14: What are we arguing about?
Here is a map of the Israeli settlements around Jerusalem. The green line on the map is the 1967 1948 border. The settlements beyond the green line are in territory intended for a Palestinian state. You begin to see the difficulties! Sorry I’m not techy enough to post the map itself, but here’s the link.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/23/world/middleeast/jerusalem-map.html?ref=middleeast And per an earlier discussion you can see the area designated East Jerusalem.
UPDATE: I pooh-poohed TNR the other day, but here is a heartfelt lament by Leon Wieseltier about today’s subject: “Why does the Israeli government allow the argument for a unified Jerusalem to be mistaken for the heartless revanchism of these settlers? Whatever arrangements about Jerusalem are eventually made in a peace agreement, and I no longer expect to see one in my lifetime, Jerusalem will remain both the capital of Israel and a demographically mottled city. It makes no sense to show contempt for the people with whom you are destined to live.” http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/washington-diarist-mean-streets
UPDATE: Ha’aretz has this on the Obama/Netanyahu meeting Tuesday evening: “In spite of attempts on both the Israeli and American sides to bring the crisis to an end, there is still lingering tension and lack of trust within the Obama administration toward Netanyahu. An American source close to the administration said that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have decided to “test” Netanyahu and see whether he will carry out his promised gestures of good will toward the Palestinians. According to an Israeli source who has discussed the matter with senior U.S. officials, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president are dissatisfied with a letter given to them by Netanyahu, in which he detailed steps he is willing to take to restore American confidence in his government. The prime minister and his aides said that a meeting with Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, which served as a preamble to the meeting with Obama, was conducted in excellent spirits.” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1158514.html
UPDATE on the East Jerusalem issue: “It is an approach that can be summed up as: “what’s mine is mine, and what you think is yours will hopefully be mine, too.” It discloses with stark clarity the underlying principle of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem policies: the status of Jerusalem and its borders will be determined by Israeli deeds rather than by negotiations. More bluntly, who needs agreement with Palestinians or recognition of the international community when “everybody knows”? ” http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/19/jerusalem_settlements_and_the_everybody_knows_fallacy
UPDATE: Ooops! Another timing problem: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/middleeast/25jerusalem.html?hp
Am I reading the legend incorrectly, or is the Green line the 1948 border?
Right you are. Thanks!
Is every nation that builds outside its borders wicked?
http://www.globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/1030globalbases.pdf
Talk about chutzpah! Netanyahu has yet to leave the U.S., and the Jerusalem municipality has approved the building of 20 apartments for Jews in an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Says one Israeli lawmaker:
“Eitan Cabel accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of unnecessarily provoking the U.S.
‘Is this another ‘unfortunate’ mistake? Is this another ‘misunderstanding?’’ said Cabel, a member of the Labor Party, which sits in the governing coalition.
‘Netanyahu decided to spit into Obama’s eye, this time from up close. He and his pyromaniac ministers insist on setting the Middle East ablaze.’”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100324/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians;_ylt=AoWQMGpsHsjnKuYn8pvgjHys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNxanMzZDVvBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMzI0L21sX2lzcmFlbF9wYWxlc3RpbmlhbnMEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwM2BHBvcwMzBHB0A2hvbWVfY29rZQRzZWMDeW5faGVhZGxpbmVfbGlzdARzbGsDaXNyYWVsYXBwcm92
I don’t get Mr. Hanley’s question. Can’t we talk about what’s happening now, the issue of middle East peace and the behavior of mr. netanyahu?
His government takes no account of The UN resolutions,and he attempts a peace process which e directs, nit begotiates, on a rather mistaken idea of history (se previous thread) as an excuse.
Mr. Hanley has seemed to be in previous posts a great fan of Mr. Netanyahu’s expansionist policies.
Mr. Hanley, if you want to make your point, you might try sending a map that can actually be read.
You can call me Craig, Margaret, and you’re extrapolating wildly.
Here’s a similar map so you won’t have to tilt your head:
http://www.ppu.org.uk/pm/usbases.html
My question, Bob, was intended simply as a bit of refreshing context for a fortnight of
diatribe that has essentially turned this Catholic blog into a rabid anti-Israel forum,
a niche that is super well-represented elsewhere on the web and usually favored by
pagan surfers with nostalgic tattoos.
And, personally, no, I don’t think you really can fairly “talk about what’s happening now” if all you want to talk about is how wicked the government of Israel is for building civilian apartment complexes. My question is simple: doesn’t that standard make the US wicked for building and maintaining hundreds of military bases outside our own borders? Lots of nice recent foreign protesters seem to think so in Japan, Italy, Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Pakistan. None of that seems to give commentators here such histrionic fits of the vapors,
UN resolutions? The UN’s plenty worried about US violations of the Geneva Convention and the fact that 1 out of 3 Pakistanis killed by our drone strikes is a civilian. We’ve got mountains of dead civilians on our account, in fact, but given the choice to lambaste their own country or the Israelis, some people prefer to join in the feeding frenzy.
It’s nothing new.
Craig, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis vote against Netanyahu’s government and its policies, does that make them rabidly ant-Israel too?
The most authoritative, scholarly, heavily footnoted paper I have ever seen on the place of Jerusalem in Near East history is here:
The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem at http://www.meforum.org/490/the-muslim-claim-to-jerusalem
It is long, but well worth the effort. Let’s at least get the history straight and the role of religion in various claims to the city. Hang in there. Some advance pointers:
Interesting that in 1917 the Ottoman commander-in-chief, instructed his Austrian allies to “blow Jerusalem to hell” should the British enter the city…that the dome still exists today is due to a Jewish artillery captain in the Austrian army, Marek Schwartz, who rather than respond to the approaching British troops with a barrage on the Islamic holy places, “quietly spiked his own guns and walked into the British lines.”
When Jordan ruled East Jerusalem for 19 years, “Jordanian radio broadcast the Friday prayers not from Al-Aqsa Mosque but from an upstart mosque in Amman.”
“Perhaps most remarkable is that the PLO’s founding document, the Palestinian National Covenant of 1964, does not once mention Jerusalem or even allude to it.”
Snip quotes through the centuries:
“Why did two surveys of American Muslims find Jerusalem their most pressing foreign policy issue?
Because of politics.
An historical survey shows that the stature of the city, and the emotions surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims when Jerusalem has political significance. Conversely, when the utility of Jerusalem expires, so does its status and the passions about it.
This pattern first emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Since then, it has been repeated on five occasions: in the late seventh century, in the twelfth century Countercrusade, in the thirteenth century Crusades, during the era of British rule (1917-48), and since Israel took the city in 1967. The consistency that emerges in such a long period provides an important perspective on the current confrontation….
(six times over 14 centuries, the pattern repeats)
Despite all logic (how can a mosque built nearly a century after the Qur’an was received establish what the Qur’an meant?), building an actual Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian historian A. L. Tibawi writes, “gave reality to the figurative name used in the Koran.” It also had the hugely important effect of inserting Jerusalem post hoc into the Qur’an and making it more central to Islam. ..
Then, with the Umayyad demise in 750 and the move of the caliph’s capital to Baghdad, “imperial patronage became negligible” and Jerusalem fell into near-obscurity. For the next three and a half centuries, books praising this city lost favor and the construction of glorious buildings not only came to an end but existing ones fell apart (the dome over the rock collapsed in 1016). …
In a typical put-down, another tenth-century author described the city as “a provincial town attached to Ramla,” a reference to the tiny, insignificant town serving as Palestine’s administrative center. Elad characterizes Jerusalem in the early centuries of Muslim rule as “an outlying city of diminished importance.” The great historian S. D. Goitein notes that the geographical dictionary of al-Yaqut mentions Basra 170 times, Damascus 100 times, and Jerusalem only once, and that one time in passing. He concludes from this and other evidence that, in its first six centuries of Muslim rule, “Jerusalem mostly lived the life of an out-of-the-way provincial town, delivered to the exactions of rapacious officials and notables,…
Also at this time, the Muslim ruler of Egypt and Palestine, al-Kamil (another of Saladin’s grandsons and the brother of al-Mu‘azzam), offered to trade Jerusalem to the Europeans if only the latter would leave Egypt, but he had no takers. Ten years later, in 1229, just such a deal was reached when al-Kamil did cede Jerusalem to Emperor Friedrich II; in return, the German leader promised military aid to al-Kamil against al-Mu‘azzam, now a rival king. Al-Kamil insisted that the Temple Mount remain in Muslim hands and “all the practices of Islam” continued to be exercised there, a condition Friedrich complied with. Referring to his deal with Frederick, al-Kamil wrote in a remarkably revealing description of Jerusalem, “I conceded to the Franks only ruined churches and houses.” In other words, the city that had been heroically regained by Saladin in 1187 was voluntarily traded away by his grandson just forty-two years later.
The Ottoman period (1516-1917) got off to an excellent start when Suleyman the Magnificent rebuilt the city walls in 1537-41 and lavished money in Jerusalem (for example, assuring its water supply), but things then quickly reverted to type. Jerusalem now suffered from the indignity of being treated as a tax farm for non-resident, one-year (and very rapacious) officials. “After having exhausted Jerusalem, the pasha left,”…
…the Turkish overlords of Jerusalem abandoned Jerusalem rather than fight for it in 1917, evacuating it just in advance of the British troops. One account indicates they were even prepared to destroy the holy city. Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, instructed his Austrian allies to “blow Jerusalem to hell” should the British enter the city. The Austrians therefore had their guns trained on the Dome of the Rock, with enough ammunition to keep up two full days of intensive bombardment. According to Pierre van Paasen, a journalist, that the dome still exists today is due to a Jewish artillery captain in the Austrian army, Marek Schwartz, who rather than respond to the approaching British troops with a barrage on the Islamic holy places, “quietly spiked his own guns and walked into the British lines.”
In modern times, notes the Israeli scholar Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Jerusalem “became the focus of religious and political Arab activity only at the beginning of the [twentieth] century.” She ascribes the change mainly to “the renewed Jewish activity in the city and Judaism’s claims on the Western Wailing Wall.”
Jordanian Rule….The economy so stagnated that many thousands of Arab Jerusalemites left the town: while the population of Amman increased five-fold in the period 1948-67, that of Jerusalem grew by just 50 percent….
Perhaps most insulting of all was the decline in Jerusalem’s religious standing. Mosques lacked sufficient funds. Jordanian radio broadcast the Friday prayers not from Al-Aqsa Mosque but from an upstart mosque in Amman. (Ironically, Radio Israel began broadcasting services from Al-Aqsa immediately after the Israel victory in 1967.)
Nor were Jordan’s rulers alone in ignoring Jerusalem; the city virtually disappeared from the Arab diplomatic map. Malcolm Kerr’s well-known study on inter-Arab relations during this period (The Arab Cold War) appears not once to mention the city. No foreign Arab leader came to Jerusalem during the nineteen years when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, and King Husayn (r. 1952-99) himself only rarely visited. King Faysal of Saudi Arabia spoke often after 1967 of his yearning to pray in Jerusalem, yet he appears never to have bothered to pray there when he had the chance. Perhaps most remarkable is that the PLO’s founding document, the Palestinian National Covenant of 1964, does not once mention Jerusalem or even allude to it.
VI. Israeli Rule…This neglect came to an abrupt end after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control. Palestinians again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program. The Dome of the Rock turned up in pictures everywhere, from Yasir Arafat’s office to the corner grocery. Slogans about Jerusalem proliferated and the city quickly became the single most emotional issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The PLO made up for its 1964 oversight by specifically mentioning Jerusalem in its 1968 constitution as “the seat of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
For a two-page article on the Palestinian effort to deny Jewish ties of Jerusalem:
http://www.meforum.org/pipes/3676/what-jewish-ties-to-jerusalem
By 1990, the Islamic focus on Jerusalem reached such a surreal intensity that Palestinian Arabs evolved from celebrating Jerusalem to denying the city’s sacred and historical importance to Jews. The Palestinian Arab establishment – scholars, clerics, and politicians – promoted this unlikely claim by constructing a revisionist edifice made up in equal parts of fabrication, falsehood, fiction, and fraud. It erases all Jewish connections to the land of Israel, replacing them with a specious Palestinian-Arab connection.
Palestinian Arabs now claim that Canaanites built Solomon’s Temple, that the ancient Hebrews were Bedouin tribesmen, the Bible came from Arabia, the Jewish Temple “was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem,” the Jewish presence in Palestine ended in 70 C.E., and today’s Jews are descendants of the Khazar Turks. Yasser Arafat himself created a non-existent Canaanite king, Salem, out of thin air, speaking movingly about this fantasy Palestinian Arab “forefather.”
Carolyn Disco: “The most authoritative, scholarly, heavily footnoted paper I HAVE EVER SEEN on the place of Jerusalem in Near East history is here.”
The “I have ever seen” does not give much confidence that you know much about the Middle East Forum, which is the site that carries the paper. MEF is an advocacy organization directed by Daniel Pipes, who is a zealous and unstinting advocate of Israeli views. No reason not to read this heavily footnoted paper albeit with a discriminating and critical eye. It appears from the cite that Pipes is the author of this “authoritative” debunking of Muslim claims.
From Wiki
“The Middle East Forum (MEF) is an American conservative think tank founded in 1990 by historian and columnist Daniel Pipes, who also serves as its director….The MEF describes its aims as “[to] define and promote American interests in the Middle East” through research, publications, and educational outreach. The MEF defines “U.S. interests” as “fighting Islam, whether terroristic or lawful; working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; improving the management of U.S. democracy efforts; reducing energy dependence on the Middle East; more robustly asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia; and countering the Iranian threat.”[3]
Commonweal is basically all abortion, all Israel 24/7 these days.
Well actually there is the timely remembrance of Archbishop Romero just above; several comments on the health care bill over-all; and a variety of posts on the sex abuse crisis in Europe. Nonetheless taxpayer funding of abortion and the question of Middle East peace negotiations loom larger in the news–both issues of deep concern to many Commonwealers–and presumably to many Americans. Sometime soon someone will post a link to Jim Martin on The Colbert Report and we can get back to really serious issues.