Weekend Haaretz

One of the interesting things about being in Israel is to be able to read the paper versions of English-language Ha’Aretz and the Jerusalem Post… However good it is to read content on-line, still, there’s something special about newsprint!
The weekend edition of H’Aretz, which came out yesterday, had a number of really interesting articles:
This well-researched piece by Akiva Eldar, which is worth reading in full, tells us about the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to destroy settlement outposts that were constructed not just– as all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been– in clear contravention of international law but also, in contravention of Israel’s own laws about such construction activities.
Eldar writes:

Next Wednesday will mark a year since the modest ceremony at which the outposts report was submitted to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Instead of an answer to the obvious question, “What has happened since then,” the author of the report, former state prosecutor and attorney Talia Sasson, suggests visiting Migron, in the Binyamin region. This outpost starred in the report as a symbol of systemic collapse.
It all began in April 2002, with a fake antenna, “a pole with a costume,” as the Israel Defense Forces’ brigade commander told Sasson. Pinhas Wallerstein, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and a public servant, gave a commitment in writing that the antenna would not develop into another illegal outpost. But it ended up as such – the permanent home of 150 families, with public buildings, roads, lighting and so on.
“I am not naive about the state’s conduct in the territories,” says Sasson, “but in the case of Migron, it is a matter of establishing a settlement on private land that belongs to Palestinians, without a government decision and without any legal status. And as if that were not enough, it is the public coffers that are paying for the tractors that broke the road through to the outpost and funded the public buildings there. It is important to understand that every day that the state allows the settlers to hold on to the land is another day of violating the law and human rights. A state that respects its desire to be democratic cannot accept this phenomenon. I put very grave findings on the government’s table, but to my great regret, what there was is what there is and apparently also what there will be.”
Sasson notes that at least half a dozen outposts the High Court of Justice ordered evacuated are still standing. The court handed down this decision after the Defense Ministry and the area commander told it that the outposts are not legal and that therefore the government must evacuate them. “This is a serious and unparalleled failure at the government level,” says Sasson decisively.
And indeed, despite the government’s explicit commitment – in the framework of the road map plan – to dismantle the 24 illegal outposts that have been established during the terms of Sharon’s governments, not a single outpost has been evacuated. Had it not been for the petition by Peace Now, even the nine houses at the Amona outpost would have remained standing.

I had a good talk with Eldar as couple of days ago. He did say that he thinks that after the failure of the extremist settlers to prevent last summer’s disengagement from Gaza, he thinks the settlers are “in deep crisis”. He said that whereas previously, most Israeli elections have been fought over the issue of how (or wherther) to make peace with the Palestinians, “This time the issue is not about peace; it’s about quiet. It’s about conflict management, not conflict resolution.”
Though he sees Kadima’s position as representing this broad public sentiment at this time, he said he thought the longer-term outlook for the party isn’t very good. “The Kadima Party is a cocktail party,” he said. “It’s not yet the end of Labour and Likud… Israel has seen a whole series of these ‘third parties’ that have come and gone, and most likely Kadmia will be like the rest of them.”
He said that the Hamas victory in the OPTs hadn’t affected the Israeli electrions much– “except that it seems to prove to many Israelis that ‘there’s no-one to talk to.’ So it’s made Labour more irrelevant.”
Well, talking of Labour, Ha’Aretz also had a lengthy, very informative (to me) interview with new Labour head Amir Peretz. He presented himself very much as a plucky outsider who has fought for his values and will keep the interests of Israel’s huddled masses front and center in his work. (Not surprisingly, since his power base was with the Histadrut trade-union federation. Additionally, he’s of Moroccan Jewish background, which makes him doubly an ‘outsider’.)
Here’s what he said about the ‘peace process’:

There will be a wave of terrorist attacks. People will test you, they will test what you are made of.
“I do not think that the most extreme person of peace and the person of peace for whom peace is the most sacred goal can allow himself to put up with terrorism. We have to ensure that there are no showcase operations here, or collective punishment, but I will have greater legitimatization for fighting terrorism than any other candidate.”
You have a limitation in the security sphere.
“If I have to decide the size of the cannon that fires at the exposed areas in Gaza, I have a limitation. But if I have to balance between the human damage entailed in that firing and the military consideration, I have an advantage over everyone else.”
Still, people are asking themselves whether Amir Peretz is capable of managing a security crisis and of piloting the defense establishment.
“I think it does Israel harm to have a chief of staff above whom is a defense minister who is a super-chief of staff and above him a prime minister who is the super-super-chief of staff. It is also not the case that the prime minister sits in the Pit [the war room] when some army unit embarks on an operation. I think it’s correct for nonmilitary observers also to sit at the table where the decisions are made. Did [Israel’s third prime minister Levi] Eshkol have more military experience than I do? Even Churchill did not have greater military experience than I do.”
… One of the most important issues in the next term will be whether to bomb Iran. Are you built to make a decision like that?
“I think I’m more capable than any of the other candidates of making a decision. My advantage over the others is that the moment the bombing of Iran appears as a possible mode of action, from that moment I must not sleep day or night in order to try and prevent that. The wisdom is not to reach a point where you say there is no choice, all options have been exhausted. The question is what to do before that happens. And I think this is my advantage over the others. I’m trying to forge a policy that will shape reality and I’m not willing to have reality dictate policy to me.”
...I assume the dream includes peace. Will there be peace in the coming decade?
“The optimal scenario is massive aid from humanitarian organizations to the moderate Palestinian forces so that within two years Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] can dissolve the parliament after Fatah cleans up its corruption. If that happens, the results of those elections will be totally different. On the other hand, if we starve the Palestinians, w’e’ll get the opposite result.”
What is the permanent border we are heading for? The Geneva Initiative border?
“I don’t think we have to accept the Geneva border. Geneva went too far, from my point of view. In general the Geneva Initiative was harmful rather than beneficial to the process. But the line of demarcation for the border will be 1967. It will be impossible to evacuate the settlement blocs of Gush Etzion and Ma’aleh Adumim, but we will have to give compensation for them – either a great deal of money or territories.”

Well, not everything I’d like to see there, but notably more forthcoming than Kadima head Ehud Olmert or his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. Also notable: that Peretz went out of his way to meet with Abu Mazen recently.
Talking of the idea that Peretz “lacks security experience”, I had an interesting talk with Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) spokesman Adam Keller the other day. He said he had become so enamored of Peretz– for his social agenda as well as his peace agenda– that for the first time in years he’d gone round to his local Labour Party office (in Cholon, south of Tel Aviv), to volunteer to work on the election.
So since Cholon has a large population of Russian immigrants, the task he was given was to stuff Russian-language Labour Party flyers into people’s mail-boxes. He showed me the stack of flyers: you open each one up and there’s a whole row of pictures of pro-Labour generals, with quotes from them saying how much they support Labour… I and that’s before you get to the visage of Peretz (looking chubby cheeked and full-mustached– “just like Rafiq Hariri” as a friend of mine said.)
What else, while I’m in the Weekend HaAretz? There was this lovely story titled The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie that was basically a tour of some of the historic residences of the two West Jerusalem neighborhoods of Talbieh and Katamon, described as “two prestigious neighborhoods in Jerusalem’s western part that were established during the British Mandate by wealthy Arabs.” The writer, David Kroyanker, continues:

In Talbieh, all of the inhabitants were Christians of the highest socioeconomic class. In Katamon, Christians lived alongside Muslims and the neighborhood’s status in the eyes of the Arab population of the city was second to Talbieh. In third place were Abu Tor and Baka.
After the Arab inhabitants left their homes in the 1948 war, Jewish families moved into them. At the beginning of the 1950s the government decided that some of the houses in Talbieh would serve as official residences for government ministers and other senior officials.

Indeed, of the nine houses featured in the article, six had been built by Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee in 1948, one had been built by an Egyptian Jewish family prior to 1948, and two were built in the 1950s.
In and after the fighting of 1948, there was complete ethnic cleansing of “the other” on both sides of then-divided Jerusalem– with the exception of the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, which retained its “island” position on the ridge east of the Old City. I have the figures somewhere (but not here) of the number of Jewish residents forced to leave Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem that year, and the number of Palestinian residents forced to leave Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem… The number of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from the city was far, far higher than the number of Jews ethnically cleansed.
Then in 1967, the city was allegedly “reunified” through the Israeli military conquest of its eastern portions. jewish Israelis immediately moved in to take control not only of the properties they had left behind in 1948, but also of vast additional swathes of land, where over the intervening 39 years some 200,000 Israelis settlers have been planted.
In the spirit of “reunification” do you think the expelled Palestinian residents of West Jerusalem were given any reciprocal right to reclaim the properties that their families, too, had been forced to leave behind in 1948?
… That would be a resounding “No.”
In fact, West Jerusalem is one of the most homogenously all-Jewish areas in the whole of Israel.
So that makes it all the more poignant to read a piece like David Kroyanker’s… Take this description, for example:

5. ‘Golda’s kitchen’
(Formerly Villa Haroun al-Rashid); 18 Marcus Street, Talbieh
This three-story building, in which there are four apartments, is one of the most impressive and splendid in Talbieh. This structure, one of the first in the neighborhood, was built by businessman Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat in 1926 and bears the name of one of the caliphs of Baghdad and a hero of “The Thousand and One Nights,” Haroun al Rashid. The name of the house appears on the wooden frame on its main entrance, as well as on ceramic tiles in Arabic and Latin characters on the facade and at the side entrance.
The main entrance into the apartment on the ground floor, which looks out over a large garden, is via an elaborate staircase that leads to a covered veranda. In the past there was a modest, plastered concrete structure on the roof that served as servants? quarters during the period of the Mandate.
During the first years of the state this was the official residence of then minister of labor and housing, Golda Meir. It is said that this is where “Golda’s kitchen” was founded – the place where she concocted “political delicacies” with the top Mapai people…

Then there’s this one:

3. Villa Jamal
Almost became the PM’s residence; 9 Alkalai Street, Talbieh
This large and luxurious two-story house was built in 1934 by Christian Arab businessman Anis Jamal. A number of members of the Jamal family built beautifully designed houses in Talbieh that put a stamp of architectural uniqueness on the neighborhood. Anis’ wife, Tabitha Jamal, was a Russian noblewoman and her cousin was British actor Peter Ustinov; his father was the Russian consul in Jaffa before World War I.
After the Jamal family left its home, in the spring of 1948, the building served as a center for the Lehi underground movement in the city. At the beginning of the 1950s there was a proposal that the building be used as the prime minister’s official residence, but David Ben-Gurion rejected it on the grounds that it was not proper to use a property that belongs to absentee Arab owners for official purposes.

Well, that was then and now is now, huh? Jewish Israelis have always admired the beautiful houses that the Palestinians had built all around Jerusalem– but especially in its western neighborhoods… But at least back in Ben Gurion’s day, Israel’s first PM thought it “not proper” to live in a house owned by an “absentee” family. How things changed in subsequent years. The list in this article includes not only “Golda’s kitchen” but also the “Levi Eshkol house”, the “Olmert house”, the “Netanyahu house”– all of which were properties “cleansed” of their Palestinian owners in 1948.