Mideast Envoy Mitchell to Set Up Jerusalem Office
By Manal Lutfi, Asharq Al-Awsat, 25 February 2009
Hillary Clinton will be visiting the Middle East for the first time as US Secretary of State on 2 March to participate in the international donors’ conference on the Gaza Strip that will be held in Sharm al-Sheikh. On 3 and 4 March she will visit Israel and the West Bank. George Mitchell, the US envoy to the Middle East, will precede her to the region on 27 February where he will inaugurate “a permanent office” for the United States in the city of Jerusalem that will act as a “link” between the Middle East region and Washington. A US Department of State official told Asharq Al-Awsat that the opening of a permanent office for the United States in Jerusalem aims at maintaining the contacts between Washington and all the sides in the Middle East. He added: “There are many issues in which we should be engaged. That is why we have decided to open a permanent office in Jerusalem that will be staffed by a number of US Department of State officials that have not yet been determined”. The US official, who declined to reveal his identity, added: “The aim of the office is to first affirm our commitment to the peace process and to continue our efforts regardless of whether Mitchell is in the region or not. These officials that will be selected will constitute a permanent link between the region and Washington”. On why the United States chose the city of Jerusalem as the venue for Mitchell’s office and not Amman, the Jordanian capital, or Cairo, the Egyptian capital, the US official said: “Amman is also close, but Jerusalem is in the middle of everything. The US officials can move from it to any other point, such as the West Bank.”
Obama’s Middle East hit squad is contemptible.
Why not Tel Aviv, from whence George and Hillary can move to any other point, including Jerusalem, and witness ethnic cleansing the U.S. enables. The office plan joins a growing list of failures to address Israeli transgressions that are setting an abhorrently hostile tone. But that’s the point, isn’t it.
Yesterday we had dinner with a family from the old city of Jerusalem who visited us here in Beit Sahour. They can visit us (for now), but we can’t visit them. They explained how the Israeli authorities have been increasing the pressures to empty Jerusalem of its non-Jewish residents through a myriad of regulations, laws, harassment, attempts to buy them out and far more. For example regulations make it impossible for native Palestinian to build or improve anything in their homes but Israel issues thousands of building permits for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem (annexed illegally by Israel contrary to International law). There are even neighborhoods in the old city that cannot get visitors from other parts of the city (their own relatives even) and are essentially living in prison like conditions. The Palestinians and all International and Israeli human rights groups are now frantically trying to prevent the demolition of homes that house over 1500 Palestinians in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. The Israeli authorities laid their hands on buildings in the old city and confiscated lands near the old city and built colonial settlement outposts throughout Arab East Jerusalem. These scattered colonial settlements are now being “connected” via underground tunnels under Arab owned houses or directly above ground by demolishing these houses. The rest of the occupied West Bank is also similarly effected. For an example of how Israel’s “master plans of development” are really master plans of ethnic cleansing, read this report
http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1679
(warning: this will make you angry)