How far do you have to go to be deep in the West Bank? I googled it: the distance from Nofei Prat and Jerusalem is 11 miles. It’s practically a neighborhood of Jerusalem. It’s as close to the Jewish capital as Silver Spring is to DC. On a good traffic day it’ll take you between 25 and 35 minutes.
Ambassador Lars was particularly offended by the accusations leveled at him by Bibi, Avigdor, and other right wing politicians, that Europe is one-sided in its approach to the negotiations, meaning they publicly rebuke Israel over every construction plan, while at the same time remaining silent over, say, rockets launched at Israel from Gaza.
Apparently, even though the public rebukes have been reserved strictly for the Jews, behind the scene there’s plenty of rebuking of the other side. The EU has told the Palestinians that, should the talks fail, they shouldn’t expect any new investments.
In case you’re curious, the sum total of new construction, most of it inside Jerusalem, is 2,791 housing units. That’s about the size of one large, 4-building co-op on the Lower East Side. And on the Lower East Side we have two co-ops this size!
Now, you know why Lars and Peace Now and Tzipi Livni and our friends from Ramallah are pushing the settlements as the deal breaker, and not any of the other issues. Because the settlements have a lousy image in Israel’s mainstream. For years, the left has depicted the Jews living beyond the 1967 border as parasites, siphoning off wealth from kore deserving places like Sderot, Kiryat Malachi, Dimona, and the rest of the struggling development towns on the honest and law abiding side of the old border.
Of course it’s nonsense, and it so happens that some of the biggest supporters of Jewish life across the green line are the residents of Sderot, Kiryat Malachi and Dimona. But the Big Lie theory still works, and decades of poisoning by the SAJ media have yielded a kind of wide-spread folk truism that won’t go away.
That’s why when the enemy is looking to split us up and get us to fight one another, they won’t pick the future of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, or the mass immigration of Palestinians back home, to Haifa, Jaffa, Lod and Ramlah. They only go after the settlements.
From deep inside the green line, which is also about 8 miles from the future Palestinian border, God forbid, this is your man in Netanya returning you to our regularly scheduled scandals and gripes.