What a month

The holiday season is over, but what a month.

The Goldstone Report. Upcoming J Street convention. Attempts to strike at Jewish communities through tax exemption status. Campaign to apply a political apartheid character to Israel. Obama's attempt at "freezing settlements." Temple Mount provocation by Islamic radicals. And much more.

It's difficult to gauge what's really important, and therefore what would interest readers of blogs.

In fact, I don't really know how many people read this blog. Many perhaps think that bloggers are narcissists. While that may be true, as for me, I prefer an inter-relationship - at least a minimal one. Was I clear enough? Did I note enough facts? Is my reasoning seemingly logical? Are the topics I deal with interesting? More religion? More sex? Less Israel?

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Deconstruction of a text

I find President Barack Obama's recent pronouncement on the question of Jewish residential communities in Judea and Samaria to be odd, awkward and and morally deficient.

On September 4, the White House Office of the Press Secretary released a statement that reads, in part:

Continued settlement activity is inconsistent with Israel's commitment under the Roadmap. As the President has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop.... We do appreciate Israel's stated intent to place limits on settlement activity and will continue to discuss this with the Israelis as these limitations are defined."

The use of "legitimacy" bestirs my political sensors. Is "legitimacy" worse, or better, than "illegality"?

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And where were you born?

The Jerusalem Post informed its readers on Tuesday that the US State Department considers Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as included in the US demand that Israel halt "settlement" construction, including for natural growth purposes as State Department spokesman Ian Kelly admitted. And that is an appropriate introduction for me to expand on a matter of State Dept. deviousness.

As American citizens are aware, their children, if born in Jerusalem, whether west Jerusalem or east, I emphasize, are not recognized by the US State Department as being born in Israel. Their birth certificates and subsequently, their passports, will list the "place of birth" as simply "Jerusalem", a seemingly stateless location.

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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:

They are not only illegal under international law, but they also jeopardize Israel's long-term security, stability, and prospects for peace with its neighbors. Settlements and the security structures that surround them debilitate the livelihoods of Palestinians...It's time for a new approach that will make it clear to the Israeli government that there must be a permanent freeze on settlement construction and expansion. By conditioning assistance on compliance with a complete and permanent freeze on settlement construction, the United States can send a clear message to Israel."

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