Settlement Construction and the Criminalization of Jewish Life

Michael L.

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

Writing in Commentary magazine, Evelyn Gordon tells us:

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predictably assailed Israel’s announced decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim and eastern Jerusalem. He noted that just four days earlier, the Middle East Quartet (i.e. the U.S., EU, UN and Russia) had issued a report deeming settlement construction an obstacle to peace. What Ban didn’t mention is that just a few days before that report came out, a leading Israeli leftist expert on the settlements published a comprehensive rebuttal of this claim, providing facts and figures showing that the settlements effectively aren’t growing at all.

The sheer unbridled racism and arrogance of the international Left, of the EU, the UN, and the Obama administration never ceases to amaze.

They honestly want us to believe that Jews living upon, and thus building upon, land that we come from, and that was purchased, makes us thieves.

They honestly want us to believe that the land of our ancestors actually belongs to the Arab invaders of the seventh-century CE despite the fact that Israel was the land of the Jewish people millennia before Muhammad's armies showed up with their religious-imperialist ideology of head-chopping.

The hypocrisy is profound.

The Criminalization of Jewish Existence

Ban Ki-moon wants us to think that the decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim and the eastern section of Jerusalem somehow represents an obstacle to peace? How is this possible? If an Arab builds a home in the suburbs of Paris is that a war crime? Is that an obstacle to peace?

Should that Arab not be allowed to build on land that he has purchased because it is not "Arab land"?

Anyone who ever suggested any such thing would be knocked in the head as a stone-cold racist, but not if you suggest it about a Jew living in Judea!

If a Jew building a second bathroom for his family in the eastern part of Jerusalem, or anywhere in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, is an obstacle to peace it is only because the Arabs and the EU and the UN and the Obama administration have made it an obstacle to peace. There is nothing unpeaceful about building on property that one has purchased and that is precisely what we are talking about.

They are criminalizing the mere Jewish presence on Jewish land because Jews cannot live on that land if they cannot build on that land. Does the Obama administration really want to tell the Jews of Judea that if they build an elementary school for their children that they are unethically imposing upon the rights of Arabs?

A Touch of History

The Arabs stormed out of their peninsula in the seventh-century, gobbled up the Middle East, almost took-over Europe, but were stopped at the "gates of Vienna" and thereby had to satisfy themselves merely with conquering the Iberian Peninsula.

Since that time they have conducted an ongoing genocide of both the Christians and the Jews in the Middle East and, yet, somehow, feel themselves morally aggrieved.

It is an astonishing long-term propaganda success story.

Arab-Muslim imperial aggression is historically the foremost example of imperial aggression in the world. It even, remarkably, overshadows imperial Roman expansion. Medieval Christian Europe responded to this Arab-Muslim aggression against their fellow Christians with what we call "the Crusades." In the West the Crusades are interpreted as a form of European malice that is often docketed with other atrocities, including the Holocaust.

The reason for this is because, since the Enlightenment, Europe and the West have undergone a remarkable transformation that has brought us from a primarily theological worldview to a primarily secular and scientific worldview. The secular and the scientific suggested a questioning stance toward the world. This questioning stance met with Jewish introspection and moral sensibilities to give us the West as we know it today.

{G-d help us.}

As we know, the Arab-Muslim world has not gone through such a reformation since the early days of the empire... when Islam stood atop the world. There was a time when Islamic societies led in science and discovery, but those days are long over and the reason for that is because Islam means "submission" - not "peace" as Obama would tell you - and submission by its nature must stifle free inquiry.

Ask Galileo.

Settlement Construction and the Racist Left

And this brings us back around to those uppity Jews, like my friend Yosef Hartuv of Love of the Land fame, and all the other hippie Jews like, say, Yishai Fleisher, who insist that we have every right to live in the land of our posterity. 

When racists like Barack Obama suggest that the Jewish people have no right to build on historically Jewish land they are resurrecting old, long established, medieval tropes that portray Jews as endless wanderers... as the Wandering Jew.

Somewhere in the introductory pages of A Tale of Love and Darkness Amos Oz reminds us that early twentieth-century European Jews were told, and I paraphrase, "Get out of Europe! Go back to Palestine where you belong!"

Now we are told by leftist legends like former White House correspondent Helen Thomas to "get the hell out of Palestine."

The Jewish people are a long abused minority and we represent a whopping .02 percent of the world population.

Much of the Left often suggests that world peace is dependent upon making the Jews of the Middle East leap through imaginary hoops.

But the Day of the Dhimmi is Done.

My suspicion is that a growing number of Jewish people are getting tired of being pushed against the wall - for our own alleged well-being - by false friends like Barack Obama.

The real lesson of the Holocaust is that we must stand up for ourselves.