DAILY ALERT

In-Depth Issues:

PA Maintains Palestinian Refugees in Ghetto - Sol Stern (Jewish Ideas Daily)
    The Balata refugee camp with its 20,000 residents is inside the West Bank city of Nablus - that is, within the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.
    Most of Balata's current residents are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original refugees. Thus, a new baby born in Balata today is still designated by the UN as a refugee dislocated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and hence entitled to substantial material benefits for life, or at least until the conflict is settled.
    In UN schools and cultural clubs financed by American tax dollars, Balata's children, like the children in similar camps in Gaza and neighboring Arab countries, are nurtured on the myth that someday soon they will return in triumph to their ancestors' homes.
    While awaiting redemption, Balata's Palestinian residents are prohibited, by the Palestinian Authority, from building homes outside the camp's official boundaries. They do not vote on municipal issues and receive no PA funding for roads or sanitation.
    Sixty years after the first Arab-Israeli war, Balata might accurately be defined as a UN-administered, quasi-apartheid, welfare ghetto.

Palestinians at Work Building Jewish Settlements - Ori Lewis (Reuters)
    For thousands of Palestinian workers, settlements mean food on the table. Palestinian officials say some 25,000 Palestinians are employed in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
    The Palestinian Authority has told Palestinians to quit their jobs in settlements by the end of the year, but compliance could be patchy due to a lack of alternative employment in the West Bank.
    In the West Bank village of Hussan near Bethlehem, Ali, a Palestinian builder, spoke of new work opportunities rather than politics when asked about the expiration of Israel's construction moratorium.
    "What difference does it make? We have lived with Israelis and we will have to live together in the future. I'm pleased that I will be able to make a living."

Boycott Turns into "Buycott" for West Bank Lotions - Andy Campbell (Brooklyn Papers)
    Those who called for a boycott of Israeli-manufactured Ahava cosmetics ended up actually promoting the products as Brooklyn Heights residents flocked to Ricky's cosmetics shop with their wallets open.
    "I came in when I saw the flags - I think [the boycotters] are absurd," said Ginger Berman, who bought a tub of Ahava bath salts. "There are so many other big issues to protest, why this?"
    Ricky's employees said that they sell out of Ahava products every time there is a protest.

Israel Makes Major Gains in Raising Life Expectancy - Judy Siegel-Itzkovich (Jerusalem Post)
    The life expectancy of Jewish Israelis has increased significantly over the last 30 years and is longer on average than in the OECD countries.
    Even Israeli Arabs now live noticeably longer on average than Americans.
    Life expectancy in the U.S. grew by 4 years since 1980, and in the rest of the OECD it grew by 6 years. But for Israelis, both Jews and Arabs, the gain was over 7 years.

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Observations:

Israelis Are Not Prepared to Concede Jerusalem - Dore Gold (Jerusalem Post)

• UN General Assembly Resolution 181, adopted in 1947 and known as the partition plan, recommended putting Jerusalem under UN control as a separate entity. The resolution was forcibly rejected by the Arab states and the UN never established the special regime for Jerusalem that it proposed. In fact, it failed to dispatch any forces to save the Old City when reports streamed in that its ancient synagogues were being systematically destroyed. Nevertheless, even after the war ended, leading diplomatic players including the U.S. insisted on resurrecting the idea of international control.
• On December 5, 1949, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that Israel rejected the demand for internationalization of Jerusalem. He explained that the UN "did not lift a finger" when invading Arab armies tried to destroy the holy city and declared that Israel no longer viewed Resolution 181 as having any further "moral force" with regard to Jerusalem. On December 13, Ben-Gurion declared that the Knesset and the rest of the government would be transferred from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
• Sixty years later, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has put forward a proposal for the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, to be overseen by "an international trusteeship." According to Olmert, Israel would renounce its sovereignty over the holiest sites of the Jewish people located in an area called "the Holy Basin."
• Yet there is no basis for the naive belief that internationalization might now work. In the past 20 years, international oversight of areas of conflict has ended with one disaster after another. In 1994, a UN force in Rwanda, made up of mostly Belgian paratroopers, abandoned the Tutsi tribe to acts of genocide by Hutu supremists, resulting in 800,000 deaths. A year later, UN peacekeepers in Bosnia abandoned the Muslims they were supposed to protect in Srebrenica and the Bosnian Serb army slaughtered more than 8,000 innocent people.
• Poll after poll in the past decade indicates that Israelis are not prepared to concede Jerusalem, and especially the holy sites of the Jewish people. The impression left by this proposal badly weakens Israel's ability to defend itself, since it implies that Israel has lost its will and might be prepared to concede what has been - and will remain - one of the core values defining the identity of the Jewish people.

  The writer, who served as Israel's ambassador to the UN between 1997 and 1999, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is the author of The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City (Regnery, 2007).