A Tale of Two Settlements

Daniel Greenfield March 28, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 Architectural schematics show luxury condominiums that would not be out of place in Miami or Santa Monica complete with balcony views, palm trees and sleek modern interiors with a fireplace, an indoor pool and a garden with a swing bench.

There’s just one catch: to live here you have to be a terrorist.

The Palestinian Authority’s latest expansion of its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program which rewards terrorists for attacking Israelis and all non-Muslims is a luxurious village with unique residency requirements. To be eligible, you need to have spent at least 5 years in Israeli prison.

The terrorist village is scheduled to be built near the Israeli village of Ofra, which has suffered numerous terrorist attacks: including the shooting of a pregnant woman which killed her baby.

The terror settlement isn’t just backed by the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, but also by regional groups like the Arab Fund for Development and the Islamic Development Bank whose memberships encompass most of the region’s major Arab and Muslim nations.

The Islamic Development Bank, operating out of Saudi Arabia, has been a longtime funder of Islamic terrorism. Especially in Israel. Last week, Uzra Zeya, a Biden diplomat, met with members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss “partnerships with the Islamic Development Bank”. No mention was made of its terror settlement.

However, in an ugly undiplomatic escalation, the Biden administration summoned the Israeli ambassador to berate him over the end of an apartheid law banning Jews from returning to their homes in villages like Homesh. A Biden State Department spokesman blasted the possibility that Jews would live once again in places like Homesh as “provocative and counterproductive”.

A terror village whose residency is limited to terrorists and whose board includes the family members of top Hamas and PFLP terrorists, is neither “provocative” nor “counterproductive”, but Jews returning to the ruins of their own destroyed village are dangerously provocative.

According to the Biden administration, “reducing violence is in all parties’ interests, including Israel’s. The U.S. strongly urges Israel to refrain from allowing the return of settlers to the area.” Jews living in a town causes violence, but building a village for terrorists is a pacifist enterprise.

“Advancing settlements is an obstacle to peace,” according to the Biden administration. Except when they’re Muslim terrorist settlements.

Unlike the luxury condominiums being financed by the Saudis for Muslim terrorists, the remaining Jews of Homesh live in makeshift tents. They’re not allowed to build permanent homes of any kind. Technically they’re not even allowed to stay there overnight and under pressure from local and foreign leftists, they keep being kicked out. Yet they keep returning.

In August 2005, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, later convicted and imprisoned over corruption allegations, forcibly expelled the 70 Jewish families living in the Israeli village of Homesh.

The ‘Disengagement’ coordinated with the Bush administration ethnically cleansed thousands of Jewish residents, destroyed their homes and bulldozed their synagogues under the expectation that a new era of peace would emerge when the PLO and Hamas had more territory to play with. Instead, Hamas and the PLO used their newfound gains to launch a new wave of terror.

The families expelled from their homes in Homesh returned to try and reclaim them. They raised the Israeli flag over the rubble, celebrated a wedding and conducted prayers. The Olmert government responded by cutting off food and water to them. (Had that been done to Muslim terrorists, there would have been international outrage.) Driven out, they still did not give up.

One of those who did not give up was Limor Har-Melech. Limor was 7 months pregnant when PLO terrorists opened fire. Their car rolled over. Her husband Shalom, an ambulance driver, died. Seriously injured, the 24-year-old mother survived. So did her newborn daughter.

Limor, still carrying the scars of the attack on her face, married again, and now has 10 children and was elected to the Knesset: the Israeli parliament. 18 years (symbolizing ‘chai’ or life in Judaism) after she was expelled from her home, the bill she championed to revoke the ban on Jews returning to Homesh has passed. That bill was condemned by the Biden administration.

The State Department, which did not summon PLO envoys over the numerous terrorist attacks this year which have killed one American, Elan Ganeles of Connecticut, and wounded another Daniel Stern, an ex-Marine who despite being shot in the head managed to fight off his attacker and get his family to safety, summoned the Israeli ambassador to berate him over Homesh.

At the heart of Homesh, its collection of ragged tents, is a Yeshiva: a religious school. Its students and teachers have been arrested for violating the law by studying and teaching there. The Supreme Court’s leftists recently demanded that the government show why it has failed to permanently evict them. In response the bill legalizing the Jewish presence in a town whose origins date back thousands of years was passed. And the Biden administration raged.

Biden’s State Department claims that allowing Jews to live in Homesh “represents a clear contradiction of undertakings the Israeli Government made to the United States” to permanently expel Jews from their homes and destroy entire villages “in order to stabilize the situation and reduce frictions.” Eighteen years later where is the stability or the lack of friction?

Where are the assurances made by the Clinton administration to the State of Israel that giving the PLO autonomy would end terrorism? Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton claimed that the PLO had accepted “Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and “to renounce terrorism”.

The PLO’s idea of renouncing terrorism is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year funding terrorism through Pay-to-Slay: including building a village just for terrorists. And the Biden administration has violated not only its commitments, but United States law, by continuing to fund the terrorists while failing to even offer the least objection to the terror village.

After the murder of Taylor Force, an Afghan war veteran studying in Israel, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act barring further foreign aid to the terrorists. The Biden administration has flagrantly violated the Taylor Force Act by sending over $1 billion to the terrorist-occupied areas.

Biden’s decision to fund the terrorists has led to a 900% increase in Israeli deaths.

Perhaps the Biden administration would consider “reducing friction” by ending its illegal funding of terrorism instead of by demanding that Israel ethnically cleanse Jews from parts of Israel.

The ‘tale of two settlements’ shows the bias and double standard of the Biden administration.

Given a choice between a terrorist village and a Jewish one, the Biden administration chose to condemn the Jewish village while continuing to fund the terrorists. Politicians and the media are outraged over the village of Homesh, but carefully avoid talking about the Jihad village.

Meanwhile, the Jews camped out in Homesh continue to live in tents, they dodge checkpoints and risk their lives walking circuitous routes to reach the high ground where the village once stood, and where they are determined it will stand again. While the Muslim terrorists will settle down in luxury condominiums, swimming laps in an indoor pool and enjoying the fruits of their murderous labors, the unsung heroes will go on risking their lives by defying them.

And defying their enablers in the Biden administration.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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The Little Jewish Village That Makes Obama Boil

 Posted by Daniel Greenfield 6 Comments @ the Sultan Knish Blog

Halfway to the sky sits a tiny village of little white houses that has attracted the ire of the White House.

The village of Amona with its small white houses and red roofs could easily be mistaken for some lost Italian village or a dusty California town. But the White House would not have “boiled in anger”, as one anonymous official claimed, over the doings of some Italian village.

There’s only one place on earth that makes Obama’s blood boil. It isn’t Iran or North Korea. It’s Israel.

Amona’s small scattering of houses have a fraction of the square footage of the White House. The 40 families living there in defiance of Islamic terrorists and left-wing lawfarers would hardly be noticeable if they all crowded into the White House foyer. And yet they've been condemned by the State Department in more virulent tones than most Muslim dictators.

What is it about this handful of Jews caught between heaven and earth that outrages so many?

That may be the great question of history. It will not be solved among the sheep pens and orchards, the little white houses of Amona and their inhabitants, who despite the rage of the big White House, continue to go to work each day, to raise their children and to worship in the way of their ancestors.

In the official parlance of the media, Amona is a “settlement”. That is to say it dates back a mere 3,300 years to the time when Joshua, born a slave in Egypt, commanded the Jews, “'Go and walk through the land, and describe it, and come back to me, and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shilo.”

Today Shilo is a city of some 3,500. Like Jerusalem, it is also deemed a settlement. But on the list of places described by Joshua’s men, the mere speck of Amona appears before Jerusalem.

But then Amona, unlike Jerusalem, vanished from history. For thousands of years the name would have only meant something to the most dedicated biblical scholars. And then the left went to war against Amona. And out of that hatred the forgotten town was raised up from its forgotten place in history.

The handful of families living in Amona have been the subject of more legal proceedings, international debates, threats and international outrage than most genocides. 3,000 feet above sea level, its residents look up at a kind blue sky and down at an angry world that is unwilling to let them live in peace.

They meet the challenges of gravity and rage with simple faith. Asked about the threat of Islamic terror, a 5-year old girl answered, "As God helped Joshua, so he will also help us."

Amona and its residents need all the help they can get. They have been under siege for decades. What the Islamic terrorists couldn’t do to the residents, lawyers and activists who receive funding from the Soros network and assorted international left-wing billion dollar organizations, strive to accomplish.

Demolition and eviction orders have been issued. Police have converged on the handful of buildings with clubs and yells. In one such battle a 15-year-old girl, whom we only know as Nili, stood in their way. The image of the teenage girl blocking the path of dozens of riot police in black became a Pulitzer Prize winning photo. “Anyone who looks today at the ruins of the houses in Amona - understands that in this operation there was no sense whatever, except destruction,” she said in an interview.

There is still no sense whatsoever to the war against Amona except destruction. It isn’t about the land.

Amona’s main antagonist is the extremist left-wing group Peace Now. There is nothing peaceful about Peace Now which seeks peace only with Islamic terrorists. One co-founder, Uri Avnery, declared, “The time has come to bury them.” Another Peace Now co-founder, Yigal Tumarkin weighed in, “My true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil, and killed them.”

The children of Israel’s small towns and villages excite such unnatural fury from left-wing notables.

Under pressure from a radical left-wing judiciary, Israel’s government decided to relocate the families of Amona by building houses for them in Shilo. It is this which reportedly made Obama boil like a little teapot. The Jews of Amona are not to be permitted to live in their town. Or in any other.

According to some anonymous official, the plan to build houses for the evacuees in Shiloh is “of great concern” to the White House. Anyone wondering why Obama isn’t concerned about ISIS or the economy had better realize that his eye is firmly fixed on a small town in Israel up against the bulldozer.

And he’s determined to see to it that the bulldozer wins.

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner claimed that building 98 homes would endanger peace. Peace in Israel is as dead as the dodo. But somehow it never seems to be endangered by any amount of Muslim suicide bombings, stabbings or rockets. The Palestinian Authority funds Islamic terrorism by paying salaries to terrorists using taxpayer money dispensed to them by Obama.

And this butchery of Jewish families and massacres of Rabbis in no way endangers peace.

It is only the very real risk that the families of Amona might find some shelter that renders the glorious infrastructure of “a viable Palestinian state more remote”. Like Haman, the Islamic terrorist state cannot stand to see a Binyaminite, no matter how alone, standing tall in defiance of its hunger and malice. These handfuls of homes represent, according to the State Department, “perpetual occupation.”

State has a point. 3,300 years isn’t quite perpetual, but it’s a lot longer than Toner has been hanging around D.C. It’s a long longer than appeasers who know not to eat with their left hand and to curse Israel when visiting Muslim countries have been sliming their way around Foggy Bottom.

Can a few dozen families really “block” the rise of an Islamic terrorist state in Israel? During Israel’s War of Independence the small village of Kfar Darom held out against sustained assaults from the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists was an Egyptian Jihadist named Yasser Arafat.

Moral courage enables a handful of people to do what the massive array of government cannot.

Nili explained her actions by saying, "You see me in the photograph, one against many, but that is only an illusion. Behind the many stands one man... but behind me stands the Lord.” Today that man is Barack Hussein Obama. The residents of Amona stand in the way of his dream of an Islamic Palestine.

Who are the people of Amona? For the most part, they are children. Amona has nearly 200 of them. 5 children are on the small side for a local family. Today Amona could pass for a village, tomorrow it’s a town and the day after it’s a city. That has been Israel’s history. In a world where the great cities of civilization are overrun by the terrible tide of Muslim demographics, it is a place whose people still believe in the future. Such little villages full of white houses with red roofs are fortresses of hope.

In Amona, you will find deer meandering through the street. The Nizri family, with eight children, sees to the casks of French oak in the winery. There are raspberries to pick, tools to mend and a life to build.

It is not mere height above sea level that enables the people of Amona to tower above their enemies. It is their determination to live lives of ordinary courage. They have attracted the ire and enmity of some of the most powerful people in their country, their region and the world. And yet they go on.

Obama boils in his anger like a lobster in a pot. The UN Security Council has scheduled a special meeting where Israel will be denounced by the likes of Venezuela and Angola. And in Amona, the children play.