Making A Mountain out of a Hilltop
Over the last several days, we have witnessed how a bureaucratic blunder and a poorly timed announcement of building apartments on a hill in Jerusalem has flared up into a major international incident between the Obama administration and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This has happened, despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately apologized, both publicly and privately for the unfortunate timing of the announcement, saying that Israel had never had the slightest intention, whatsoever of ever embarrassing the Vice President of the United States. Yet members of the Obama administration have since let the rhetoric escalate and heat way up out of proportion.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, employing an unusually harsh tone, berated the Prime Minister for forty-three minutes over the telephone on Friday, calling the statement “provocative” and saying that Israeli building plans sent “a deeply negative signal” towards the US-Israeli relationship and the peace process. The rhetoric was again turned up during an ABC news interview with top Obama official David Axelrod calling the statement “insulting”, and “seemed calculated to undermine the ‘proximity talks’” When the preposterous question was asked by ABC news correspondent Jake Tapper if the statement “puts American troops at risk in the region”, he did not directly confirm or deny it.
The Palestinians have not lost any ground in inflaming the situation and using the new-found American ally of the Obama administration to embolden them. As soon as the Vice President’s plane left Ben Gurion Airport a new school was named in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, perhaps one of the most notorious terrorists in the bloody history of the Palestinian conflict against Israel.
Ms. Mughrabi was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that in 1979 sailed from Lebanon and landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv. She and her cohorts killed an American photojournalist, hijacked a bus and commandeered another, embarking on a bloody rampage that left 38 Israeli civilians dead, 13 of them children.
What is even more horrific is that members of the Palestinian Authority Leadership,(note this is NOT Hamas, this is the P.A.), including Fatah Central Committee Member Tawfiq Tiwari hailed Ms. Mughrabi as a heroine and a martyr.
“We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” declared Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, who came to join the students. “For us she is not a terrorist,” he said, but rather “a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”
The PA is obviously feeling emboldened by the apparent rift between America and the United States, and is using it to show their true colors, as people who glorify terrorism and the murder of innocents. Might we also point out that the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv lies in the heart of pre-1967 Israel?
Why no word of rebuke from the Obama administration for the PA’s glorifying the murder of innocents? What is more detrimental to peace, incitement to terror or building some apartments on a hill in Northern Jerusalem that had already been established and is inhabited, but needs to expand because of natural growth?
Would it have been alright if the area was designated for Arabs only, and not for Jews? Isn’t it somewhat racist that Jerusalem, Israel’s designated eternal capital, is one of the only places in the world where, according to our government Jews are not allowed to live?
Let’s take a sober look at the situation at the heart of this that lies under the inflammatory rhetoric. Ramat Shlomo is an already established Jewish neighborhood in the northern part of Jerusalem. Even the most far-reaching peace proposals such as that offered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Chairman Arafat on July 25, 2000, have always considered this area as part of Israel.
Going back to 1967, every single Israeli Prime Minister, including those from the Labor Party, have always regarded Jerusalem as Israel’s sovereign capital, and have included neighborhoods surrounding the Western part of the city as belonging to Israel. This includes Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Shamir, Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. All have built neighborhoods beyond the 1967 lines, including Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Ramot, Gilo, Pisgat Zeev and Ramat Shlomo.
We already know that offering portions of Jerusalem to the Palestinians in a final solution will be a deal breaker. Why is the Obama administration turning up the rhetoric to such a degree and reinforcing the unrealistic dream that Jerusalem will sometime fall into Palestinian hands?
Although building has always gone on in Jerusalem since 1967, why is the Obama administration letting this rhetoric get so out of hand, even after an official apology was made and accepted?
What is going on here and why? Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that this past January, 16, Gen. David Petraeus had sent a team from CENTCOM to the Pentagon to and briefed Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presenting a 45 minute slide show saying Arab leaders were “disgusted with Israeli intransigence”, and that “America has to stand up to Israel”.
Can I ask you what else is new? Since 1948 the Arab world has been saying this. They never wanted a Jewish state and are now rejoicing in the fact finally, there an administration in the White House who is using a simple mistake to fan the flames between America and Israel and to make a silly blunder into an international crisis.
Please, I implore you, President Obama, it is time to please tone down the rhetoric, and to finally concentrate on the real problems at hand affecting both Israel and the United States, and the entire free world as we know it, which is the looming Iranian nuclear bomb.
But perhaps the administration is using this mistake as a decoy so that we do not have to concentrate on it, after all. And that is the scariest thought of all.
Update: Since Monday when this article was submitted for publication there has been statements on both sides to reduce the temperature of the discussion. We hope that this trend of cooler heads continues, and no more “mountains are made out of mole hills.”
A version of this article also appeared in the Washington Jewish Weekly