Jointly authored by Lara Friedman, APN (USA) and Hagit Ofran, Peace Now (Israel)
Defenders of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu have seized on a recent report in Haaretz to argue that Netanyahu’s record shows that he has, in fact, been less pro-settlements than his detractors (including Peace Now) have suggested. Their argument hinges on a single statistic raised in that story: the average number of construction starts in settlements per year, as counted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS), across the 6 years Netanyahu has been in office, compared to that same number for previous prime ministers over the past 20 years. But as is often the case when it comes to statistics, the devil is in the details, and a single statistic taken in isolation will always obscure more than it reveals.
This week, Alpher discusses whether the new intifada that is apparently developing has any symbolic significance in regard to the 20 year anniversary of the Rabin assassination; is the fact that Netanyahu’s government is building walls and imposing partial closures around Jerusalem’s outlying Arab neighborhoods a kind of re-dividing of Jerusalem and couldn’t this be a potentially positive step toward peace; if it is fair to say that the fear instilled by previous rounds of intifada violence helped usher in rounds of negotiations and Israeli concessions previously, could that happen again this time; the role of the international community; why the initiative attributed to the French to introduce an international police observer force to the Temple Mount appears to be a hastily conceived non-starter; and how to characterize the violence at this point in time.
