It’s astonishing how many people, never having set foot in Israel, are happy to bash Israeli ’settlers’ without having even a basic grasp of the facts.
But then, Israel bashing is the sport du jour, especially in Britain. Thus we find the British media cheerfully employing a blatant double standard in its coverage of Arabs and Jews in Israel.
Here is a superb piece by Sultan Knish which exposes this hypocrisy. Please read it, link to it, share it, cite it, stumble it… It should be compulsory reading.
Israel’s Arab Settlements
While the media and politicians wail over Israeli settlements and revisionist historians pen narratives in which Israel’s entire history comes down to a plot to seize Arab land (following in the footsteps of how their American counterparts have reinterpreted US history)… very little is said of Israel’s Arab settlements.
But Arab settlements in Israel far outweigh Jewish ones and have far less legitimate roots. Consider East Jerusalem, which Obama and the EU are insisting should be reserved for Arab residency alone.
East Jerusalem does indeed have a solid Arab majority because in 1948 the armies of seven Arab nations invaded Israel and occupied half of Jerusalem, dividing it as their Soviet allies divided Berlin, and ethnically cleansed its Jewish population.
Jewish places of worship in East Jerusalem were bombed or turned into mosques and toilets, even the dead were not allowed to rest in peace as their tombstones were used to pave roads. Jewish homes were seized by Arabs and East Jerusalem became wholly Arab.
This is the situation that Obama and the EU are fighting to perpetuate by banning any Jewish housing in the eastern half of the now united Jerusalem. This is what every government that refuses to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is legitimizing by rewarding the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Jordanian Legion and the Holy War Army (Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas) of the nephew of Nazi collaborating Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad al-Husayni.
And then there are the so-called Israeli ’settlements’ of Gaza, Judea and Samaria– which indeed were built on territory that Israel captured from Egypt and Jordan in 1967, after Egypt and Jordan had captured the territory in 1948, destroying Jewish villages on the territory in the process.
Some Jewish villages like Kfar Darom suffered the fate of being destroyed twice over, once by the Arab occupation armies in 1948, to be reestablished and again destroyed by Fatah’s terrorist militias after Israel agreed to ethnically cleanse its own population from Gaza to appease Arab terrorism.
That is the truth behind the so-called Israeli Settlements issue, but it is not by any means the whole truth.
Because the UN, the EU and the State Department have only applied the term “settlements” to Jewish towns and villages, never Arab ones, regardless of their legality. This double standard that is defined purely by ethnicity and religion, and by no other factor whatsoever, represents the real international Apartheid that targets Jews for ethnic cleansing to the benefit of Arab Muslims.
That means that the Arab Muslim seizure of land for the creation of settlements has been mostly unregulated and is widespread. Not only that it’s often aided and abetted by foreign activists who regularly come to “help” Arab villagers harvest olives.
In reality this is often a charade in which those same villagers have marked the territory by planting on the land of Jewish villages nearby, resulting in calculated clashes that are broken up by soldiers and police, and filmed by the same activists resulting in international condemnations.
To avoid those condemnations, Israel eventually seizes the land from the Jewish farmers and turns it over to the Arab villagers. This only sets the stage for the next stage of the clashes, recreating in a microcosm the entire “peace process”, in which terrorism results in concessions, which results in more terrorism and more concessions, creating the cycle of appeasement and terrorism that has bedeviled Israel and most of the First World when dealing with Islam.
Those same left wing activists, most notably groups such as Peace Now and Rabbis for Human Rights, go on to destroy and damage the land of Jewish farmers. When the farmers attempt to defend their land, the activists videotape the resulting encounter and the farmers are arrested.
At which point the land can be easily seized while its owners are tied up by the legal system. Attempting to reestablish ownership then becomes next to impossible in a political system constantly afraid of international condemnation and in a legal system controlled by the Anti-Israel left all the way up to the Supreme Court, which actually refused to seat a Justice for being too conservative.
And in the process Arab settlements continue to expand on land that they casually appropriate, whether from public domain lands under the authority of the Israel Land Administration or from that of farmers and villages who own the land.
Arab villages and towns routinely expand into public lands, fouling water sources and seizing property they do not own, and then defying the government to do anything about it. And while the government occasionally issues a demolition order, then braces itself for the rioting and the international condemnations, these orders constitute only a fraction of the illegal Arab construction.
While Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states fund Arab land purchases, similar Jewish ventures, such as Irving Moskowitz’s developments in Jerusalem meet with aggressive opposition from the EU and the State Department. Once again the double standard is all too clear and it promotes the growth of Arab towns and houses, at the expense of Jewish ones.
The media, whether the international media, or the Israeli media, which is just as left wing as its American and European counterparts, naturally report the Arab side of the story. The culture of demonization they have created toward Jewish farmers and residents helps justify the terrorist attacks aimed at them.
Every time the media reports on the victims of a Muslim terrorist attack as “settlers“, the labeling of Jewish residents as subhuman continues.
Israel’s left wing parties have sold much of the secular public on the idea that the “settlers” are the problem. This conveniently allows them to ignore the fact that on Arabs maps and in the Islamic lexicon, all Israeli Jews are settlers, regardless of which side of the demarcation line they happen to be living on.
Since non-Muslims cannot live in a Muslim land except by agreeing to become Dhimmis and paying Jizya, under Islamic law no Jews, aside from a handful of collaborators who recognize the area as an Islamic ruled state like the Neturei Karta have any right to live anywhere in Israel.
When Zionist activists opposed to the Oslo Peace Process shouted that Hevron is Jerusalem in the early 90’s, they were laughed at. Today Jerusalem is indeed Hevron, the new slogan should be that Tel Aviv is Hevron, because any dividing lines of legitimacy exist only as a diplomatic fiction.
The idea that Muslims are any more reconciled to 1948 than they are to 1967, and that returning to 1948 will somehow win their friendship is the worst form of political and diplomatic delusion. But it is the dominant policy of the EU and successive American and Israeli governments.
As a result Israel is shrinking and Arab settlement is expanding. The settlement freeze enacted under pressure from Obama has frozen the ability of Jewish residents to build and expand homes, even those already mortgaged and under construction. But Barak has gone even further by barring Jewish residents from planting trees.
Jewish residents pay 28 shekels for a cubic meter of water. Arab residents pay less than 50 agorot (cents). The result is that Jewish residents are being charged up to 50 times more for water. And water is the lifeblood of farming in a generally arid part of the world.
Since Oslo, elements within the Israeli political system, aided and abetted by foreign funding from the likes of Soros, have been on a crusade to wipe out Jewish towns and villages in order to destroy the conservative and Zionist parts of the country.
The resulting quiet civil war in which hundreds of thousands of Jewish villagers have been pitted against the machinery of government bureaucracy, the judicial system and various left wing activist groups, has only further increased Arab settlements, at the expense of Jewish ones.
Every institution that was once intended to promote Jewish residency, has instead been transformed into a hostile force that aids and abets Arab settlement, and works against Jewish settlement.
Case in point, the Jewish National Fund which normally refuses to plant trees outside the Green Line around areas of Jewish residency, is donating 3,000 trees for Rawabi, a new Palestinian Authority Fatah city set in a strategic location.
While inspectors march around every Jewish town looking for signs that anyone has lifted up a hammer to bang in a nail on a door, Arab construction is continuing non-stop, including on places like Rawabi, an Arab settlement meant to house 40,000.
And while Tony Blair repeatedly warned Israel against building Jewish ’settlements’, he himself visited the headquarters of the Bayti Real Estate Investment Company that is constructing Rawabi. Bayti is co-owned by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company, which is itself owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, which is an arm of the Government of Qatar.
Qatar is an oil rich gulf dictatorship that is one of the biggest funders of Hamas and Al Queda. It is likely that Hamas and Al Queda would have serious trouble continuing their operations without money from Qatar. It is an Islamist Sharia paradise much like the rest of its gulf neighbors and it funds Jihad around the world.
Rawabi is another expression of the international Islamic Jihad, which in this case takes the form of demographic warfare through Arab settlement. Gulf State construction companies such as the Bin Laden group are tools for promoting Islamic expansionism.
And JNF’s gestire of appeasement is another example of how Israel’s institutions continue to collaborate with Arab settlement, even as they restrict Jewish settlement.
The global double standard treats Israel’s Jewish residents as foreign invaders who must be expelled, despite the fact that the Jewish presence in the land is a matter of record in virtually every major world religion, while treating the Arabs, many of whom came to the area from Egypt after the British conquest and Jewish immigration created jobs, as indigenous natives who have every right to be there.
This form of political ethnic cleansing has become the de facto narrative, rooted in double talk about settlements and terrorism. But to treat Jewish towns and villages as illegitimate and working to destroy them, while encouraging the construction of Arab towns and villages means that talk of “settlements” and “settlement freezes” is nothing more than an international apartheid and the Islamist agenda dressed up in seemingly reasonable talk.
Until Israel’s Arab settlements are on the table, as much as Israel’s are, the only thing that Israel can do is reject this international mandate for ethnic cleansing.
A Jew With A View 