E1: Just Another Pretext to Discriminate Against Jews

 (With thanks to Honest Reporting)

Yesterday, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced an import ban on products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and also deemed the “occupation” to be illegal, along with potential sanctions against British companies for various offenses deemed helpful to any Jewish presence in the regions of Judea and Samaria as well as “East” Jerusalem.

Several weeks prior, Israel issued a construction tender for a small piece of land between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim known as E1. E1 has been in the news off and on for over 30 years, with the first plans to build there coming from the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a right-wing extremist. There is nearly unanimous consensus, in Israel and internationally, that E1 will remain part of Israel in any conceivable final status agreement with the Palestinians.

Despite these facts, the UK did what they and others have done in the past. They seized on a bureaucratic housing announcement, in an area nobody believes will ever be part of any country but Israel, to condemn the Jewish state. The claim most often associated with E1, an area of only 4.5 square miles, is that building there by Israel will cut the West Bank in two, thus making any possible future Palestinian state unviable.

The reason given for this assessment, as shown in the map below, is that the distance from Maaleh Adumim to the Dead Sea is only about 10 miles. Putting aside for a moment whether a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is viable in any case, or if it is truly the Palestinian end goal, how do the British and others who advocate so vociferously for a Palestinian state along the 1948 armistice lines make the claim that a state just 10 miles wide lacks viability when it is exactly what they demand Israel accept?

The UK is saying that it is infeasible to have a viable country with a narrowest point very similar to an area where millions of Israelis live. In other words it is OK for Israelis living in Netanya but not Palestinians living near Maale Adumim!

This makes something abundantly clear: E1, as always, is just a pretext.

The UK government has its reasons, foreign and domestic, for why it believes it is in its interest to demand a judenrein Palestinian state, for why it believes Jews, and Jews alone, should be banned from living in a large part of the land of Israel, including our capital city, because we are Jews. Foreign Secretary Miliband listed some in his announcement on social media yesterday. Most were even more unconvincing, dishonest and inflammatory than any argument around E1.

Whatever the real reasons are, they have nothing to do with E1. E1 is simply their excuse to take discriminatory action against the State of Israel and the Jewish people.