{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}
Jews building housing for themselves in our traditional home is considered a crime not just by the often violently racist local Arabs, but by their allies in the west. The tidbit below was written by AFP, whatever that is, and published by Y-Net:
Israeli authorities have given the go-ahead for the construction of 829 new settler homes in the West Bank, Peace Now said on Monday.This is all just so predictable.
"The construction of 829 homes has been approved by a committee of the Israeli military in charge of the West Bank," said Lior Amihai, a Peace Now activist.
"This is yet another move that threatens to derail the peace process," Amihai told AFP.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has warned that ongoing settlement building by Israel in the Palestinian territories threatens the future of Middle East peace talks, which stand at an impasse little more than three months after they began...
The latest move comes two weeks after Israel announced its largest plan for settler homes ever, saying some 20,000 would be built in the West Bank.
The Jewish presence in Judaea and Samaria is actually quite small, representing only a few percentage points of the overall population and, yet, western governments and the progressive-left agree with the anti-Jewish racist Arab population that even one Jew in Judaea is far too many.
What is preventing a peaceful resolution to the long Arab war against the Jews is not the fact that Jews have children, and thus build housing for themselves, but that the Arabs are viciously bigoted against the Jewish minority for religious reasons and have been since we refused to throw ourselves at the feet of Muhammad in the 7th century.
This has always been the problem and it is the reason why traditionally-raised Arab teenagers in the Middle East enjoy throwing rocks at elderly Jews and historically could do so with impunity.
To the extent that westerners honestly care about this issue - which is a doubtful premise to begin with - when they hear about Jewish "settlement" building in the "West Bank" they tend to think that Jews are encroaching on the land of the perfectly innocent, bunny-like, allegedly-indigenous population. One thing, among many others, that they do not understand is that the Jews have built no new townships in many years. The building that these people keep complaining about are within existing Jewish towns and villages.
The bottom-line, however, is that if the local Arabs honestly wish to gain autonomy within a state on Jewish land then they must accept the presence of Jews on that land. If Arabs cannot accept the fact of Jews on Jewish land then they will never create the little, corrupt terrorist entity, with full membership rights in the United Nations, that they supposedly want.
In the mean time, what we need to tell non-Jewish westerners is that complaining about Jews building in Judaea is the equivalent of complaining about the French building in Toulouse or the Easter Islandish building on Easter Island.
The surest way to prevent a negotiated resolution of the conflict is to insist that Jewish land is not Jewish land and that, therefore, Jews have no right to build there, despite the fact that it represents a grand total of about .5 percent of the Middle Eastern landmass.
And yet, somehow, Israel thrives.
