The same liberal American and European politicians who routinely ignore the abuses of the Chinese, Pakistani and Qatari regimes rushed out to condemn the 3,000 acre expansion of the Israeli city of Ma’ale Adumim (Red Rock Heights) into the neighborhood of Mevaseret Adumim (Red Rock Herald) or, as its mayor has promised, it will be named after Trump once it’s actually built.
That is assuming it ever is.
The project has been underway for 30 years and has been stalled due to political pressure. It was last shut down by the Netanyahu government, after threats from Biden, in June 2023.
Since then the political landscape has changed.
“The Israeli government’s decision to advance the illegal E1 settlement project is unacceptable,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband claimed that issuing a tender authorizing bids to potentially build houses on those 3,000 acres is “the crossing of a longstanding red line.”
The “longstanding red line” isn’t killing Jews: it’s Jews living.
19 Senate Democrats, including half the Jewish Dem delegation consisting of Sen. Adam Schiff, Sen. Eliza Slotkin, Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Brian Schatz, a militant anti-Israel figure, are joining in a bill to sanction Israel backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose hostility to Israel’s existence only narrowly falls short of Sen. Bernie Sanders who probably only failed to join this bill because it fails to formally call for destroying Israel.
The bill proposes sanctions on “the investment in, or construction of infrastructure that has the purpose or effect of facilitating the establishment of Israeli settlements, Israeli settlement units, or related structures in the E1 area of the West Bank, including roads, water systems, sewage systems, and electricity infrastructure” and “facilitating the transfer of Israeli civilians into Israeli settlements.”
Build water pipes for a Jewish community or maintain them as a plumber and 19 Senate Democrats will sanction you and then send millions more to Islamic terrorists.
What’s actually at stake here?
According to to the politicians and many media accounts (none of which give the actual acreage of land involved), having Jews living on the 3,000 acres near Jerusalem would “make the two-state solution unviable” (Miliband) or “would largely sever the northern half of the West Bank from the southern half, complicating the prospect of a viable, contiguous Palestinian heartland” (New York Times), but if your ‘Palestinian state’ can be severed by 3,000 acres, how viable was it?
The ‘Palestinian state’ in question is run by a 90-year-old dictator who hasn’t held elections in 20 years. Its budget consists of demanding money from other countries to give to terrorists. In the decades since it was set up, the Palestinian Authority depends on Israeli or foreign aid for pretty much everything and its only real efforts are directed at demanding UN recognition.
If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, the Palestinian Authority would vanish 5 minutes later.
The ‘Two State Solution’, which after nearly 50 years has solved absolutely nothing and destroyed everything, has never been threatened by terrorism or the mass murder of Jews, but a few thousand homes filled with living Jews can somehow always threaten to destroy it.
Media coverage and statements by politicians make it sound as if an expansion in the city of Ma’ale Adumim is some conspiracy made by maneuvering people into living there for no reason except to block the existence of an otherwise “viable” ‘Palestinian’ state run by a 90-year-old dictator who last held an election when Borat (coincidentally) was in theaters.
But if that were so, an apartment in Ma’ale Adumim wouldn’t be going for $650,000. The housing shortage in the Jerusalem area has been badly exacerbated by international pressure to stop building houses anywhere that the bankrupt Islamic terrorist group out of Ramallah might want to claim for its own at some indefinite point in time when it will agree to a peaceful settlement. Considering that its ruling Fatah party just called for unity with Hamas to “defeat Israel”, that might take a while. And meanwhile thousands of people need someplace to live.
UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband lives in a $3.6 million four-story London mansion near the former site of the Soviet TASS propaganda agency, but not everyone can get by that way.
The real objection is not that building houses on 3,000 acres will ‘cut off’ a ‘Palestinian state’, but that it interferes with the goal of building up terrorist base communities to cut off Ma’ale Adumim and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and make living there unviable.
The real lesson of Oct 7 was that when the corrupt Olmert government expelled the Jewish population of Gaza, it also took away the defensive barrier that prevented a Hamas invasion of Israeli communities near the border with Gaza. Israeli towns and cities don’t threaten Arab Muslim settlers in the area because their residents are never going to swarm them, rape the women, kill the men and take whoever is left hostage. The same can’t be said for ‘Palestinians’.
The Israeli solution to Palestinian Authority complaints about ‘contiguity’ is to build a bypass road for them to use while the Palestinian Authority solution was taking part in the Oct 7 attacks.
Massacres and real estate are not the same, but only one is a ‘red line’ to the UK government.
The Israeli government after Oct 7 sees no reason to continue delaying Mevaseret Adumim in the hopes that the other side will come around because there is nothing to come around to anymore. Israel was told to hold off on building up ‘Metropolitan Jerusalem’ because one day it would be needed as a bargaining chip and a concession for a ‘Palestinian’ state.
Families in Jerusalem have lived in squalor and been unable to afford housing for generations while waiting for the Messiah to come or, even more improbably, for their Arab Muslim neighbors to agree to a final deal and end the violence. The construction of houses on those 3,000 acres for some 3,000 families means that they won’t be held hostage to a peace that will never come.
The propaganda barrage about “settler violence” filling the media is just confirming that the other side is not only acting in bad faith, but intends to ‘Gazafy’ the conflict in Judea and Samaria. And if so, Israel might as well head off another Oct 7 by building around Jerusalem.
If Democrats and the European Union really wanted to change that, it could take a break from condemning Israel for anything and everything, and actually create some expectations and accountability for the terror state whose depredations its members keep funding with billions in foreign aid. The Biden administration had set new records in sending money to the ‘Palestinian’ areas ahead of Oct 7 and as of last year, the EU had promised $1.8 billion to the Palestinian Authority across three years.
Instead, as ‘no go zones’ rise in London and New York, they want a ‘no go zone’ for Jews in Israel.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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