Saturday, August 1, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Richard L. Cravatts: Whither Jerusalem? - '...In characterizing East Jerusalem—or any part of Jerusalem, for that matter—as territory that Israel “occupies” but over which it enjoys no sovereignty, the Obama administration is misreading, once again, the content and purpose of 1967’s U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 that suggested an Israeli withdrawal “from territories” it acquired in the Six Day War. Critics of Israeli policy who either willfully misread or deliberately obscure the resolution’s purpose say that the Jewish State is in violation of 242 by continuing to occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem, including what is mistakenly now referred to as “Arab” East Jerusalem. But the drafters of Resolution 242 were very precise in creating the statute’s language, and never considered Jerusalem to have been “occupied” by Israel after the Six Day War. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, one of the resolution’s authors, made this very clear when he wrote some years later that “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate . . . At no time in [my] many speeches [before the UN] did I refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory.”...' [Jerusalem? Hands off.]
When the Sunni Arabs give Medina (formerly Yathrib) back to its Jewish ancestral owners, Sunni Arabs can have East Jerusalem.
I don't intend that in an unnecessarily provocative manner, but rather to lend some perspective. It is Mecca and Medina that are the focal centers of Islam, while Jerusalem is the center of Jewish identity. Typically I'm not one to get excited about overly religious and too exciteable aspects of the overall equation being faced in the M.E., still, this compare-and-contrast helps to lend some perspective.
Too, this reflects but one example of a gross imbalance among so many that could be listed. E.g., there's the entire "refugee" situation itself, wherein the Sunni Arab refugees are cossetted in perpetuity from one generation to the next by the UNRWA and other agencies, while the 900,000+ Jewish refugees from Arab Muslim states after 1948 are literally forgotten by such tranzi institutions.
(Yathrib, now Medina, was one of the centers Jewish communities fled to after the Romans overthrew the second temple.)
A bit of a correction, or rather clarification. I didn't mean to suggest Jerusalem has only "religious" meaning, it obviously has existential and vibrant social/political, cultural, etc. connotations as well. It's simply that I can't "get into" third temple and related emphases in anything beyond a secondary or tertiary level of interest. In any immediate sense, those concerns do not hold my interest whatsoever.
The underlying point being, one doesn't need to get into those more religious and fideist dimensions as anything more than a secondary or tertiary interest (or any interest whatsoever, for that matter). Instead, one can much more simply approach the subject from a social, political, cultural, etc. perspective, while taking note of an entire array of imbalances in how the overall calculus in Israel and the M.E. is approached - and still come out decidedly in favor of Israel's right to Jerusalem.
Obviously enough, Jerusalem has the potential to be the ultimate flashpoint, moreso than the West Bank and the Golan or any other piece of geography. Hence it behooves any analyst or anyone concerned to approach the subject as methodically and rationally as can be expected. And that is the point, one can do so, reasonably and rationally, and still come out in decided favor of Israel vis-a-vis Jerusalem itself.
Not to put to fine a point on it and not to emphasize what may be obvious enough to many, but there's a salient fact in this and one that needs to be appreciated fully given some of the emphases of the current U.S. administration, tranzi orgs and NGOs, etc., etc.