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nataliesnews · 4 years ago

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A school in Palestine

Your children went safely to school. You often drive them there and back. You never had a problem to find a school or to get a permit to buy one. This is how Israel deals with Palestinian children who try to get a basic education. Very, very rarely do Palestinians get permission to build anything Starting with a pen for animals, a toilet or an addition to a building. As for a building it …forget it. And how cares where they go? They do not walk on roads or through the desert…imagine in summer. Often the schooling of the girls is cut short because parents say is it dangerous for girls alone in the desert. We are the people of the book……but better to keep them uneducated as one settlers said….They were created to be our servants” This Pastoral Palestinian Community Built a School of Its Own. Now Israel Wants to Demolish It

Before the schoolhouse was built, children had to walk seven kilometers each way to get an education. Will the dream be destroyed by bulldozers?

The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

Gideon Levy

Alex Levac

Published at 15:00

It’s exactly 12 noon. A little boy bursts out of the teachers’ room holding a heavy iron bell and rings it. The chime of redemption? Not quite. Immediately afterward the doors of the five classrooms open and dozens of boys and girls spill out of them. Schoolbags on their backs, most of them wearing corona masks, they walk in a line down the slope of the verdant valley to their homes – in tents. One “privileged” boy has a ride waiting for him: a mule that’s tied up nearby. He’s from one of the neighboring pastoral communities.

Since the start of the school year in September, the lives of these Palestinian children from the village of Ras a-Tin, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, have been transformed beyond recognition. Until then they had to walk more than seven kilometers each morning to school in the closest village, Mughayir, and then take the same route home – about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) back and forth in the heat and the cold, in the wind and the rain, and sometimes also in the face of settlers’ attacks along the way. So in late August the community decided to act: It would build its own school.

With the aid of the Palestinian Education Ministry and GVC, an Italian-based European Commission aid organization, the miracle occurred. Residents built a simple brick structure of six rooms – five classrooms and a teachers’ room – covered with a tin roof, situated on a gravel mound. This was the primary school of the village of Ras a-Tin.

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The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

It’s a very touching sight. The simplicity of the white building; the small, Spartan classrooms that contain only a few children’s work tables, chairs and a whiteboard; the sparkling eyes of the teachers, the enthusiasm of the pupils; the principal who came here after administering a similar institution in another shepherds’ community. Previously most of the children were frequently absent from school, or dropped out altogether, because of the ordeal of the daily trek, but now the attendance rate is high.

This week pupils in the new school learned about equations with an unknown variable.

The real unknown, however, is whether and when the dream will be shattered and the school demolished. The fear is that this heartwarming vision will be a short-lived one, because the occupation authorities won’t let it last. Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, has already issued the demolition orders; the bulldozers are on the way.

First, personnel of the Civil Administration tried to prevent the building’s construction, then they began to confiscate equipment and furniture. Now they are preventing the town from hooking up the teachers’ bathroom to some sort of plumbing infrastructure, in a locale that’s not even connected to the main water or power grids. Inspectors from the Civil Administration show up regularly to make sure no one has connected the plumbing in the meantime so as to make it possible to flush the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. That’s how far this evil has gone.

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A classroom in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

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An expert opinion written on behalf of the Israeli human rights NGO Bimkon – Planners for Planning Rights by architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, which was submitted to the court last month states that the school has tremendous importance vis-a-vis the lives of these pupils.

“For some of them, it is their only possibility to participate in the education system, as it is close to their home,” he wrote. “The school makes it possible for all the children in the community to exercise their basic right – the right to education: for those who never attended school, for those who have dropped out, and also for those who previously had to make their way to a distant school across difficult terrain and who were frequently absent. Demolition of the school will deprive these children” of this opportunity.

According to Cohen-Lifshitz’s document – which will also be submitted to the Supreme Court, following a district court ruling that the school’s demolition can go ahead – in numerous other cases in the West Bank, ways have been found to avoid demolition of a school that has been built without a permit, and special directives to that effect have actually been issued by the military government, citing “regulations authorizing the establishment and exemption from permit for an educational structure.”

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But such exemptions, of course, apply solely to Jewish settlements, not to the other residents of the region. Cohen-Lifshitz emphasizes that the land on which the Ras a-Tin elementary school was built is privately owned and that the Palestinian owner gave the go-ahead for the structure’s construction. In addition, under the Mandatory-era regulations that apply in this area, a school may be built on agricultural lands, even though there is of course no chance they would ever receive a building permit from Israeli authorities in Area C of the West Bank (under exclusive Israeli control).

Cohen-Lifshitz went on to describe what the typical school day would look like should the children be required to return to attending their former school in Mughayir. . “Here we should try to imagine little girls and boys, in the first grade, who need to leave home at 6 A.M. to reach school on time for their first class. These children end their school day at 1 P.M., but will arrive home only at 4 P.M. Their school day thus lasts 10 hours, only half of which is devoted to learning,” the document says, he wrote on behalf of Bimkom.

In the period of the coronavirus pandemic, this predicament is even more acute, as online learning is virtually nonexistent in a community lacking electric power, not to mention computers and internet.

About 300 people, around half of them children or adolescents, live in Ras a-Tin, where their parents make a living raising sheep and growing wheat and other feed grains for them. It is situated next to the Kokhav Hashahar settlement’s rock quarry, itself a gross violation of international law, which forbids occupying forces to mine natural resources in an area under their control. Kokhav Hashahar is located on the ridge opposite.

We are perched above the Jordan Valley. On the surrounding hills settler outposts and mobile homes sprout up like poison mushrooms after the rain. The Israeli residents’ aim is identical to that of the Civil Administration: to strangle and force out the pastoral Palestinian communities in the vicinity and shunt them to the Jericho region – in a reprise of their expulsion in the early 1970s from their previous habitation in the South Hebron Hills.

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A maths class in Ras a-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Israel does not recognize its existence, but the community of Ras a-Tin is relatively well kept, consisting of a group of family tents spread across the hills above a valley where wheat fields bloom after the first rains of autumn. The grain is stored in nearby caves that function as natural granaries. But Israel is out to destroy this way of life.

The abuse here is long-standing. Iyad Hadad, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, shows us some documents and testimonies that he took from the residents of Ras a-Tin back in 2009, when the campaign to expel them began. The mukhtar, or headman, of the community is Ahmad Ahadishan Kaabana, and we’re sitting with him now on a gravelly area in front of the new school, which is neither a yard nor a playground.

“Free Palestine” declares a sign in childish handwriting pinned to the door of a classroom. Unlike other schools in the Palestinian Authority, they’re afraid to fly the Palestinian flag here. It is evident in only one classroom, on the floor in a corner, leaning against the wall, folded and ashamed. Maybe also frightened.

“We don’t dare hang up even a drawing of a tree here, so you want us to hoist a flag?” says the principal, Nura Azhari, who lives in Ramallah. Before coming here, she ran a school in another shepherds community, near Beit Liqya, west of Ramallah. There, too, a demolition order hangs over the school.

There are 22 “challenged” schools like this across the West Bank at present, under threat of being torn down at any time. Mapping carried out by Bimkom for 260 routes that run between 130 communities like Ras a-Tin in Area C and the schools their children attend, shows that accessibility is poor and difficult. For more than 80 communities, the route to school is longer than two kilometers; for 48, it’s longer than five kilometers, which often must be traveled on foot.

Ras a-Tin residents haven’t felt secure for even one day since moving here in 1971, Kaabana tells us. “They have us in their sights, they don’t leave us alone.”

Several times they have been moved from one place to another, and sometimes they are forced to leave their homes temporarily to allow training exercises by the Israel Defense Forces. They are not permitted to dig wells; they must bring containers of water at high cost. No one even dreams of being hooked up to the water and power grids.

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The school principal, Nura Azhari.Credit: Alex Levac

When the children attended the school in Mughayir, they were sometimes bused by the PA, but no more than two or three times a week. The situation became more acute during the past two years because of attacks on the children by members of the settler outposts. So the community decided to build its own school, close to home. The revolutionary idea was implemented quickly, because the PA promised to help if land could be made available – and that was contributed to the community by its Palestinian owner. Afterward the mukhtar heard about GVC, an NGO that helps build schools in disadvantaged areas around the world, and the dream of the school materialized.

Construction began on August 20. Eleven days later, on August 31, Civil Administration forces showed up and confiscated construction equipment, bricks, rods and cement. The next day they returned with an order: “Final order for cessation of work, and demolition,” issued by the “subcommittee for construction supervision of the Supreme Planning Council.” The work continued, however, and skeleton of the structure was in place by September 3.

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School children in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Civil Administration personnel returned and confiscated the tin sheets that were intended for the roof. They also took the opportunity to make off with four pallets of bricks, 30 chairs and 12 tables. The community’s race against time reached a peak of intensity – three days later, on September 6, the school year was supposed to start.

At first, the pupils sat on the floor surrounded by gray, unplastered walls and no roof over their heads. On September 10, the Israeli forces returned and expropriated more tin sheets, which were already serving as a roof in place of those previously impounded. The forces also took 12 more tables that the PA had provided. In the following days, empty olive oil containers were used as tables.

The Civil Administration hasn’t actually confiscated anything since, but on three occasions teachers and pupils arrived in the morning to find all the furniture from the school strewn on the ground outside. The perpetrators might have been settlers, perhaps the Civil Administration: In Ras a-Tin, people believe there is total identification of the latter with the former, and collaboration between them all.

Administration personnel returned on September 20, this time only to photograph the site. They also came back last week, to do more photography and to check that the toilets were not connected to the water supply. Each such visit of course gives rise to more fear and dread among teachers and pupils alike.

A spokesperson for the unit of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories issued the following response to a series of questions from Haaretz this week: “A petition concerning the allegations [of the residents] was received in our office. The response to the petition will be made to the court, as usual. We emphasize that the Civil Administration’s supervisory unit carries out activities of enforcement against offenses relating to planning and building, this as part of its duty to preserve public order and the rule of law. The enforcement activities, like the confiscations of equipment carried out in the place mentioned, are executed in accordance with its powers and procedures, and also subject to orders of priorities and operational considerations.”

During the period of the coronavirus epidemic, pupils only are at school for four hours a day. The classes are coed and mixed: First, second and third grades are in one classroom, and the same holds for the upper grades too. All told, there are 50 pupils, 30 girls and 20 boys, six teachers, a secretary and the principal. Now it’s girls, who previously hardly attended school because of the distance and the dangers involved in going, who constitute the majority.

Principal Azhari says that with all the fears and anxiety caused by the demolition order, the changes from the period before the school existed have been dramatic. Parents tell her proudly that their children suddenly know a little English. And math. And literature. And suddenly they want to learn. As for the teachers, the principal says, they can’t wait for each new day to dawn so they can come to the school.

#Your children went safely to school. You often drive them there and back. You never had a problem to find a school or to get a permit to buy

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garudabluffs · 7 years ago

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Map of Concentration Camps in Italy

List of Italian concentration camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_concentration_camps

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These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them. OpEdNews Op Eds 8/3/2

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy By Jim Kavanagh "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much""-- Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" [h/t William A. Cook]

The Israeli-American (Let's never forget this is a team effort!) slaughter in Gaza is so horrifying that I've been at a loss to find the words to comment on it without letting anger get the better of me. The media coverage of what's happening, dominated by the ridiculous notion that Israel is "defending" itself, is so grotesquely mendacious, hypocritical, and racist (imbued with colonialist ethno-supremacism) that it is hard to know where to begin critiquing it--without, again, becoming enraged. - Advertisement - For the moment, I'll focus on one particular, insistent meme, constantly being promoted by Israel and its apologists, namely that Hamas is using civilians as "human shields." The idea is that for Hamas to place any kind of military personnel anywhere in or near a civilian neighborhood constitutes using all the civilians in that neighborhood as "human shields." Furthermore, it makes of that neighborhood a legitimate "military" target for devastating Israeli attack, absolves Israel from any culpability for the scores of resulting dead, blown-apart civilians including children, and places all moral and legal responsibility for those victims on the Palestinian resistance fighters who dared appear anywhere near civilians. So, for example, the personal homes of Palestinian political and military leaders, construed as "command and control centers," are legitimate military targets. If a Hamas functionary lives with his family of five children in an apartment building of 8 stories with 4 apartments per floor, it is perfectly legitimate to bomb that building and kill all 32 families--"human shields," after all--in order to destroy that "command and control center." - Advertisement - This "human shields" argument is what allows Israeli officials, as Noura Erakat points out, to "openly admit that they are deliberately and systematically bombing the family homes of suspected militants," killing whole families. It suggests an ethic that supposedly justifies an Israeli offensive which produces 75-80% civilian causalities , 33% of which are children, among the Palestinian population (and somehow renders insignificant the contrasting fact that almost 100% of Israeli casualties from Palestinian resistance operations are military). To hear it in the American media, poor, anguished Israel actually becomes the victim of all these "telegenically dead," deliberately sacrificed, Palestinian "human shields." American political "leaders" and media pundits universally endorse this pretense of an ethic, or at the least, let it pass unchallenged. Of course, anyone with an ounce of intellectual or moral honesty would have to accept that such an ethic was universally applicable: Kill by that ethic, die by that ethic. - Advertisement - As Amira Hass points out, "the [Israeli] Defense Ministry is in the heart of Tel Aviv, as is the army's main "war room." [These are real "command and control centers"] And"the military training base at Glilot [is] near the big mall" And the Shin Bet headquarters [is] in Jerusalem, on the edge of a residential neighborhood." If Israel's claimed ethic were anything other than the flimsiest excuse for its presumed ethno-supremacist license to kill, Israel and its supporters would have to accept that Hamas has at least as much right to fire its crude rockets in the general direction of the Israeli Ministry of Defense as Israel does to blow up homes, schools, and hospitals with its precision weapons--civilian casualties be damned. By Israeli logic and ethic, are not the Israeli civilians near these military facilities "human shields"? When they get killed, should we not sympathize with the anguished Hamas rocketeers who were forced to kill the civilians that Israel cleverly placed in dangerous neighborhoods? [Actually, unless one is comfortable with colonialism, it's arguable that Hamas has every right to its attacks, and it's inarguable that Israel has no right to theirs.] We all know, of course, that there is no intellectual or moral consistency here, only the ethic of ethno-supremacist, colonialist "exceptionalism." Can you imagine the moral outrage and gnashing of teeth on the part of the oh-so-tough-minded American political and media personalities who accept the Israeli "human shields" argument if anyone tried to apply it to hundreds of dead Jewish children? If this were the scene, day after day, for Israeli Jews: The father is saying: 'Wake up -- I brought you a toy.' (Image by مختلفون mo5talfoon) PermissionDetailsDMCA But we need to take a step back to see how Israel is deliberately and dishonestly confusing a specific definition of "human shields" with a more general notion of something like "collateral damage" in a way that tries to justify the viciousness of its current massacre in Gaza. As Brad Parker, of Defence for Children International Palestine, points out: the use of civilians as human shields is prohibited under international law and involves forcing civilians to directly assist in military operations or using them to shield a military object or troops from attack. The rhetoric continually voiced by Israeli officials regarding "human shields" amounts to nothing more than generalisations that fall short of the precise calculation required by international humanitarian law when determining whether something is actually a military object. Israel is using the "human shield" argument in a way that dilutes is specific meaning in international law, and turns it into another catchall bugaboo, used to hinder careful thought and justify the unjustifiable. Israel finds "human shields" everywhere there are civilians in the way the U.S. government now finds "weapons of mass destruction" anywhere there's "an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce." It's particularly brazen for Israel to be raising and confusing the "human shields" issue because it is Israel itself which has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as "human shields" to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, along with the torture, solitary confinement, and threats of sexual assault toward detained children, Israel is guilty of the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants." The report, issued last year, cites14 cases in 3 years. We're not talking here about some vague notion of endangering children by allowing them to live in a dangerous town. Nor are the accusations limited to namby-pamby UN Committee that no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to. We're talking about specific practices, identified and denounced by the High Court of Justice in Israel, "like the 'neighbor procedure,' whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man's house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped." Here's a picture, from The Guardian in 2007, of Sameh Amira, 24, who--along with his15-year-old cousin Amid, and an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush--was forced to act as a human shield to search homes in Nablus during a search for bomb-making labs. They were forced them to enter apartments ahead of the soldiers, and to search the houses, emptying cabinets and cupboards, in order to protect the most-moral IDF boys from getting hurt. And here's a picture of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy lashed to the front of an Israeli armored vehicle to prevent stone throwers from" What? Damaging the clearcoat? These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them. And, according to a report in Mondoweiss, there is evidence that Israel is using these explicit human shield tactics in the present conflict. One resident of Khuza, Ayman Abu Toaimah, reports that: "As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields." Another, Abu Saleem, 56, says: "Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields-- how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It's them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza'a and Shuja'iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses." And a third, Abu Ali Qudail, said: "When the ICRC told us that ambulances are waiting us at the entrance of the village from the western side, about 1,000 people rushed to leave their homes, some of which were used as a hideout for Israeli forces." Here's a good rule of thumb: Every nasty tactic that Israel accuses the Palestinians of using is one that they are actually the masters of. It's called projection, and you'll be understanding the world a lot better if you consider that most of the accusations Israel (as well the United States) makes against its enemies are projections of its own faults and crimes. Do you think for a second that, if there were one piece of evidence as clearly dispositive of Hamas's use of human shields as the pictures above, you would not have seen it all over the news every day? Corollary question: With all the constant chatter about "human shields," why does none of this factual evidence about Israel's use of the human shield tactic ever enter into the media discourse? Because American politics and media are in complete collaboration with the colonial savagery that is Zionism, and they do not want to disturb the American public's acquiescence to that. This is a stance that must be refused, with contempt. As Congress approves unanimously and Obama supplies the weapons, no American can think s/he stands in a neutral space, shielded from the nasty effects of the decision s/he is making--whether by resting silently complicit or by speaking up in protest.

#mass murder

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dani-qrt · 7 years ago

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As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape

JERUSALEM — When Israel declared its independence in 1948, President Harry Truman rushed to recognize it. He took just 11 minutes, and Israelis, about to go to war to defend their infant state, were euphoric.

Seventy years to the day — and nearly as long since Israel declared the holy city of Jerusalem its “eternal capital” — the United States will formally open its embassy on a hilltop here two miles south of the Western Wall.

The embassy’s move from Tel Aviv and President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — reversing decades of American foreign policy — comes at a moment so fraught with both pride and peril that Israelis seem not to know what to feel.

Israelis find it hard to rejoice when they find themselves doing some of the same things they did back in 1948: listening for civil-defense sirens, readying bomb shelters and calling in reinforcements to confront threats to the north, south and east.

An escalating shadow war with Iran has broken into the open, pitting Israel against its most powerful adversary in the region. A mass protest in Gaza has spurred thousands of Palestinians, encouraged by Hamas, to try to cross into Israel, whose snipers have killed scores and wounded thousands of them. The bloodshed has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back onto the international agenda after years as an afterthought.

Now, in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, Israeli border police and troops are bracing for expressions of pent-up frustration, impatience and rage — at the United States for seeming to dispense with any pretense at balance; at Israel for its continuing occupation; at the Palestinian Authority for its weakness and corruption; and at the peace process itself, for inspiring hopes that have again and again proved false.

“If you look at it from the outside, you’d see one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century,” said the historian Tom Segev, author of a new biography of Israel’s founding prime minister, “David Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs.”

With Israel so strong and its Jewish population larger than ever, Mr. Segev said, “It’s really the realization of Ben-Gurion’s dream. But at the same time, the future is very bleak, and some of the problems he left us remain unresolved.”

It is hard for Israeli Jews to feel entirely at ease when they remain so estranged from one another and the nearly two million Arab citizens at home, and from millions of people next door: A lasting settlement with the Palestinians seems as elusive as it has been in more than a generation.

However besieged many Israelis may feel, objectively Israel has never been more powerful, in almost any sense of the word.

Its military routinely obliterates opposing forces with fighter jets, antimissile batteries and newfangled tunnel-destroying tools. Its spies whisk warehouses’ worth of secrets out from under its enemies’ noses. Its high-tech start-ups routinely sell for billions, its economy is the envy of the Middle East, its television shows thrive on Netflix. On Saturday, its entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest — a chicken-dancing feminist named Netta Barzilai — overcame a boycott attempt by Israel’s detractors to win by popular acclaim.

Warming relations with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states are even buoying hopes that Israel could begin to expand its tiny circle of friends in the region.

Monday’s move of the American mission to a fortified former consulate along the seam between East and West Jerusalem, from a beachfront bastion in Tel Aviv, is freighted with symbolism in manifold ways.

But the relocation of the chief American outpost from liberal Tel Aviv, a blue dot on the red political map of Israel, to a capital city that has largely replaced its secular Israeli population with a more religious one, neatly mirrors what is happening to support for Israel in the United States.

Ben-Gurion was prime minister for 13 years, all told. Benjamin Netanyahu will surpass that record in mid-2019 if he holds on to office. That is far from assured: He faces possible indictment in a web of domestic corruption scandals, and criminal charges could cause his governing coalition to collapse.

President Trump has gone further than perhaps any of his predecessors to support Israel and its right-wing leader, and no American president has done more to bestow gifts on an Israeli leader than he has.

From recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to withholding money from the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees — an agency Mr. Netanyahu would like to see eliminated altogether — to pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement last week, Mr. Trump has showered Mr. Netanyahu with political prizes.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior adviser on the Middle East, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are among the high-ranking representatives sent by the administration to attend Monday’s opening ceremony. Israel said all 86 countries with diplomatic missions in the country were invited to the event, and 33 confirmed attendance.

To Palestinians, the official unveiling of the embassy is just the most concrete and latest in a cavalcade of provocations from Washington and the Israeli government.

“It’s might makes right,” said Hind Khoury, a former diplomat for the Palestine Liberation Organization who now heads a sustainable development nonprofit based in Bethlehem. Not only are Palestinians now expected to forget about Jerusalem, she said, but also the losses of their homes in 1948 and again in the fighting of 1967.

“Accept Israel’s presence and dominance,” she said. “Accept home demolitions and expulsions and dispossession.

“Accept the uprooting of our olive trees, the violence of settlers,” she continued, picking up steam. “Accept settlements. Accept Israel’s control of all the Jordan Valley, and using it for its economic benefit. Accept that Israel didn’t live up to any of its commitments. Accept the siege of Gaza. Accept that East Jerusalem doesn’t belong to us anymore. Accept the racist legislation that Israel passes; that we’re prisoners in our land: I can’t get a visa because we’re ‘all terrorists.’ Accept the use of ‘anti-Semitism’ to fight anybody who wants to support Palestinian rights.”

“These are things we have to accept, or we’ll just get more hell,” she said, before adding: “Maybe I speak more like a mother and grandmother, but it’s so sinful to give such a legacy to the next generation.”

For Israeli Jews, a different set of grievances is being assuaged and activated by Monday’s embassy opening and all it stirs up.

The American-Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi, whose new book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” is being published on Tuesday, sees the embassy move as a “rare moment of compensation” for what he called “the campaign to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem” — one expressed in votes of Unesco, or in the speeches of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, when he invokes the Christian and Muslim attachment to Jerusalem but pointedly omits any Jewish one.

“There’s this deep resentment among Israelis about the war against our history and our rootedness in this city,” Mr. Halevi said.

Still, noting that his book “about reconciliation with my Palestinian neighbors is coming out at one of the worst moments in the tortured history of our relationship,” Mr. Halevi said he wished the embassy move could be accompanied by some kind of “affirmation by both Israel and the United States of the Palestinian presence in the city we share.”

“I don’t think we should be laying out blueprints,” he said. “We’re far from that. But there should be a clear stating of our recognition that we’re not alone in Jerusalem. This would be an apt moment for a generous Israeli statement.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s advocacy against the Iran deal during the Obama administration did much to sour Jewish Democrats on the Israeli leader. His abandonment of a painstakingly negotiated deal to give Reform and Conservative Jews a bigger stake in Jewish life in Israel, and approval of a measure granting the Orthodox chief rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel, drove a wedge between liberal American Jews and Israeli religious leaders.

Other policies, like efforts to deport African migrants, and a continuing legislative attack by Mr. Netanyahu’s political allies on democratic institutions like Israel’s Supreme Court, have only added to many liberal Americans’ discomfort with Israel.

In effect, as the Trump administration gives physical expression to its affection for Israel, a rift appears to be widening between the world’s two main centers of Jewish life.

The immediate threats to Israeli security could of course fizzle. The rift between American and Israeli Jews could heal with a new administration in either place, if not before. Even the risk posed by the embassy move could prove no more dampening to the celebration, in retrospect, than the smashing of a glass at a Jewish wedding.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Middle East peace process “is most decidedly not dead,” despite the embassy move, telling “Fox News Sunday” that the United States still hopes to be able to “achieve a successful outcome” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Segev, the biographer, said he had learned in his research that Ben-Gurion had never cared much for Jerusalem, and had refrained from trying to take the city in 1948 in part because he knew it would be difficult to guard its Old City from extremists.

In that sense, Mr. Segev said, little seems to have changed.

“That’s what Jerusalem is all about,” he said. “That’s why it’s been a problem the last 3,000 years. And it may be a problem for the next 3,000 years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Israel, Pride and Anxiety Greet U.S. Embassy’s Jerusalem Debut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape appeared first on World The News.

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newestbalance · 7 years ago