Settlement Freeze? What Settlement Freeze?
Say this much for Nir Barkat, the multimillionaire venture capitalist who serves as mayor of Jerusalem, the world’s most contested city: he doesn’t pull his punches.
Just one day after press reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had ordered a freeze on new Jewish construction in contested East Jerusalem, Barkat offered his own blunt message to the Obama administration and special Mideast envoy George Mitchell: forget about it.
“There’s no freeze,” Barkat told a group of reporters at a Washington restaurant Tuesday night. “There is building going on. There will be more building going on.”
Barkat, a former paratrooper who was elected mayor in Dec. 2008, came to Washington this week amid a near crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations that centers around the future of his city. The Obama administration wants Jerusalem’s status left open for peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. But Barkat made clear that, as far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing to talk about: Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli rule; not even a few blocks of the eastern section, captured by Israel in 1967, can be carved out for a Palestinian capital.
There are many issues on which the Israelis can be flexible, Barkat said at a dinner sponsored by The Israel Project, a Washington, D.C.–based group that a spokeswoman says is dedicated to supporting the position of the Israeli government, whatever that may be at any given time. But, Barkat added, “there is one thing that we must not be flexible on—and it’s the unity of Jerusalem. Giving the Palestinians any grip on the city of Jerusalem is like giving them a Trojan horse.” There is, he added, a “general consensus” in Israel that dividing Jerusalem “is not part of the discussion.”
Barkat says he is confident that the recent stories about Netanyahu’s government ordering some sort of settlement freeze are bogus, floated by “opposition oriented” politicians. In fact, as Netanyahu himself recently publicly declared, his government continues to reject any halt on new Jewish construction in the city. But other reports suggest there may be at least a temporary lull in the planning process for new construction.
To prove his point that everything is “business as usual,” Barkat came to The Israel Project’s dinner with a giant color-coded map showing what he called “the master plan” for his city. On the map were multiple areas of new construction for new homes and apartments for Jews in the Arab parts of the city. The building of such homes will continue—as will building of new Arab homes in the city, he said.
And what if, a reporter asked, the Obama administration were to take the advice of some (like former national-security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft) and lay out its own Mideast peace proposal and seek to impose it on the parties? Such a peace plan would almost surely include East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. How would Israel react?
“It will not fly,” Barkat said, matter of factly. “The Israeli public will not enable that to happen.”
Good luck, George Mitchell.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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