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Haaretz Last update - 05:03 20/07/2009
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101385.html
Extracts:
British diplomats touring the Shepherd Hotel recently in the Jerusalem
neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah expressed concern about Israeli construction
plans there, particularly in light of the site's close proximity to the
British consulate in East Jerusalem.
The tour, which also included American diplomats, was led by Jerusalem city
councilman Meir Margalit of Meretz, who is also active in the Committee
Against House Demolitions. During the visit, Margalit said, the British
diplomats asked their American colleagues to pressure Israel on the issue
and take the lead in applying international pressure to stop settlement
building.
"The British said explicitly - the Israelis don't pay attention to us, but
if you apply pressure, there is a chance," Margalit recounted. The U.K.
envoys also expressed concern that construction activity so close to the
consulate could lead to an intelligence leak.
The area was acquired in 1985 by American Jewish philantrhopist Irving
Moskowitz and designated for private housing. Two weeks ago, the local
planning council approved the construction plan, which calls for the
erection of two residential buildings of 20 housing units stretched over a
3,000-square-meter area.
The council recognized the hotel building - which in the 1930s and 40s
served as the compound for the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini - [a Nazi collaborator and associate of Hitler -editor]
as a historic site and designated it for renovation.
Eitan Geva, the Israeli legal representative of Moskowitz, said he was
surprised by U.S. opposition to the project, which he characterized as
"commercial," and not "ideological."
Sarah Kreimer, associate director of Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit
organization engaged in issues affecting Israeli-Palestinian relations in
Jerusalem, said yesterday, "All of these small developments constitute a
sequence, the goal of which is to encircle the Old City from every
direction - Sheikh Jarrah, Wadi Joz, the Mount of Olives, Ras al-Amud,
Silwan and the Armon Hanatziv promenade," she said.
"In each of these places, plans are being advanced for construction whose
ultimate purpose is to disconnect the Old City from Palestinian Jerusalem,"
she said.
2. Is the US Aligned Against Jerusalem?
Extracts:
'No difference to U.S. between outpost,
East Jerusalem construction'
By Akiva
Eldar,
Barak
Ravid
and Jack Khoury
Haaretz Last update - 04:05
20/07/2009
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101353.html
The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West
Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement
construction, American sources have informed both Israel and the Palestinian
Authority.
This clarification came in the context of a growing crisis in U.S.-Israel
relations over the planned construction of some 20 apartments for Jews in
the Shepherd Hotel, in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The U.S.
has demanded that the project be halted, but Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu told the cabinet meeting Sunday that "Israel will not agree to
edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem."
"United Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people in the State of
Israel, and our sovereignty over the city is not subject to appeal," he
continued.
Saying that Israel could not accept Jews being forbidden to live in anywhere
in Jerusalem, Netanyahu added: "I can imagine what would happen if someone
proposed that Jews could not live or buy in certain neighborhoods of London,
New York, Paris or Rome. A huge international outcry would surely ensue. It
is even more impossible to agree to such an edict in East Jerusalem."
"In my previous term [as premier], I built thousands of apartments in the
Har Homa neighborhood of Jerusalem, defying the entire world," Netanyahu
added. "Therefore, it is clear that I will not capitulate in this case -
especially when we are talking about a mere 20 apartments."
Other ministers also criticized the American stance at the cabinet meeting.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, for instance, termed it "puzzling,"
while Interior Minister and Shas Chairman Eli Yishai declared that "no
agency in the world can stop construction in Jerusalem."
And Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin told the ministers that the
PA and its security services are engaged in widespread efforts to keep
Palestinians from selling land in Jerusalem to Jews. He also said that
Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi of Qatar has allocated $21 million to Hamas activists
to buy buildings and establish infrastructure in Jerusalem.
3. Sarah
Honig.
Another Tack: Self-exiled by guilt
July 17, 2009
Sarah Honig, THE JERUSALEM POST
Extracts:
Those little neglected news stories that rarely make front-page headlines and
never receive airtime are often the most telling of all. It's through them that
deliberately suppressed fundamental truths occasionally surface. It's there that
big lies are sometimes, albeit inadvertently, exposed.
Scant attention was paid last week to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas's revelations on Al-Palestinia TV. Abbas talked about his youth in Safed,
from whence he routinely claims his family was forcibly driven out by Israeli
troops in 1948. Abbas revels in his supposed refugee status. It's his
stock-in-trade on the Arab scene and the international arena. The pitiable pose
of an aggrieved victim confers ostensible moral authority upon his cause.
This pose, moreover, becomes a basic Arab tenet - the crucial claim for
justifying terror against Israel and for refusing to relinquish the so-called
"right of return" by refugees to what are described as homes robbed from them by
violent interloping Jewish conquistadores. Biased world opinion willingly and
gladly falls for the Palestinian freedom-fighter fable.
Fatah's cofounder reminisced at length about his Safed origins and haphazardly
let the truth slip out.
"Until the nakba" (calamity in Arabic - the loaded synonym for Israeli
independence), he recounted, his family "was well-off in Safed." When Abbas was
13, "we left on foot at night to the Jordan River... Eventually we settled in
Damascus... My father had money, and he spent his money methodically. After a
year, when the money ran out, we began to work.
"People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist
terrorist organizations - particularly from the Safed ones. Those of us from
Safed especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what
happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and
parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the
whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale - saving our lives and
our belongings."
SO HERE it is from the mouth of the PA's head honcho himself. He and no other
verifies that nobody expelled Safed's Arabs. Their exile was voluntary,
propelled by their extreme consciousness of guilt and expectation that Jews
would be ruled by the same blood-feud conventions that prevail in Arab culture.
Unrealistically they anticipated that Jews would do to them precisely what the
Arabs had done to Safed's Jews. If that was their premise, they indeed had cause
to panic.
The "uprising" Abbas alluded to was one among the serial pogroms instigated by
infamous Jerusalem mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who's still revered throughout
the Arab world. He was a Berlin-resident avid Nazi collaborator during World War
II and a wanted war criminal postwar.
In August 1929 Husseini rallied Arabs to slaughter Jews on trumped-up
allegations of Jewish takeover attempts at the Temple Mount. Sixty-seven members
of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron were hideously hacked to death. That
was the most notorious massacre, but others were perpetrated throughout the
country. In the equally ancient Jewish community of Safed, 21 were butchered no
less gruesomely (a cat was stuffed into one old woman's disemboweled abdomen). A
child and young woman, due to be married the next day, were cold-bloodedly shot
dead by Arab constables whom British mandatory officers assigned to watch over
the majority of Safed's Jews who sought safety in the police courtyard.
The British proposed that all Safed Jews be evacuated "for their own safety," as
was the case in Hebron. The offer was vehemently refused. Thereafter,
principally during the 1936-39 mufti-led rampages, the Hagana and Safed's own
IZL cells protected the town's 2,000 Jews.
Nevertheless, on the ill-fated evening of August 13, 1936 Arab marauders managed
to infiltrate and invade the modest Unger home in the old Jewish Quarter, just
as the family ate supper. They murdered the father, Alter, a 36-year-old Torah
scribe, his daughters Yaffa and Hava (nine and seven respectively) and the
six-year-old son, Avraham.
SUCH WAS the uprising for which Abbas's kinfolk assumed they deserved just
reckoning. Ironically, Jews were alarmed by the Arab exodus, figuring it
presaged a formidable onslaught by invading Arab armies (which indeed came). In
many areas (Haifa, for instance) Jews begged and pleaded with local Arabs to
stay. But Arabs in Safed and elsewhere - heeding their leaders' exhortations to
pull out and hounded by fears arising from their own vengeful traditions (but
not Jewish ones) - did what was prudent in light of their surmise that Jews
would behave according to Arab codes.
On the eve of the April 16, 1948 British withdrawal from Safed, the mandatory
authorities turned over the town's police facilities and Mount Canaan's military
fort to the Arabs. They offered to escort all Jews out of town "for their own
safety." As in 1929, the Jews refused unequivocally, though memories of the
horrific carnage should have inspired more dread among them than among the
fleeing Abasses.
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