“Relentless settlement expansion”? For diehard anti-Israel types, the facts are never relevant.

...For diehard anti-Israel types, the facts are never relevant. But for the rest of the world, maybe it’s time to finally admit what two successive leaders of the opposition now have: Far from Israel engaging in “relentless settlement expansion,” state spending on the settlements is actually minuscule.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
18 June "15..

Regardless of the subject, some people would always rather divert the conversation to Israel’s “relentless and deliberate program of settlement expansion,” as J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami did in response to Michael Oren’s revelations about the Obama Administration’s conduct toward Israel. So let’s honor their wishes and talk about the settlements – specifically, about how much Israel’s government spends on this “relentless program of expansion.” Because according to new data released by none other than the leader of the opposition, government spending on West Bank settlements and their residents is actually about 40 percent less per capita than Israel spends on all its other citizens.

In an interview with Haaretz published last Friday, Labor Party chairman Isaac Herzog – who opposes the settlements – was asked what “the annual cost of the occupation” is. His response: “From 2009 to 2014, Israel invested 10 billion shekels [$2.5 billion] in Judea and Samaria. That’s a huge amount of the state budget.”

But math clearly isn’t Herzog’s strong point, because 10 billion shekels is actually a trivial amount of the state budget, which totaled 408 billion shekels in 2014. So even assuming (which I do) that he meant 10 billion a year, not 10 billion over the course of five years, that still amounts to only 2.5 percent of the state budget.

According to data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, however, there were 341,800 Jewish settlers in 2013 (the last year for which data is available), out of a total Israeli population of 8.1345 million. In other words, settlers account for 4.2 percent of the population.

Thus if the government is spending 10 billion shekels a year on the settlers, then their proportional share of the state budget is 40 percent less than their share in the population. And most of that money would be spent regardless of where they lived, since all Israelis are entitled to healthcare, education, defense and various other government-funded services.

Of course, one could claim that Herzog’s figure is simply unreliable. But his predecessor as Labor Party chairman, who also opposes the settlements, similarly concluded that the government actually spends very little on them.

In a 2011 interview with Haaretz, Shelly Yacimovich was asked whether “the billions … invested in the settlements” weren’t coming at the expense of her dream of a welfare state within the Green Line. She flatly denied it:

A Far-Fetched, Strange and Bizarre European Border Fantasy

...And under such an arrangement, would there be Palestinian enclaves in Israeli territory? Through land swap deals, might Arab border towns go to the Palestinian side? After the Netanyahu government has insisted it must hold the Jordan Valley, it makes a mockery to talk of the need for defensible borders in one place while proposing such impossible borders elsewhere. The only comfort here is the thought that the Palestinian’s compulsive tendency for fleeing peace agreements means this kind of derangement will likely never come to fruition.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
10 March '14..

While Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have often taken on the air of farce, in recent days they appeared to cross over into the realm of the truly bizarre. Over the weekend it was announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has tasked his cabinet secretary with researching the complex border arrangements that exist between Belgian Baarle-Hertog and Dutch Baarle-Nassau. Naturally, this is not some purely academic exercise concerning the eccentric cartography of the Low Countries. Rather, it seems that Israel’s prime minister is entertaining the disturbing notion that that the Jewish state might seek to emulate these border arrangements as a way of surmounting the problem of what to do about the Jewish communities in the West Bank, if a Palestinian state were to be established.

Belgium and Holland have what has been described as one of the most complex border arrangements in the world. Under these arrangements enclaves of each country sit within the territory of the other, with 24 separate and mostly non-contiguous fragments of land existing as minute outposts within the greater territory of the two states. With the Palestinians having made clear that they want to join with the other countries of the region in enjoying the luxury of a Jew-free state, Netanyahu’s earlier suggestion that Israeli civilians would stay behind after an Israeli withdrawal has been rendered null and void. Yet while many were skeptical about whether Netanyahu had ever really been serious about that first proposal, it would seem that he is far more serious about his pledge not to forcibly evacuate any Israelis from their homes.

Since the Palestinians are insisting that they won’t share a future state with Jews and with Israel’s prime minister saying he won’t make the Jews of the West Bank leave, it seems that the Baarle-Nassau plan has arisen as a farfetched attempt to bridge a clear impasse in negotiations. When President Obama attempts to set up Netanyahu as intransigent in the peace process, as he did in his recent interview in Bloomberg, proposals such as this one demonstrate the fantastical, and indeed ridiculous, lengths that Netanyahu is apparently willing to go to so as to assist Kerry’s plan. One can only imagine what kind of things the Obama administration might be threatening Israel with behind closed doors.

A paean to the demonstrators of Nabi Saleh, so patently disingenuous

One more point about the supposed non-violence of the Nabi Saleh demonstrators. The piece accepts the idea that throwing rocks and gasoline bombs at soldiers or settlers is a form of non-violent protest. It may be that these weapons seem less sinister to the foreign press than suicide bombing, but the notion that the use of such lethal force is consistent with the beliefs of Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. is absurd.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
17 March '13..

With President Obama due to arrive in Israel on Wednesday, slanted pieces on the Jewish state found their way onto both the front page of the Sunday New York Times and the cover of its weekly magazine today. I’ll have more later on the newspaper story by Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, which treats the erecting of homes for Jews in Jerusalem as an outrage that “complicates” the nonexistent hopes for peace with the Palestinians. But that piece is a model of objective journalism when compared to the magazine’s cover story. The title of the article, “Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?” promises an investigation into the chances of more Palestinian unrest and violence. But what author Ben Ehrenreich delivers is not so much an answer to that question as an argument about why it should happen and an affectionate portrait of some of those who are doing their best to see that it does.

Ehrenreich’s story centers on his experiences hanging out in the village of Nabi Saleh, where Palestinian organizers of violent demonstrations have been seeking out confrontations with a neighboring Jewish settlement and Israeli soldiers who guard it and nearby checkpoints every Friday afternoon. The weekly dust-ups have become a tourist attraction for leftist European anti-Israel activists (so much so that local Palestinian hosts for the foreign Israel-bashers are always ready with vegan meals). But, as with so much reporting from the Middle East, what it missing from this compendium of Palestinian derring-do and grievances is more interesting than what made it into the magazine.

In order to understand the piece, the first thing one needs to know is Ehrenreich’s personal point of view about this conflict. The second would be to examine the alternatives to confrontation that the heroes of his piece have no interest in pursuing.

A Zionist Renaissance

Joseph Puder
Frontpagemag.com
06 May '10

Avner S., 26, is a handsome young man with a smooth face that gives him the appearance of a teenager. He is, in spite of his soft exterior, a hardened ex-combat soldier who served in the top combat unit of the Israel Defense Forces – Sayeret Matkal. Both Avner and his colleagues are wearing helmet-like skullcaps and tzizits, which are flowing out of their T-shirts. The roofers, busy putting on red tiles, and the other two dozen workers, all of whom are veterans, are now on a new mission- to build up the land of Israel.

This group, led by Avner, and many others like them, have began a movement that is reminiscent of the early 20th century. An idealistic and pioneering movement of Jewish Labor, inspired by the philosophy of A.D. Gordon. Unlike many secular-leftist, post-military service young men who let themselves go and use drugs in Thailand or India’s Goa, Avner and his crew are being true to a paraphrased rendition of JFK’s famous words: “See what you can do for your country, for your ancestral heartland.”

While the kibbutz youth, who once symbolized Israeli idealism and self-sacrifice, have left the kibbutzim in droves moving either to Israel’s cities or abroad, the young men of the West Bank settlement communities stay where they were born and raised and raise large families. They are reviving today’s sagging idealism and bringing back the old values of self sacrifice that characterized Israel’s pre-state era and the early decades of its existence, in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And they are doing it in the face of cynicism and malice coming from the Israeli urban and leftist elites who control the media and academia.

(Read full story)

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