About Those Israeli 'Settlements'

UN tool-in-chief Ban Ki-Moon is at it again , calling for an Israeli 'settlement freeze' :

I have stated that the United Nations will work with a united Palestinian government that brings Gaza and the West Bank under the authority of President Abbas. I urge all Palestinian parties, and all regional and international players, to support the process of Palestinian reconciliation.

If anything, the crisis in Gaza underscored the depth of the political failures of the past, and the urgent need to achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace for all peoples in the Middle East. Just as we need a unified Palestinian government committed to the peace process, we need an Israeli government that will uphold its commitments. Just as we need the Palestinians to address security issues--as the Palestinian Authority is doing so commendably in the West Bank--we need the Israelis to implement a genuine settlement freeze.

Settlement expansion is illegal and unacceptable and does so much to undermine confidence in the political process throughout the Arab world. I am urging all international partners to make this issue central to renewed international peace efforts.

I wonder..did the Secretary General of the UN write this all by himself? Because it's a lot more revealing than I think he intended.

Let's examine this whole warped concept of 'settlements.'

Some of these communities have been there longer than Ban Ki-Moon's home country South of Korea has existed, and even the ones that haven't have existed for forty years or so. In 1948, when the Arabs attacked Israel at its birth and ethnically cleansed Jews from Judea and Samaria ( AKA the West Bank) and East Jerusalem, they simply apropriated a lot of Jewish homes and property...which is how the place CNN and al-Reuters refer to 'traditionally Arab East Jerusalem' came to be. It was 'traditionally Arab' for only 19 years, from 1948 to 1967. Yet somehow this illegally seized property somehow never got the label 'settlements.'

In fact absolutely nothing was ever heard in the hallowed halls of the UN about this theft, or about the forced expulsion of almost a million Jews from the Arab world.

Even more ironically, when Israel retrieved these areas in 1967 after being attacked by Jordan, they let the Arabs who had participated in this theft hang on to their ill-gotten gains for the most part instead of retaliating in kind. So almost all the so-called settlements were built according to official Labor government policy on land that was either vacant or on Jordanian government land.

Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem is a good example. Originally purchased from the Ottoman Emirs at an exhorbitant price in 1924 by the Jewish National Fund, the residents with great effort and toil had built a prosperous farming community there. In 1948, they were cut off by the Jordanian Arab Legion and their British officers and offered safe conduct to the Jewish lines if they surrendered. Burdened with women and children, armed with a few rifles and facing a modern fighting force, they agreed.

After the Jews laid down their arms , the Arabs massacred two hundred of the inhabitants outright, including almost all of the able bodied men. The rest, mostly women and children were sent to a Jordanian military prison, where they lived under unspeakable conditions until they were repatriated to Israel in 1950.

Gush Etzion became a Jordanian military base, with the rightful owners able to view their old homes from the John F. Kennedy Memorial forest in Israel. And after Jordan attacked Israel in 1967, the Israelis recaptured it and returned it to the rightful owners.

Was it somehow 'illegal' to restore this stolen property to its rightful owners? Apparently the UN and Ban Ki-Moon seem to think so. Just as they seem to think that 19 year's worth of squatter's rights is more legitimate than 40 to 60 years' worth of ownership.


There's another hidden context to this that's insidious, but reveals how closely the UN and the rest of the so-called 'Quartet' including the Obama Administration are signalling that Jews have no real rights in the Middle East and are not to be tolerated except grudgingly.


Both Ban Ki-Moon and our own secretary of state Hillary Clinton have made a huge point about a 'settlement freeze' as part of the Road Map. Since the Israelis are not kicking Arabs out of their homes, what they're really referring to as settlement expansion is building homes for Jews inside or next to existing Jewish communities on vacant land to cover the natural population increase .

Now ask yourself - why would that be a problem? What does it have to do with where the borders end up being drawn, really?

A million Arabs live in pre-1967 Israel as a minority with full rights under the law and no one at the UN is talking about removing them as an obstacle to peace. Is there a reason that Jews somehow wouldn't able to have the same privilege in an Arab state?

Could it be that the Arabs are unwilling to to tolerate the existence of a single Jew in the new supposedly 'peaceful' and 'democratic'Palestinian state the EU, the US and the UN are so dead set on creating?

Could it be that the UN and the rest of the Quartet are aiding and abetting - dare I call it by its true name - apartheid?

You bet they are. And without the slightest bit of shame.