallah,” as David Solway notes in his new book, “…is a good enough Palestinian capital.” Why, then, the insistence on East Jerusalem?

CAMERA - Citizen Klein and the East Jerusalem Citizenship Stats

East Jerusalem Arabs outside the Ministry
of Interior. Increased numbers are applying
for, and receiving, Israeli citizenship
(Photo by AP)

TS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
30 May '12..

Menachem Klein, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University who in the past has accused Israel of practicing apartheid and following a "classical colonial approach" in Jerusalem, of all places, the Jewish people's historic capital, continues to mislead on Jerusalem. In Ha'aretz, he wrote May 25 that following Israel's annexation of eastern Jerusalem after the 1967 war:

it did not automatically grant Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. Up until the early 2000s, they could apply for citizen's status - though few did - but since Israel amended its citizenship law, it's almost impossible for them to attain it. (Emphasis added)

Further on, he reiterates his assertion that citizenship is practically unattainable for Arabs living in eastern Jerusalem:

But should they desire to obtain Israeli citizenship, their way is almost completely blocked because the government is worried by the demographic implications this would have for the country being a Jewish state and Jerusalem being its capital. (Emphasis added.)

It is unclear what amendment to the citizenship law Klein has in mind, but the B'Tselem board member would have benefited from checking B'Tselem's own site:

Levick - The Guardian’s Chris McGreal and the moral logic of a Jew-free “Eastern” Jerusalem

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
17 October '11

Before commenting on the latest report by the Guardian’s Chris McGreal, “Israel plans new settlement of 2600 that will isolate Arab East Jerusalem“, an understanding of the designation “Arab East Jerusalem” is in order.

This isn’t, of course, a comprehensive history, but represents important context sorely lacking in the Guardian’s frequent misrepresentations about issues pertaining to Jerusalem.

Around the year 1010 B.C.E., King David made the Jerusalem the administrative capital of Israel and brought the Ark of the Covenant to the city. It is believed that David’s son, Solomon, built the first Jewish Temple as a permanent resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, a place which would become the focus of Jewish veneration from that point to the present.

In 597 B.C.E. the Babylonian army captured Jerusalem, deported thousands of Jews, and razed the city.

In 560 B.C.E., the Persians conquered “Palestine” and told the Jews they could return to their homeland, and rebuild their Temple. The Second Temple was completed in 516 B.C. Over the next 150 years Jews rebuilt Jerusalem and developed the surrounding areas.

In 332 B.C.E., the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, became Palestine’s new ruler.

In 167 B.C.E., Jews rose up and, three years later, Jerusalem was recaptured from the Greeks and the Temple restored, an event that gave birth to the holiday of Chanukah.

After 76 years, the Romans wrested control of Jerusalem and the rest of Judea from the Jews.

Under King Herod, the area of the Temple Mount was doubled and surrounded with four retaining walls, including the area known as the Kotel or Western Wall. In 66 A.D., after a failed Jewish revolt against Roman rule, The Romans laid siege to the city and in the year 70 A.D. destroyed the Second Temple.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, Christianity began to rise, until the Islamic conquest in 633 – the beginning of a 1,300-year span during which more than ten different empires were to rule in the Holy Land prior to the British occupation after World War I.

The Ottoman Turks took control of Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The Ottoman Turks were defeated in World War I and Palestine was captured by the British, who subsequently were awarded a mandate from the League of Nations to rule the land.

When the United Nations took up the Palestine question in 1947, it recommended that all of Jerusalem be internationalized. The Jewish Agency agreed to accept internationalization, while the Arab states were opposed to the plan, as they were to the rest of the partition plan.

In May 1948, upon Israel’s declaration of Independence, Arab armies invaded the newly created Jewish state and (by the end of the war, per the 1949 armistice lines) Jordan occupied east Jerusalem, dividing the city for the first time in its history, and driving thousands of Jews — whose families had lived in the city for centuries — into exile.

For the next 19 years, from 1948-67, the city was split between Israeli and Jordanian control, a period which represents the only time the city has been divided in its history.

This is what is meant by the extremely misleading refrain by Guardian reporters (and others in the MSM) of “Arab East Jerusalem“.

Jews living in the Jordanian controlled section of Jerusalem were expelled and all Jews were denied access to the Western Wall. Jordan also subsequently desecrated Jewish holy place and all attempted to erase all traces of Jewish history in the city. Fifty-eight Jerusalem synagogues — some centuries old — were destroyed.

(Read full "The Guardian’s Chris McGreal and the moral logic of a Jew-free “Eastern” Jerusalem")

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Pollock - What Do the Arabs of East Jerusalem Really Want?

David Pollock
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Published September 2011
Vol. 11, No. 14
7 September 2011

Click here for original link

- According to face-to-face surveys conducted according to the highest international standards, more Palestinians in east Jerusalem would prefer to become citizens of Israel rather than citizens of a new Palestinian state. In addition, 40 percent said they would probably or definitely move in order to live under Israeli rather than Palestinian rule.

- 44 percent of the Palestinians in Jerusalem say they are very, or at least somewhat, satisfied with their standard of living. This is a very high percentage compared to other populations in the Arab world. Only about 30 percent sympathize with either Fatah or Hamas or with the Israeli Arab Islamic movement. Politics is not a major preoccupation.

- Three-quarters of east Jerusalem Arabs are at least a little concerned, and more than half are more than a little concerned, that they would lose their ability to write and speak freely if they became citizens of a Palestinian state rather than remaining under Israeli control.

- Significantly, 41 percent thought that the armed conflict probably or definitely would continue even after a peace agreement, and this is from the most moderate population of Palestinians. Only a third say that a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence backed by the UN would have a positive effect on their lives. Two-thirds say that such a unilateral step would have no positive effect.

- For people who tend to assume that a fair and practical solution for the Jerusalem issue is for the Arab neighborhoods to become part of Palestine and the Jewish neighborhoods to become part of Israel, these findings suggest that this could be somewhat problematic from the point of view of the people who actually live in east Jerusalem.

The "Arab Spring": The Eruption of Public Opinion

All around the Middle East we see the eruption of public opinion as an important, and perhaps even a decisive, factor in the politics of various Arab countries. For the first time in recent memory, the ordinary people in these countries are becoming empowered to change the course of their own governments. This indicates how vital it is for us to try to understand and measure not just what the politicians say, but what the people think.

In Egypt during the revolution, in cooperation with Pechter Middle East Polls, we used Arab interviewers to conduct a telephone poll in Cairo and Alexandria at the very moment that thousands of Egyptians were out in the streets demanding the overthrow of Mubarak. We found that the main reasons for the Egyptian revolution were internal economic issues, not issues of Islam, America, Israel, or any foreign policy issues, or even political issues such as democracy or freedom. The issues were more about economic opportunity, inequality, corruption and abuses, and the ineffectiveness of Egypt's government to provide for its own people's basic needs. This is what motivated the people in Egypt to overthrow their government.

Ceren: Obama’s East Jerusalem Stance Rewards 1948 Ethnic Cleansing

Omri Ceren
Commentary/Contentions
06 June '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/06/obamas-east-jerusalem-stance-rewards-1948-ethnic-cleansing/

Last month the State Department weirdly declared that Jerusalem is separate from Israel. This month the Obama administration declined to move the U.S. embassy to Israel’s capital. Jonathan decsribes the notification as a symbol of Obama’s hostility to a united Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority crowed that “the world and the U.S. don’t recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” a followup to their calls for Arab “resistance” throughout the city.

You’d expect at least the PA to be underwhelmed, since Presidents Clinton and Bush also used to issue twice-a-year notifications declining to move the embassy. That’s certainly what Obama’s defenders are pointing out. What they’re leaving unsaid—in a rhetorical and argumentative move that neatly repeats the line that they took during the “1967 borders” dust-up—is that previous Presidents also included wording implying that the embassy would eventually be moved. Obama’s statement removed that wording, leaving only the anti-Israel part of the statement intact.

Denying Israel’s right to its united capital, of course, rests upon the idea that East Jerusalem is some kind of “settlement.” That’s the position the President took when he demanded a halt to Israeli construction in the eastern part of the city, forcing the Palestinians to follow suit and bringing the peace process to a grinding halt. It ignores how Jews have indisputably been the majority in Jerusalem since at least 1853, to saying nothing of the ancient heritage of Jewish Jerusalem. Instead, it picks out the brief period between 1949 to 1967, when Jordan ethnically cleansed East Jerusalem of Jews to interrupt a continuous 1,000-year Jewish presence.

Taking the Palestinian position means installing that atypical 18-year historical blip as the baseline for negotiations. It’s a strange choice even for someone with pretensions toward being even-handed between the victims and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. It means siding with and rewarding Israel’s Arab enemies, who aimed for exactly this goal when they leveled the Jewish Quarter:

Colonel Abdullah el Tell, local commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, with whom Mordechai Weingarten negotiated the surrender terms, described the destruction of the Jewish Quarter, in his Memoirs: “The operations of calculated destruction were set in motion. . . . I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty. . . . I embarked, therefore, on the shelling of the Quarter with mortars, creating harassment and destruction. . . . Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it. . . . As the dawn of Friday, May 28, 1948, was about to break, the Jewish Quarter emerged convulsed in a black cloud—a cloud of death and agony. . . .”


The Jordanian commander who led the operation is reported to have told his superiors: “For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”

The Jordanians then went on to destroy 34 out of the 35 ancient synagogues in the Jewish Quarter and to use them as hen-houses, to desecrate the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives and to use the gravestones as latrines, and to deny Jews access to the Western Wall and to turn the courtyard into a garbage dump. But because they succeeded in doing that for almost 20 whole years—in contrast to 1,000 years of continuous Jewish life—the Obama administration insists that the Jewish State needs to cede portions of East Jerusalem to a future Palestinian entity on demographic grounds. Very even-handed!

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BBC Fights For an Arab West Jerusalem

Simon Plosker
Honest Reporting/Backspin
29 May '11

http://honestreporting.com/bbc-fights-for-an-arab-west-jerusalem/

The BBC is so fond of referring to “Arab East Jerusalem” to make the point that this part of the city should be a homogenous demographic that doesn’t include Jews. But what happens when the BBC visits the western part of Jerusalem?

In this video, the BBC reports from Lifta, an Arab village abandoned in 1948. Many Jerusalem residents will be familiar with the area in question as it is located at the western entrance to the city and is visible from some of the main highways in the area. The BBC report refers to Lifta’s “exquisite mosque”, a subtle ploy to imply some deep spiritual and living breathing connection to the village as well as to presumably induce negative feelings towards anyone who might interfere with a house of worship.

However, any observer can see that all that is left of this village are tumbling down stone structures that have been left untouched for decades and what may have been a mosque is nothing more than an empty edifice. Lifta is also known as an area whose crumbling structures are used by criminals and drug users seeking somewhere quiet and off the beaten track to engage in unsavory pursuits.

It also happens to be within a few minutes walk from Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, International Convention Center and many Jewish neighborhoods and is clearly within the 1949 Armistice Lines and part of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty before the reunification of the city in 1967.

Does the BBC reporter not see the gross hypocrisy of promoting the opinions of a former Lifta resident who complains that he is unable to live in his former home while complaining that Jews from around the world could live there instead? After all, the BBC is so quick to parrot the line that the eastern part of Jerusalem belongs to the Arabs.

So if the BBC recognizes “Arab East Jerusalem”, why does it not recognize a “Jewish West Jerusalem”? The BBC isn’t prepared to recognize a united, undivided city but it still tries to have its cake and eat it.

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(Video) Jerusalem: The Media Myth of Two Cities

HonestReportingVideo
May "11


The history of Jerusalem did not start in 1967. Thousands of years of Jewish history took place in what is now called "Arab East Jerusalem." Only when the Jewish residents were driven from their homes in 1948 was the city divided between East and West.

This video shows the reality of Jerusalem today and includes interviews from survivors of the fall of Jerusalem.



To discuss the issue of Jerusalem, join our Facebook Group "The History of Jerusalem Did Not Start in 1967."

To read more about the issue of Jerusalem, check out the Jerusalem resources section of the HonestReporting website: http://www.honestreporting.com.

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News the HP Doesn't Cover: East Jerusalem Residents Prefer Israel

Matt
Huffington Post Monitor
06 May '11
Posted before Shabbat


http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/05/news-hp-doesnt-cover-east-jerusalem.html

In what seems like a weekly event, yet another poll has come out of Jerusalem in which east Jerusalem Palestinians are polled about their residency status if a Palestinian state was created and east Jerusalem was part of it. The highest percentage of those surveyed indicated that they would not want to be in east Jerusalem if the Palestinians are given control over it:

"A recent survey conducted by Pechter Middle East Polls, in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations, ahead of the possible Palestinian bid for statehood in September, revealed that given a choice, the majority of east Jerusalem residents would prefer to remain Israelis.


The survey sampled 1,039 Palestinians living in all 19 neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, and was supervised by Dr. David Pollock.


Perhaps the most striking finding regarded the residents' citizenship preference, after a two-state solution is reached: When asked if they preferred to become citizens of Palestine or remain citizens of Israel, only 30% chose Palestinian citizenship.


Thirty five percent chose Israeli citizenship and 35% declined to answer or said they didn’t know.


When asked if they would move to a different home inside Israel if their neighborhood became part of Palestine,40% said they were "likely to move to Israel" and 27% said they were "likely to move to Palestine" if their neighborhood became part of Israel...Also, 44% of east Jerusalem's residents seem content with their standard of living, while 31% said they were not content with it. "

Interesting findings, once again it seems like Israel isn't exactly the apartheid state the haters pretend it is.

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When Everything Is “Genocide” or “Ethnic Cleansing,” Nothing Is

Evelyn Gordon
Commentary/Contentions
22 March '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/22/when-everything-is-%E2%80%9Cgenocide%E2%80%9D-or-%E2%80%9Cethnic-cleansing%E2%80%9D-nothing-is/

It’s hard to argue with the Israeli diplomat who called Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestinian rights who accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” an “embarrassment to the United Nations” yesterday. But the problem isn’t that Falk lies, or even that he does so with the UN’s imprimatur. The real problem is the larger trend he represents: The self-proclaimed “human rights community” increasingly treats minor issues as indistinguishable from major crimes.

What enraged Aharon Leshno Yaar was Falk’s demonstrably false claim that Israel practices ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem. The Arab population of Jerusalem quadrupled between1967 (when Israel annexed East Jerusalem) and 2008, from 68,600 to 268,600, while the city’s Jewish population rose by a factor of 2.5. Consequently, Arabs now constitute 35 percent of Jerusalem’s population, up from 26 percent in 1967. Since ethnic cleansing is normally meant to reduce the target population, if Israel were actually attempting such cleansing, it is surely the most incompetent ethnic cleanser in human history.

But to Falk, the fact that Jews build houses in East Jerusalem at all, along with evictions of Palestinian tenants of Jewish-owned buildings for nonpayment of rent, also constitutes “ethnic cleansing” — and never mind that the city’s Palestinian population continues to grow in both absolute and proportional terms.

By defining “ethnic cleansing” so broadly as to even include tenant evictions, Falk is essentially equating such evictions to events like the Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, and demanding that the world be equally outraged by both. But humans have a limited capacity for outrage, and the international community has a limited capacity to intervene. Thus demanding international intervention in cases like this actually reduces the likelihood of intervention in genuine cases of ethnic cleansing like Srebrenica — i.e., in precisely those cases where the victims most need help.

Granted, Falk is widely seen as a crackpot outside the UN; even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had to rebuke his promotion of 9/11 conspiracy theories.

But he is far from unique. In 2005, for instance, the International Association of Genocide Scholars split because European scholars objected to the Americans’ insistence that the term “genocide” retain some connection to its original meaning of mass murder. The European breakaways, as the Forward noted last month, define genocide so broadly as to see “genocide victims everywhere, from the Aborigines in Australia to the Albanians uprooted from Kosovo” — including, naturally, “the expulsion and killing of Arabs in Palestine during Israel’s War of Independence.”

That, frankly, is ridiculous. Wars, in which both sides fight, always entail casualties, but every war isn’t genocide. Indeed, the Palestinian death toll in 1948 was extremely low — an estimated 2,800-4,000 ( compared to Israel’s 6,400). Second, the flight of refugees, or even their expulsion, is not equivalent to murder. Refugees who flee or are expelled are still alive. Genocide victims aren’t.

But this warped definition definitely isn’t harmless. When crimes like genocide or ethnic cleansing are defined too broadly, people lose the ability to distinguish real evil from minor offenses. When everything is “genocide,” nothing is; the world will simply shut its ears to the cacophony of claims arising from all sides, unable to distinguish the important from the trivial. And then, the true victims will be slaughtered with impunity as the world stands idly by.

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Twisting the Geneva Convention

Carl
Israel Matzav
18 January '11

In the bizarre world of the 'Palestinians,' if you sell me your house and I move in to it, the Israeli government is displacing you in violation of the Geneva Convention, at least if you're a 'Palestinian,' I am a Jew and we are in Jerusalem.

UN agencies and EU officials in the occupied Palestinian territory are calling for the implementation of international humanitarian law to protect the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem from forced displacement.

UN, Palestinian Authority and EU officials say East Jerusalem is occupied territory, requiring protection of the civilian population by international humanitarian law, a legal framework which prohibits population transfer into and out of the territory.

Israel says property transfers in East Jerusalem are private transactions governed by Israeli local municipal law. Today East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in 1967, is governed by Israeli basic law.

(Read full "Twisting the Geneva Convention")

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Memo to EU Consuls: Eastern Jerusalem Palestinians Want Israeli Citizenship

Honest Reporting/Backspin
12 January '11

A poll of Palestinians living in eastern Jerusalem finds that an awful lot of them would like to have Israeli citizenship.

I couldn't find the results at the Pechter Mideast Polls, but Jackson Diehl discusses the numbers. An estimated 270,000 Palestinians live in eastern Jerusalem. Here's a vertical rundown:

• "30 percent said they would prefer to be citizens of Palestine in a two-state solution . . ."

• "35 percent said they would choose Israeli citizenship . . ."

• "Forty percent said they would consider moving to another neighborhood in order to become a citizen of Israel rather than Palestine . . ."

• ". . . 54 percent said that if their neighborhood were assigned to Israel, they would not move to Palestine."

Diehl's response:

The reasons for these attitudes are pretty understandable, even healthy. Arabs say they prefer Israel's jobs, schools, health care and welfare benefits to those of a Palestinian state -- and their nationalism is not strong enough for them to set aside these advantages in order to live in an Arab country. The East Jerusalemites don't much love Israel -- they say they suffer from discrimination. But they seem to like what it has to offer.

(Read full "Memo to EU Consuls: Eastern Jerusalem Palestinians Want Israeli Citizenship")

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Et Tu Europa?

Hadar Sela
The Propagandist
11 January '11

A recent document drawn up by the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises some worrying issues, not least the proposal for organised boycotts. Readers will doubtless notice the report’s reliance upon information gleaned from politically motivated NGOs such as UN OCHA and ACRI, which set the tone for the cavalier repetition of numerous untruths such as;

“Successive Israeli governments have pursued a policy of transferringJewish population into the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law.” (my emphasis)

It is also blatantly apparent that despite the fact that the status of Jerusalem is supposed to be the subject of long-awaited negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the EU Heads of mission seem intent upon creating their own ‘facts on the ground’, together with a flawed narrative which seeks to over-ride any negotiation process.

However, the report’s ‘action plan’ is possibly its most disturbing aspect in that it includes outright initiatives for boycott of Israeli businesses and institutions as well as specific calls for intervention in the affairs of the host state.

(Read full "Et Tu Europa?")

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Jerusalem Marathon route changed

Carl
Israel Matzav
02 January '10

Adidas has caved in to the threat of an international boycott, the Jerusalem City Council has caved in to Adidas, and the Jerusalem Marathon will be rerouted not to take in any areas of Jerusalem that were liberated in 1967, including the Jewish neighborhoods in those parts of the city.

The Jerusalem Municipality had decided to change the course of the Jerusalem Marathon. The new route will not include running paths in areas of Jerusalem that were added to the city after 1967. Last month, two Meretz members of the Jerusalem City Council asked Adidas, which I sponsoring the marathon, to pull out of its sponsorship, threatening to start an international campaign accusing the company of supporting “occupation.”

(Read full "Jerusalem Marathon route changed")

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Israel Replies To NYTimes "Settlers" Slur

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
05 December '10

NYTimes allows official Israel opinion to appear:

Residents of Jerusalem

To the Editor:

In “Eviction of Palestinian Family, After a Legal Battle, Underlines Tensions Over Jerusalem” (news article, Nov. 24), you call Israelis who move into homes legally purchased from Palestinians in Jerusalem “settlers.”

Today, hundreds of Palestinians are moving legally into homes owned by Jews in Jerusalem. We, however, do not disparage them as “settlers.” Rather, we call them “residents” and “neighbors.”

The notion that some areas of Jerusalem — the capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years — should be off-limits to Jews, while the entire city is open to Arabs, is deeply prejudicial. The suggestion that Jews, or any other ethnic group, would be denied residence in an American city would instantly be condemned as racist.

(Read full post)

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Questionable Guardian portrayal of east Jerusalem eviction

Key fact buried in paragraph nine in reporting of controversial eviction of Palestinians from east Jerusalem house.

Just Journalism
The Wire
24 November '10

Yesterday, Haaretz reported the eviction of a Palestinian family from a house in the east Jerusalem neighbourhood, Jabel Mukaber. Regardless of the highly charged context within which the eviction has taken place, the Israeli news outlet – known for its critical stance of Jewish activity in the area – nonetheless set out the facts clearly.

Both the headline and the standfirst made clear that ownership was disputed and that the family allegedly sold the property:

‘Palestinians evicted from East Jerusalem home claimed by Israelis’

‘Right-wing Elad association claims family sold the home and left voluntarily’

The lead also made reference to the alleged purchase:

“Israel Police forces on Tuesday evacuated a Palestinian family from their home in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, after right-wing activists claimed to have purchased the building.”

The framing of the same story in today’s Guardian was somewhat different. The headline and standfirst read, respectively:

(Read full post)

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Ask the Arabs of East Jerusalem: Should Jerusalem Be Redivided?

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
28 September'10

The future status of Jerusalem is back on the negotiating table between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It is being described as one of the "core issues" in the US-sponsored direct talks that were launched in early September.

Both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators need to take into account that it's completely unrealistic to talk about restoring the pre-1967 situation where Jerusalem was divided into two cities.

The division was bad for Jews and Arabs back then and it will be worse if it happens once again.

Jerusalem is a very small city where Jews and Arabs live across the street from each other and on top of each other. Since 1967, Israel has built many new neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, rendering it impossible to imagine a reality where Jerusalem would exist as a divided city.

Redividing Jerusalem will turn the lives of both Jews and Arabs into a nightmare, especially with regards to traffic arrangements. Every day, tens of thousands of Jews and Arabs commute between the two parts of the city freely.

Redividing Jerusalem will result in the establishment of checkpoints and border crossings inside many parts of the city. Jews and Arabs will find themselves confined to their homes and neighborhoods, which will be surrounded by security barriers and checkpoints.

In addition, the negotiators must concede the possibility of asking the Arab residents of the city about their preferences. There is no reason why more than 200,000 Arabs in Jerusalem should be denied the right to voice their opinion on a matter that has a direct affect on their lives and future.

(Read full article)

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