Stand for Israel

New apartments going up in southern Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood

Stand for Israel was in the Holy Land last week and couldn’t resist snapping a picture of the “very dangerous” building taking place in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which caused a kerfluffle last month when the U.S. administration and even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon decried the new apartments as expanding “settlements” and therefore imperiling the peace process.

(Is it just us or has the peace process been way beyond “imperilment” for years — pretty much since the Palestinian leadership decided that they’d choose terror campaigns over recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state?)

People of good will can disagree about “settlements” — whether they’re “obstacles to peace” or not, but no one in Israel thinks that these apartments are in a settlement. Gilo is a sprawling neighborhood that runs along Jerusalem’s south-western side, between the Malcha area  to the west (which has housing, a big, Western-style mall, and a large “technology park” that is home to many high-tech companies), the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa to the north, and the now built-up area around Kibbutz Ramat Rachel to the east.

To the south is the Arab town of Beit Jala which, during the intifada, was taken over by Fatah’s Tanzim militia who took over homes in the largely Christian village’s homes in order to turn Gilo’s outer edges into a shooting gallery.  In fact, the new apartments aren’t far from Ha’anafa Street, a road whose beautiful views of Beit Jala and the valley it rests in next to Bethlehem turned their residents into sitting ducks. Eventually, the view–and the vulnerability–were obscured by a wall the Israeli government erected to block the shootings. Some 950 apartments had their windows reinforced at government expense (though another 700 unprotected ones were damaged as well).