Wetherhorn

According to my dictionary a busybody is someone who is officious and inquisitive. This applies especially to those who are involved in matters that aren’t really their concern. There are two organizations that earned this appellation from me this week. The US Government and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Here’s how.

Those who follow the international news probably saw stories related to rioting and demonstrations in Jerusalem. The real story behind much of those activities can be a bit complex, but I’d simplify it into two parts; Housing in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem,and prayers at the Temple Mount.

The case regarding housing is not all that simple, either.There are a few families (Arab) living in homes in that neighborhood. The homes originally belonged to Jews.The 1949 armistice lies put those homes in the area controlled by Jordan. The Jewish owners had fled, and could not return. The Jordanian authorities had a lot of Arab refugees in the territory they controlled. They confiscated the homes and placed Arab families in them. Note that at that time the Jordanians were an “occupying power”. They later annexed the West Bank territory they controlled, and even later, abrogated that annexation. The original annexation was officially recognized by only 2 bodies; the governments of England and Pakistan. Even other Arab states didn’t accept it. The Jordanians even made the Palestinian Authority their successors. But that does not change anything concerning those homes. After the 1967 Six day War Israel became the governing power. Israel never formally annexed the territory because it was just part of the British Palestine Mandate that was originally intended as part of a Jewish State. A Jewish organization bought the homes from the original Jewish owners and wanted to evict the current residents (who, according to international law, were living in homes whose status was changed by an occupying power (Jordan) in contravention to International Law. An Israeli Court heard the case. They decided that eviction was perfectly legal. But, as in other similar cases, the Jewish organization was willing to allow the occupants to remain in the dwellings if they paid rent. The erstwhile tenants refused to do so. That would amount to recognizing that they were living in homes acquired illegally. They appealed the ruling. The case has been through two levels of appeals, and the original court decision has always been upheld, until now.

Enter the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees) who claims that Israel is an occupying power and cannot change the status under international law. Where were they when Jordan did exactly that? It seems that history started for them only in 1967. There is a corollary problem for them in that the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) was created specifically to deal with the problem of Arab Palestinian Refugees in 1949. That charter, unlike the charter for UNHCR, does not empower them to resettle the refugees if repatriation is impractical. The result of that lapse of judgement is that there are millions of Arabs living in refugee camps that claim to be Palestinians (or, more correctly, are claimed as Palestinians by Arab political groups) that are unable to be integrated into normal lives in the countries where they reside. The Syrian civil war of the past decade gave many of them an opportunity to claim to be Syrian refugees (NOT Palestinians) and avail themselves of an opportunity to start new lives somewhere else.

The residents of those houses in Sheikh Jarrah have been adopted by other Palestinian political groups who have recruited “volunteers” to demonstrate for “justice” in Jerusalem. The new demonstrators are mostly from Arab villages in Northern Israel (and from within the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority) and are not fighting with the Israeli Police only about those houses. They have been given liberal doses of Palestinian propaganda claiming that Israel is trying to force them off the Temple Mount. Several I’ve heard in interviews are reiterating the claim that ALL of former Palestine is Arab land. This is a natural continuation of a separate stream of complaints in the Arab sector about discrimination (almost always untrue, but based on historical events) and lack of political representation.

The frustration due to lack of representation comes from the lack of free elections inside the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is currently serving in the 14th year of his original 5 year term of office. He declared there would be elections this summer. Then he cancelled them because he claimed Israel would not allow Jerusalem Arab residents to participate. Negotiations over future Palestinian statehood have been at a standstill for years because the various Palestinian political parties all claim the entire area of Israel must be part of their country. One objective of the demonstrations is to bring their case back into the forefront of Arab political discourse. The Palestinians have dictated the policy of the Arab world, and indeed, of many other countries, by continuously refusing to allow for any consideration of the existence of a Jewish state. For them, the Zionist Entity is an object to be destroyed. There are a great many Arab individuals who do not agree with this, but there are, so far, no prominent political groups that are willing to risk actual recognition of any rights for Jews as a nation.

This brings us back to the ridiculous position of the US Department of State that clings to a policy that has long been seen as impossible to apply. The US supported a two-state solution ever since the 1947 partition recommendations. Arab rejection of that recommendation had no effect. The officious Americans should have tried a different approach long ago, but their belief that they have the only right answer, despite repeated rejection by the Palestinians, still holds sway in most of America’s power elites. President Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and President Biden seems to be looking for some way to move it back out again. The current administration in Washington maintains troops in the streets of their capitol while they continue to present those demonstrations as an attempted coup while other demonstrations that result in much more damage to the economic and social fabric of America are given apologetic “explanations”.