Your headline over the JTA article: “UN passes anti-settlement resolution” [online] is the understatement of the century.
The implications of the perfidious unprecedented UN Security Council resolution is to cast Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall, as well as the 3,000-year-old Jewish “Old City” as occupied Palestinian territory. This could criminalize residents and visitors, stabbing every Israeli and visiting Jew in the back and dishonoring Judaism.
It forces the indefensible 1949 Armistice Lines — which Abba Eban famously labeled “Auschwitz borders” — on Israel as an international border. This puts the millions of Israeli residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at risk as easy targets for rockets from the high grounds of the West Bank, especially once Hamas, ISIS or other Islamist radicals take over that area, as they surely will.
It turns the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who live in Jerusalem neighborhoods and West Bank lands from which Jews were ethnically cleansed into international criminals. This, and more, is much more profound damage than an “anti-settlement resolution.”
The article also disingenuously claims that the Jewish community was divided, with the Conference of Presidents and the major American Jewish organizations on one side, and J Street and New Israel Fund on the other. But this does not constitute a divided community any more than claiming that the positions of mainstream Democrats and marginal Green Party supporters divided America.
The report understates and grossly misrepresents the profound tragedy of Dec. 23, a day of U.S. perfidy under President Obama toward Israel and the Jewish people.
