Marty Peretz Responds to N. Kristoff

Or, TNR vs. NYT.

(The New Republic vs. the New York Times)

Here.

An extract:-

There has been a demographic struggle for Jerusalem for centuries. Jews have had the predominant numbers at least since the early nineteenth century, and probably earlier. Christians no longer figure in the competition, there being only 14,000 of them in a city of some 700,000 and growing fast. Moslems by the tens of thousands smuggle themselves in from the West Bank so that they can live under Israeli control rather than any form of Palestinian rule whatever. This is what fuels some of the resentment of the separation barrier in Jerusalem. Palestinians want to be Israelis, with social and economic privileges that come with being residents of the Holy City but without citizenship in the Jewish state.

The race for population mastery continues. It will also be won by Israel, and this outcome will be guaranteed by securing contiguity of Jewish neighborhoods in the city and linking the capitol to the largest Israeli community in the West Bank, Ma'aleh Adumin and its offspring. The Palestiniams may whine about this but the wise among them have no illusions. The necessity of such outcomes was set when the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem was utterly demolished and Jews were kept from the Western Wall of the temple and other holy places for two decades. History also makes its claims in such circumstances: you gamble and lose then you really lose. When and where has it ever been different?

So to Kristoff's own four concrete cases. The first: Hebron. "The Jews have deep ties to Hebron, just as Christians do to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but none of these bonds confer any right to live in these places or even visit them." Forget about Hebron's historic Jews for a moment. But notice how casually Kristof has vacated the right of Christians to reside (or even visit) Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Probably without knowing it, he is actually alluding to a real situation in Bethlehem. Not so long ago, Bethlehem's proportion of Christians used to be some 75%. It is now roughly a quarter, maybe a tiny bit more. Bethlehem's Christians were and are Arabs. No matter. The Moslems wanted them out, and over the decades the Moslems pushed them out. But this is the place where Jesus was born and where the Church of the Nativity (Armenian and Greek Orthodox) sanctifies his arrival. Surely, the remaining Christians deserve some protection of their historic presence in the place where their religious journey began.