Thursday, August 08, 2013

The Rawabi Apartheid, Part Two

After The New York Times' "radical sheikh" piece on the stonethrowers, the Los Angeles Times deals with Rawabi.  My Part I is here.

It's asserted that

Rawabi, the first master-planned project for Arabs in the West Bank, is audacious, risky and perhaps still part fantasy.

 
and

Rawabi — which has been frequently held out as a model for future Palestinian independence — will need to overcome cost overruns, construction delays, lackluster government support and disputes with Israel over roads and water that still threaten to delay its opening...said Bashar Masri, chairman of Massar International...the impetus was social and political.  "Every Palestinian has a duty to participate in nation-building," said Masri, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt that attest to his years spent in the U.S. as a chemical engineering student at Virginia Tech....Developers say they drew inspiration from master-planned communities in the U.S., Dubai and — though they don't like to admit it — Israeli settlements built on West Bank territory that Palestinians hope to one day make part of their own state..."But there are no red-tiled roofs and no gates," said Ramzi Jaber, commercial manager of the project, referring to common features of Jewish settlements. "Rawabi will be an open city." Well, mostly open.



I left this comment there:

Briefly:

(a) note this claim, contained at the Rawabi site (here) - "Neighborhood names are ancient Canaanite words, especially significant for Palestinians, who are believed to be the ancestral descendants of Canaanite tribes."  Believed? By whom?  Since we know Arabs conquered and occupied the Land of Israel only in 639 CE, could not they also be, logically, descendents of Jews?  Could it be also a total fabrication, an element of inventivity?

(b) and if visit another page there (here), you can read of apartheid - "The city will also offer 8 schools, green spaces, playgrounds, civic services, church and mosques"  No synagogue?   Ah, no Jews.  Muslims and Christians welcome.  But no Jews.  

(c)  maybe we should be calling the Arab-populated residential locations in Israel as "settlements" to even things out?

___________________

P.S.  I'm going to guess the journalists were taken on a tour.


^

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The Arabs are repeating the ridiculous Canaanite lie over and over again. The Arabs have transformed into Canaanites. It seems that they read the Torah and saw that the Land of Israel was called the Land of Canaan before the Jews arrived three and a half thousand years ago.

It's interesting to note that they are trying to make an argument of priority by inventing a blatant and absurdly idiotic lie. But they are NOT saying that the Arabs or Muslims were there before the Jews. They are retreating from that position and trying to invent a different one.