The Rules of the Game Must Change – and the Settlement Enterprise Must End

August 22, 2011: A new grassroots movement is on the streets and boulevards of Israel. Tent communities have sprung up, and massive demonstrations are taking place not only in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but also in over a dozen smaller cities and communities across the State of Israel. The protests are against the high cost of housing, medical care and childcare, and against the increasing financial pressures on middle-class and working-class Israelis at a time when the Israeli economy is doing very well indeed.

The Jewish Labor Committee welcomes this new movement for social justice within Israel. We support the calls for “changing the rules of the game” in a country that is seeing the basic expenses of living going up and up, and the disparities between the very rich and everyone else increasing day by day. The calls of this new movement must be heard by the Netanyahu Government.

Impressive in a country with a multiplicity of political parties, ethnicities, and a range of social cleavages, this movement encompasses wide sectors of Israeli society rarely marching side-by-side in shared protest: secular and religious Jews, college students and retirees, political activists and those new to participating in a demonstration, parents with baby-strollers and municipal clerks.

But although this new Israeli movement has for the most part not done so, we at the Jewish Labor Committee cannot help but connect the issues it is raising with the expensive burden of the settlements in the West Bank, and the unresolved occupation of that territory. The political as well as financial necessity to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has been clear to us for some time. Yet, in a cynical attempt to appease the unrest over the shortage of affordable housing and simultaneously satisfy the parties opposed to ending the occupation, the Israeli Government has authorized the construction of 277 new housing units in the West Bank community of Ariel, and 1,600 apartments in Ramat Shlomo, 930 housing units in Har Homa – the latter two being communities in disputed areas in East Jerusalem.

It is with the utmost concern for Israel and the prospect for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and a fair and just negotiated two-state solution, that the Jewish Labor Committee opposes the recent decisions of the Netanyahu Administration to authorize this construction. We join with those within Israel and abroad calling for the Netanyahu Government to freeze the authorization, development and construction of new housing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and for such agencies as the World Zionist Organization to similarly halt the construction and expansion of settlements beyond the Green Line.

We agree with the many critics of such construction, in the U.S., Israel and the international community, that the expansion of these communities in Jerusalem and settlements in the West Bank is an obstacle to the much-needed resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The announcement of their authorization by the Netanyahu Government aggravates relations between Israel and its allies, as well as between Israel and the Palestinians. The expansion of Ramat Shlomo and Har Homa, only make a bad situation worse in terms of the challenge of Jerusalem. The cost of not only building the new housing units in Ariel but protecting the entire settlement enterprise in the West Bank is both a political and financial drain on Israeli society at a time when clearly a different path must be followed.

Government subsidization of housing for Israeli settlers in the West Bank has been a policy for decades, and did much to supplement the minority of Jewish settlers in the territories who moved there for political or ideological reasons with an influx of Israelis who just needed affordable housing. The continued subsidization of such communities to effect political “facts on the ground” must stop. The legitimate demands for decent, affordable housing within Israel must be addressed, but they cannot be dealt with by additional housing in East Jerusalem or settlements on the West Bank, which unnecessarily complicate the negotiations to end the occupation.

We do not believe that the “invisible hand” of the market can resolve this critical problem, and call on the Israeli Government to bring its precious resources “back home” where they are needed to build new and renovate existing housing within the Green Line.

Stuart Appelbaum is President of the Jewish Labor Committee, and President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, UFCW, CLC.