Getting lost in the Green Line
As a CAMERA alert informed me, one written by Tamar Sternthal, the papal trip of Benedictus XVI to Israel has confused the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which allowed some errors of fact about Israel to appear in its pages. One of them seems to been a stumble over the Green Line, as if it were a tripwire for political geographic correctness. Duke Helfand, an LA Times reporter, erroneously states in one article that the Pope will arrive at:
Ooops. Yad Vashem, for sure, is not in the "West Bank" and I would suggest that neither is the Western Wall. They are located in Jerusalem. And, if one wants to get nitpicky, Yad Vashem is actually in the western section and was under Israeli control prior to 1967, that watershed year when maps got redrawn, Biblical locations became rediscovered and the Green Line became, well, obsolete to a great extent. Green line language
A May 1 New York Times story included this information about Jerusalem:
Now, I am not certain that the numbers above are exact but, for the moment, that is less a concern to me than the language used. Raising the green-line veil
I hope you are not shocked if I tell you that a terrible secret-not-a-secret has been revealed. And that secret is that there most probably won't be a full peace between Jews and Arabs in the territory of the former Mandate of Palestine, no matter what borders are delineated. We had the Chaim Weizmann borders of 1919 (from the Litani in the north to the Hejaz Railway in the east, see note 8) -, the Ze'ev Jabotinsky borders (all of TransJordan included), Peel Commission Borders or UN Resolution 181 and much more. And why do I arrive at that conclusion? No going back to 1967
With the return of George Mitchell to Israel, and his seeking long-term office space (jealous of Tony Blair, I would guess) as well as the purported statement of Rahm Immanuel which can be summed up as "you give us what we want, we give you, maybe, want you need," the media is hopping with commentary of the issue of the Jewish revenant communities in the areas of the Jewish national home (as fixed by international bodies between 1917-1922) not under Israeli political sovereignty. One of them is a Washington-based policy analyst, Yousef Munayyer, affiliated with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In the Philadelphia Inquirer he wrote, "inter alia", about Jewish towns and villages:
Green Line Greenbacks
Following remarks of a Yesha resident in New York, recorded by Philip Weiss, a renewed attempt to attack the tax-exempt status of charitable funds contributed to worthy projects, that is, Jewish projects, beyond the Green Line began. Americans for Peace Now supplied material to David Ignatius, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post. Following that, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee announced it was filing a complaint with the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service requesting they investigate tax-exempt groups raising money for Yesha communities, suggesting that groups were using the income "in direct violation of their addressed purpose." The Green Line Meanders
The Green Line is not only a delineation on the map and ground that marks the cease-fire lines of 1949, the line where Israel was able to stop and even roll back the Arab aggression launched to destroy and eliminate all Jewish life in its national homeland, the line never recognized by Arabs for 19 years as they initiated a continuing terror campaign to kill, steal and psychologically destabilize the state of Israel. It is also a line that the Left in Israel - from the radical anti-Zionist to the post-Zionist to the embarrassed Zionist - has adopted to divide what they claim is rational and moderate Jewish nationalism from what they portray as messianic, fanatical Zionism. Calling the Kettle Black
This has a familiar sound to it: The Palestinian Authority accused Israel of "ethnically cleansing" east Jerusalem of Palestinians, following the tearing down of dozens of buildings in the capital's east... said Nabil Abu Roudeina, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "This is an infuriating campaign by the municipality to 'Judaize' the city and expel the Palestinian population," he added. No, I don't mean that the Arab propagandists have been making this claim in years past, which they have. I mean that actually they have done exactly this - to Jews. Green Line Fever
The issue of Jewish civilians living across the Green Line is one that stirs passions. Anyone who, like me, seeks to stay up-to-date on the matter, both historically as well as in contemporary media commentary and news reports, cannot be but overwhelmed at times at the downright nastiness of some of the language used. For example, here is Paul Mirengoff of the Claremont Institute in a recent piece: "In my view, the continued expansion of settlements is the most toxic activity that is undermining the negotiations process and [that] actually, in the long term, will assure a deterioration in America's support for Israel." Or, take Tom (Breira) Friedman of The New York Times, who has a hang-up about me and my friends and neighbors: "The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel's crazy settlements from Palestinian villages... " Back on January 25, he published in his column an article which referred to "the fanatical Jewish settlers." True, it is not my wish to censor any one's expressions of disagreement. It's just that it's quite obvious to me that such reactions, from people who should both know their facts better and how to use the language better, seem to indicate a loss of control - or worse, a seeking-out of the most disparaging and derogatory terms. They literally seem to lose it, as if their pens were "foaming at the point." A Red Line to the Green Line
The Jerusalem Post has reported on an upcoming court case that human rights group Yesh Din, which opposes Israel's continued presence in Judea and Samaria, claims that "Israel's practice of transferring 75 percent of the rock and gravel it mines in the West Bank into areas within the Green Line is illegal," and they hope that the High Court of Justice will issue a ruling that "Israel's mining activity constitutes blatant infringement of international humanitarian law and the laws of occupation, and may even constitute pillage and/or war crimes." The attorneys representing Yesh Din, Sfard and Avisar Lev, have written in their petition that continued quarrying was "a practice reminiscent of occupation patterns in ancient times, [when]
the winner was entitled to plunder the occupied territory, enslave its economy and citizens for its own purposes, and transfer their treasures to his own land." The Green Line comes... and goes
Did you know that the "Green Line" is sixty years old? Tom Segev, who is as much a pro-Green Line proponent as I am its opponent, has reported in his Ha'aretz column that: "...the demarcation of [the Green] line... took place at the Hotel des Roses on the Greek island of Rhodes, where Egyptian and Israeli representatives met at the end of the War of Independence... under the auspices of the United Nations... [mediator and later Nobel Peace Prize awardee Ralphe] Bunche, [who] bent over backwards to get the sides to reach an agreement... The two sides signed on February 24, 1949. We got Beersheeba; they got Gaza... " |
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