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Jews in Harlem and Tokyo don’t endanger peace
Jews can buy homes anywhere they want in New York City, in Moscow, in Tokyo, in Paris – so why not anywhere they choose in the Middle East? One wonders when America discusses peace in the Middle East, why is it that Jews building homes is such a big deal?
Israel’s government announced new building plans in Judea and Samaria (West Bank areas) — why is it that America criticized such efforts? Don’t Arabs live amongst Israelis in Israel? When people live in peace, doesn’t it mean they can at the very least tolerate one another? How come Jews don’t live anywhere in the Arab world?
When the US State Department of the Obama administration says it “does not accept the legitimacy” of the plans for up to 851 new housing units for West Bank settlements, one wonders why. Isn’t it simple racism that Christians and Muslims can live in a certain area but Jews cannot? Black and white, no?
This “peace process” can’t handle having 851 new homes? That’s the breakdown of peace in the Middle East? One wonders: could one dare say such a thing about Arabs? Is America saying that Palestinians are incapable of living on common ground with Israelis? Would they say the same thing in, say, South Central LA, or Harlem? Would Obama say that Arabs couldn’t move into Jewish areas like Borough Park?
So many questions, and for any rational person there are clearly few rational answers.
It seems to be a continuation of a 2,000-year-old habit of Jews being told where they can and cannot live. This spanned from the ghettos of medieval Europe, to severe zoning restrictions in czarist Russia and finally to the edicts of Nazism, where we were eventually told that we could not live at all. Can it be possible that we will accept any part of that today in our own nation? Jews should be able to live anywhere in the world.
These words were written a number of years ago by heroic Cherna & Irving Moskowitz and ring true today.
Owning a PR agency, I am in the business of shaping ideas, but for me those who are constantly against Israel simply cannot be reasoned with. In the face of facts, the Obama administration seems to feel that Jews living in certain areas is why there isn’t peace. Before 1967 Israel did not occupy the “West Bank” and yet there were three wars fought in 19 years from 1948 to 1967.
Robert Serry, a United Nations Mideast peace envoy in the past compared settler vandals to terrorism of Arabs upon buses, and has just made the absurd statement that “moving 300 additional families to Beit El could threaten the two-state solution and regional peace.” Is the so-called peace process worth anything if a few hundred extra Jews in the area threatens peace? Mr. Serry, why not worry about the Arabs in Syria being killed non-stop. Focus your efforts on Syria and leave little Israel alone.
As Prime Minister Netanyahu feels in addressing his “brothers and sisters’’ in the settler movement, let’s remember the words of the great Ze’ev Jabotinsky: “There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supercedes all—- [Jewish] settlement [of the land].”
Am Israel Chai.