Wiesel: For me, as a Jew, Jerusalem is above politics

[Jefferson23]

* I wanted to post this mainly for the words from Secretary Clinton.

snip* For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics," Wiesel wrote. "It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture - and not a single time in the Koran...the first song I heard was my mother's lullaby about and for Jerusalem."

snip* Wiesel's ad prompted a critical response from Americans for Peace Now.

"I would have loved to agree with you that Jerusalem is above politics," Debra DeLee, APN's president and CEO, said in a statement. "Perhaps, as a transcendent symbol, it is. But Jerusalem is not just a Jewish symbol. It is also a holy city to billions of Christians and Muslims worldwide. It is Israel's capital, but it is also a focal point of Palestinian national aspirations."

snip* Despite that criticism, the American administration is sticking to its position that there has been no shift in its strategic approach to Israel.

Secretary Clinton said in Thursday's speech at the Dedication of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace: "I've had friends of mine - Israelis - say, but you know we can't determine what happens and we just have to hold firm to the positions we hold. As I said in my AIPAC speech, there are three problems with that position: demography, ideology, and technology. So for Israel, accepting concrete steps toward peace - both through the peace process and in the bottoms-up institutions building I have described - are the best weapons against Hamas and other extremists".


article in full: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1163634.html

[LeftishBrit]

1. I respect Wiesel, but I disagree with him here. I fully agree with DeLee and Clinton

[Crunchy Frog]

2. Our foreign policy needs to be based in reality,

and not on some Bronze Age writings.

[TomClash]

3. The Beggar in Jerusalem

is now Palestinian. No just and objective observer can call that progress. It is now Wiesel's dream.

A man I once greatly admired has begun to descend the primordial ladder.

[Scurrilous]

4. Leftists to Elie Wiesel: Occupied Jerusalem can't be holy

<snip>

"Jerusalem must be shared by both Israelis and Palestinians, a leftist activist group said Thursday, in response to Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel's ad in the Washington Post last week."

<snip>

"In the open letter made public Thursday, activists in the Just Jerusalem group, which includes Israel Prize laureates Avishai Margalit, Zeev Sternhell as well as former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, said they wanted to express their "frustration, even outrage" at Wiesel's letter, saying that "Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it."

"Only a shared city will live up to the prophet's vision: Zion shall be redeemed with justice," the letter said.

The letter's signatories said that their "Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets lined with synagogues, mosques and churches." They added that that Wiesel's Jerusalem, on the other hand, was "an ideal, an object of prayers and a bearer of the collective memory of a people whose members actually bear many individual memories."

"Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity - not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one," the letter said."

more

[Jefferson23]

5. Good for them:

The letter's signatories also said that the reason they found Wiesel's ad so troubling wasn't only "because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one."

"For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet it is our commitment that makes your homecoming possible. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it," the letter said.

Jerusalem, the letter continued, was not, as Wiesel claimed in his ad, above politics since "contemporary Jerusalem was created by a political decision and politics alone keeps it formally unified."

"Second, your attempt to keep Jerusalem above politics means divesting us of a future. For being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one's life," letter writers continued.

The signatories culminated their response by appealing Wiesel to visit Jerusalem for himself, thus seeing "with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction."

"You will witness that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You discover see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services between east and west," the writers said.

"We will take you to Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their homes to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood, and to Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality?s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians."

The letter culminated by reiterating the chant used by Sheikh Jarrah activists in their weekly rallies: "Nothing can be holy in an occupied city!"