The Hysteria Over the Israeli Land Announcement

By Jerusalem News Network

Muslim extremists can massacre people in one country after another in the Middle East, but Israel appropriating land it already controls to build houses is the ultimate threat to the survival of the world. This “logic” depends on the badly mistaken notion that if only Israel would stop building houses, then peace would be achievable between Israel and the Palestinians, and all the myriad Muslim grievances in dozens of countries on every continent would miraculously disappear. Israel’s recent declaration of certain open, uncultivated areas near the 1949 Armistice Line as “state land” has been widely mischaracterized as an “appropriation” of private Palestinian land. It is not. A designation of land as “state land” requires a determination, based on extensive investigation, that it does not have a private owner. The determination can be challenged administratively and judicially, as Palestinian claimants often do, and sometimes prevail. The fact is that no private Palestinian owners lost their land in Israel’s recent declaration. But Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas says the “land seizure” endangers the two-state solution, and is looking to garner international pressure to reverse the Israeli move. The disputed acres are in an area known as Gush Etzion where 70,000 Jews already live, in one of those blocs everyone knows Israel will absorb in any peace agreement. So what is the problem if Israel builds houses in an area that all acknowledge will remain in Israel? The Middle East and the Western world are today facing a much larger threat than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Radical Islam and its jihadists are inching ever closer to the West, and Israel today is the last line of defense against this tide of violent extremism. And yet, multitudes are focused on a mere 400 acres of barren land as though Israeli use of it is the primary destabilizing factor in the region. (Commentary/Israel Today)