Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor on US fundraising trip

25 thoughts on “Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor on US fundraising trip”

1. IF Israel wants peace, which it obviously doesn’t, there would be no better place to start than Jerusalem, which could become the pre-eminent City of Peace, instead of the pre-eminent city of conflict.

2. In short, Barkat should be met wherever he goes on his current tour with a series of pointed questions that undermine the kind of propaganda points he will be making (as previewed in the NYT interview with him, which ran today.)
   Do you think he will be met with anything other than wet kisses at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
   Your reasoned arguments are consistently nullified by the shameful demagoguery of Israel’s minions in Washington DC.

3. Thanks Helena. He’s coming begging for money when we’re already giving them billions. Chutzpa’s the word, isn’t it? Will he bring the mayor of Bethlehem with him? Maybe they could meet with the mayor of Berlin while they’re at it and compare wall notes.

4. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem (1948-1967), they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
   In the Jewish Bible, Jerusalem is mentioned over 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, or 823 times. The Christian Bible mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran. Jerusalem is also not mentioned in the Palestinian Covenant.
   King David established the city of Jerusalem as the capital of the whole Land of Israel. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem. Jerusalem remained under Turkish Ottoman Empire rule from 1517 to 1917, and under British rule from 1917 to 1948.

5. Helena,
   “All of the area of Jerusalem that came under Israeli occupation in 1967 is considered, under international law and also by the US government, to be occupied territory. ”
   Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan from 1948-1967.
   The 1,500 residents of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City were expelled and a few hundred taken prisoner when the Arab Legion captured the quarter. Jordan assumed control of the holy places in the Old City. Contrary to the terms of the agreement, Israelis were denied access to Jewish holy sites, many of which were desecrated, and only allowed very limited access to Christian holy sites. During this period, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque underwent major renovations.
   Jews were barred from the Old City and denied access to the Western Wall and other Holy Places. The Jewish Quarter in the Old City was destroyed; fifty-eight synagogues were also destroyed or desecrated. Thousands of tombstones in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were destroyed to pave a road and build fences and latrines in Jordanian army camps.
   In 1967, Jordan ignored Israeli pleas to stay out of the Six-Day War and attacked the western part of the city. The Jordanians were routed by Israeli forces and driven out of east Jerusalem, allowing the city’s unity to be restored.
   After the war, Israel abolished all the discriminatory laws promulgated by Jordan and adopted its own tough standard for safeguarding access to all religious shrines.

6. I wonder why this post has failed to point out the real facts about Jerusalem, like the fact that the jews were denied access to the Western Wall .
   By the way a major terrorist car bombing was averted at a Haifa mall on Saturday night when one of several explosive devices hidden in a parked vehicle malfunctioned.

7. James, you’re definitely violating the rules on discourse hogging so please re-read the commenters’ guidelines. And don’t hog the discourse here.
   It is interesting in a vaguely sociological way that you come here with all these assertions and half truths. Well, it lets the rest of us see the kind of logic you’re laboring under.
   Yes, as I’ve noted elsewhere that in and after the fighting of 1948, the Jordanian army expelled around 2,000 Jews from east Jerusalem. But the Haganah and Israeli army expelled around 60,000 Palestinians from west Jerusalem in that war (source: Mick Dumper’s Politics of Jerusalem, published by Columbia UP in 1997.) All those expulsions were equally hurtful for those thereby cleansed. But since 1967, Israel has moved nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem, including into the locations from which Jews had been expelled in 1948. Not a single one of the 58,000 Palestinians expelled from west Jerusalem has been allowed to return.
   You make one-sided and misleading assertions about the Jewish claims to Jerusalem. But honestly, you cannot expect people in other faith/social groups to simply cede the argument once you’ve made these assertions and say, “Oh, if the Jews claim it we must let them have it, even if that means completely trampling on the rights of the city’s indigenous population!”
   Why would we do that?
   It seems as if you don’t care about the rights of non-Jews at all. But guess what. Most people in the world believe that all humans are created equal… and that a Palestinian born and bred in Jerusalem should have more rights in his native city than a Jewish person from Miami, who already has secure citizenship and property rights in the US, who might choose to jet into Jerusalem from time to time.
   International law also guards the rights of the indigenous residents of territories that come under foreign military occupation, in the ways that I indicated above (principally, in this context: through the bans on annexation and on implanting civilian settlers from the occupying country into the occupied area.) Honestly why would anyone want to live in a world in which basic rules of decency and reciprocity like these held no sway? Such a world would be one in which might simply makes right: Not a healthy or stable world to live in, at all.

8. U.S. moment of truth
   …since the inauguration of the Obama administration, expansion of Israeli colonial settlement has accelerated particularly in Jerusalem. On February 17, The Washington Post reported that the Israeli occupation authorities confiscated some more (1700) dunams of Palestinian land to expand the colonial settlement of Efrat by 423 acres to enable the increase in its settlers from (9000) to (30,000) as part of Gush Etzion settlement bloc, “just east of a cluster of Palestinian towns and villages, with biblical Bethlehem at the center,” to close the only left Palestinian outlet on the south western outreach to Jerusalem.
   On February 25, the Palestinian presidency invited accredited foreign consuls in Jerusalem to a tour to see first hand the Israeli “E1” settlement plans to connect Maale Adumim to more than fifteen colonies in eastern Jerusalem… “the E1 plan would separate the northern and southern West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would prevent the establishment of Palestinian state,” presidential chief of staff, Rafiq Husseini, told the diplomats.
   Earlier this month the occupation authorities handed eviction orders to Palestinian owners of eighty houses in the al – Bustan neighborhood of Silwan town, the last Palestinian demographic community adjacent to the south eastern walls of Islam’s third holiest site of the Al – Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, threatening to displace (1500) Palestinian Jerusalemites, but more importantly to complete the Jewish demographic siege of Al – Haram al – Sharif and old Jerusalem.
   Accelerated colonial settlement facts on the ground in Jerusalem, where the two – state vision promises a capital for the Palestinian people, leaves nothing to speculation that the Israeli military occupation is about to render the final status issue of Jerusalem “non – negotiable,” the vision itself a non – starter, whatever “peace process” is revived a waste of time for the Palestinians as much as it wins more time for Israel to complete the Jewish metropolitan region around Jerusalem that will completely wall in an area covering (100) square miles by the more than 700 kilometer long wall the Israeli military is building “in” the West Bank, thus torpedoing the very foundations that would make the vision come true.
   The modus operandi of U.S. foreign policy persists. The so – called peace process is sustained by Washington as crisis management diplomacy for one merit only, i.e. to reign in violent Palestinian reaction to the sixty – year old dispossession and displacement and the forty – one year old Israeli occupation.
   On 4 June 2008, in command performance, Barak Obama crawled before his assembled masters at the AIPAC convention in Washington DC and said:
   And I know — and I know that when I visit AIPAC I’m among friends — good friends, friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow — unbreakable forever… Now let me be clear; Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable; the Palestinians need a State — the Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive and that allows them to prosper, but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state with secure, recognized, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.
   So no one should now be surprised that Obama is seeing to it that Jerusalem “remains” the “undivided” capital of Israel. Nicola Nasser continues :
   Without the umbrella of the so – called “peace process” Israeli colonial settlement enterprise could not have prospered to its present state. Since Mitchell led his US fact – finding mission in 2001 more than (95,000) Jewish settlers joined the process. Of the more than 120 settlement outposts in the West Bank, 58 were established after March 2001; only three have been dismantled, but rebuilt, since the Annapolis process began on November 27, 2007. Since the ‘settlement freeze” agreed upon in Annapolis tenders for settlement building in 2008 increased by (550) percent from the previous year and actual construction increased by (30) percent, (38) percent of which was in Jerusalem. The settler population has grown consistently between (4-6%) per year over the last two decades “of peace,” a much higher rate of growth than Israeli society as a whole (1.5%).
   Instead of creating a viable Palestinian state on the land conquered and still occupied by Israel since 1967, an expanding autonomous mini state was established for the colonial Jewish settlers on more than forty percent of the area of the West Bank. Allegra Pacheco of the United Nations’ Humanitarian Office in the Palestinian Territories told BBC on March 3 that the “Israeli settlers occupy 60% of the land.
   For the last eight years, there has been neither “peace” nor “process.” The former U.S. administration’s last-minute effort at peacemaking, known as the “Annapolis process,” has already collapsed; building on its failure promises more failure only.
   Real peace-making seems yet to penetrate the moral consciousness of the U.S. leadership. Obama’s administration, if it doesn’t intend to change course, would do peace and history a great favor by disengagement from the conflict to pave the way for a more balanced international involvement that would base a political settlement thereof on the resolutions of the United Nations legitimacy, if not on justice.
   End the hemorrhage of dollars in support of Israeli expansion in Palestine! End the “peace-process” charade! US out of Palestine now!

9. International donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. It has been very painful for me to witness over the past few years the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.
   The media tend to attribute Gaza’s decline solely to Israeli military and economic actions against Hamas. But such a myopic analysis ignores the problem’s root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at cementing the Palestinian people’s status as stateless refugees in order to use their suffering as a weapon against Israel.
   As a child in Gaza in the 1950s, I experienced the early results of this policy. Egypt, which then controlled the territory, conducted guerrilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza. My father commanded these operations, carried out by Palestinian fedayeen, Arabic for “self-sacrifice.” Back then, Gaza was already the front line of the Arab jihad against Israel. My father was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1956.
   It was in those years that the Arab League started its Palestinian refugee policy. Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel. Even descendants of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can never gain that country’s passport. Even if they marry a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse’s country. They must remain “Palestinian” even though they may have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza.
   This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in a refugee camp was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis.
   So was the Arab policy of overpopulating Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, whose main political support comes from Arab countries, encourages high birth rates by rewarding families with many children. Yasser Arafat said the Palestinian woman’s womb was his best weapon.
   For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.
   Arab countries always push for classifying as many Palestinians as possible as “refugees.” As a result, about one-third of the Palestinians in Gaza still live in refugee camps. For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.
   Now it is Hamas, an Islamist terror organization supported by Iran, which is using and abusing Palestinians for this purpose. While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.
   As a result of 60 years of this Arab policy, Gaza has become a prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians. Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza — all the more so since Hamas took over — and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.
   And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no “cycle of violence” then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity. But instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans’ and Israelis’ hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.
   Hamas, an Iran proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel, but also to Palestinians as well as to neighboring Arab states, who fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilize their countries.
   Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they’d pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians’ refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel. It’s time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them

10. Helena,
    “Haganah and Israeli army expelled around 60,000 Palestinians from west Jerusalem in that war ”
    “Not a single one of the 58,000 Palestinians expelled from west Jerusalem has been allowed to return”
    Very few arabs lived in the west side of Jerusalem. Most of the west side was built after 1948. The east side of Jerusalem including the old city is where arabs lived.
    During 1940’s through 1950’s nearly ALL the Jews had to flee from Arab countries to avoid persecution and pogroms. The number of Jewish refugees from arab countries is estimated to be a million. This number is greater than the number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948, estimated as 343,000- 500,000 .
    Regading Jerusalem, you wrote :”It seems as if you don’t care about the rights of non-Jews at all”
    I do care about ALL religions. In my comments I did say: After the war, Israel abolished all the discriminatory laws promulgated by Jordan and adopted its own tough standard for safeguarding access to all religious shrines.
    I hope I did not violate the rules :}
    to Nonie Darwish comments, Thank you for speaking up. Very well said.

11. Ah yes! Nonie Darwish, career Islamophobe and professional liar. She considers it her duty to, among, other things, inspire deep fear and suspicion of Islam into the heart of every non-Muslim.
    She was on a local radio program a few weeks ago, and among the patent nonsense she spouted was that every Muslim is taught that it is their duty to wage “jihad” against the Christians and the Jews.
    Helena, in my opinion you should remove these comments that someone is placing here under the names of the likes of Michael Totten and now Nonie Darwish. This is clearly a case of impersonation.

12. For over 3,300 years, … from James
    Bizarre, distorted version of history.
    Jerusalem is centrally important in Islamic civilisation, the third most important sacred site after Mecca and Medina. It is indeed mentioned in the the Qur’an, in the guise of al-Masjid al-Aqsa. It was the first place outside Arabia visited by a head of the Islamic community, Umar, who prayed there in 637.
    As for political “capital”, that is a western obsession of the notion of the “nation”-state.

13. James, your “Very few arabs lived in the west side of Jerusalem.”… You adduce no evidence whatsoever for that claim or the claim implied therein that therefore only “very few” Arabs can have been expelled from there in ’48. That is because there IS no evidence to back up your assertion. Instead there is the copious documentary evidence used by researchers including Dumper, David Kimche, etc– and the PHYSICAL evidence of all the many beautiful Arab-built houses in West Jerusalem that are now occupied by Jewish Israelis.
    If you’ve ever spent much time visiting with friends in West Jerusalem, as I have, you’ll know how valued these “Arab houses” are. For information about some of the finer of these houses, see Zochrot’s great web-ex about them, here. But of course those architectural monuments were just the “creme de la creme” of Palestinian housing in pre-1948 West Jerusalem.
    It’s the outer areas of WJ that were developed after ’48.
    As for Israel “safeguarding access for all religions to the places of pilgrimage in Jerusalem”, ha, ha, ha… That claim is quite simply, flat-out untrue regarding those many Palestinian Muslims and Christians– often people with long family connections to these shrines and religious institutions– but who happen to live outside the area of Jerusalem that was unilaterally and illegally annexed by Israel in 1967. Maybe you should go re-read my recent post about Bethlehem.
    The government of Israel has given no assurance of right of pilgrimage visiting to religious sites in Jerusalem, to any religion. In developing the plaza in front of the Kotel it summarily demolished a small mosque and a number of Sufi shrines. Now, it is allowing Simon Wiesenthal to build an institution grotesquely described as a “Museum of Tolerance” on the site of a longstanding Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem.

14. If the mayor is visiting, that gives us the opportunity to protest. I’d like like to see him explain himself to Jerusalem specific protests.
    Declare the “western” part of Jerusalem the city of Jerusalem, and declare the gerrymanded “eastern” part an entirely separate city, closing down all the settlements surrounding. Then there can be a “united city of Jerusalem” that is the capital of Israel, and a “City of East Jerusalem” or “City of al-Quds” that is the capital of Palestine. Two cities as different as Kansas City, KC and Kansas City, MO. The holy city area can become a special U.N. administered zone run by the principles that all people off all faiths have full access to their holy sitese. And there the Jerusalem issue is solved.

15. Inkan,
    Do you think that “closing down all the settlements ” and dividing Jerusalem will satisfy the Palestinians?

16. No, James, it will not satisfy the Palestinians, but it is a necessary part of what is needed to satisfy the Palestinians. What will satisfy the Palestinians is having the security and self-determination of their own independent state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. That and only that will satisfy the Palestinians.

17. Dear Shirin,
    You are wrong. The only think to satisfy them would be the distruction of Israel. Land for peace will not work for Hamas, Jihad and Hizbollah.
    Read the Hamas charter.

18. James, you really should seek professional help.

19. Shirin
    It would be really helpful if you refuted Nonie Darwish’s statements point by point instead of smearing everyone you disagree with. Perpaps Ms Darwish is a liar-prove it. In addition, your suggestion that James seeks mental health was entirely uncalled for. The Hamas charter explicity calls for the destruction of Israel-read article 7 among others
    Article 7 “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
    Article 11The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Muslim generations till Judgement Day?
    This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Muslims have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations till the Day of Judgement.
    Article 13Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Muslim problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Muslims as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?
    “But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow – verse 120).
    There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:
    Article 22 For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
    You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
    “So often as they shall kindle a fire for war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers.” (The Table – verse 64).

20. Scott, refuting the lies and misconceptions pushed by Nonie Darwish and her ilk point by point would be a full-time job.
    And it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to you and your ilk who are in love with your paranoid delusions. Your need to have someone to hate and fear is too overwhelming. I don’t know how you can live that way, but you must find something rewarding about it.

21. Shirin,
    As I said before, the Palestinians already have three nations – Jordan, PA, and Gaza. That they have made of sewer of the latter two (PA, GAZA) is their own fault. That they have not made a sewer of the first (Jordan) is to the credit not of the Palestinians, but of the Hashemites.

22. James, have you noticed that no one here takes you seriously? Even the people who come here regularly with their Israeli hasbara talking-points are ignoring you, apparently trying to pretend they don’t notice. I suspect they are embarrassed by you.
    You are a sad, hate-filled, frightened person. It must be a terrible way to live, eating yourself from the inside that way. I feel so sorry for you.

23. Shirin,
    Repeating your big lies don’t make them true.
    You are a closed-minded ignorant and arrogant arab nut job.

24. Shirin,
    Repeating your big lies don’t make them true.
    You are a closed-minded ignorant and arrogant nut job.

25. Yes, as I’ve noted elsewhere that in and after the fighting of 1948, the Jordanian army expelled around 2,000 Jews from east Jerusalem. But the Haganah and Israeli army expelled around 60,000 Palestinians from west Jerusalem in that war (source: Mick Dumper’s Politics of Jerusalem, published by Columbia UP in 1997.) All those expulsions were equally hurtful for those thereby cleansed. But since 1967, Israel has moved nearly 200,000 Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem, including into the locations from which Jews had been expelled in 1948. Not a single one of the 58,000 Palestinians expelled from west Jerusalem has been allowed to return.
    This is an interesting figure, because according to records I have seen, on the eve of the war in 1947, the entire population of Jerusalem (both East and West) was 165,000, of which fully two-thirds was Jewish. That would mean that according to you and Dumper (an appropriate name?) every single Arab from both sides of Jerusalem (including an extra 2,000) was “expelled”.

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