Tuesday, July 21, 2009

On Jerusalem

I'm way too busy these days for much blogging. Fortunately, however, there are lots of others out there still doing a fine job, and I can link to them. David Hazony, for example, who has done a great job of summarizing the issues the Obama adminstration raised earlier this week when they urgently summoned our ambassador Michael Oren to Foggy Bottom, (over the weekend apparently, so urgent it was) to reprimand him for the intention to build some apartments in Sheich Jarach.

At the same blog (Contentions), Rick Richman has dug up an interesting historical document:
Neither Resolution 242 nor 338 mentions Jerusalem, and the omission was intentional. On March 12, 1980, Arthur J. Goldberg, who was U.S. ambassador to the UN when Resolution 242 was adopted, wrote a letter to the New York Times to “set the record straight”:
Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate. . . . In a number of speeches at the UN in 1967, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after 1948 were intended to be temporary. This, of course, was
particularly true of Jerusalem. . . . I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable. In other words, Jerusalem was not to be divided again.

Personally, I have not yet written off the Obama administration in its attempt to make the world better, though my original scepticism is being reinforced steadily. One does however wonder if anyone there knows much about history.

4 comments:

RandomMoshe said...

History has no importance to those who have goals that contradict it.

Anonymous said...

Fer shnizzle

Anonymous said...

If you want to know something about the concept Obama is probably following listen to the authors of Nudge presenting their book - here is Richard Thaler (the other Cass Sunstein is an Obama-advisor and husband of Samantha Power) pitching it with the example of the fly in the urinal
(sorry, but these people turn me more and more into a fan of Miss Manners) http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?i=56937765&id=279428154
rgds,
Silke

drdroom said...

Can anyone refer me to a critique of the recent EU report on discriminatory housing practices in E. Jerusalem? This post is helpful w/ underlying issues.