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Rejecting Obama, U.S. Jews push West Bank settlement
Wed Nov 18, 2009 5:09pm EST
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By Tom Perry
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - President Barack Obama may be telling Israelis that building settlements round Jerusalem risks dangerously fuelling Palestinian anger, but some of his fellow Democrats brought the opposite message to the city on Wednesday.
Dov Hikind, a member of New York state's assembly, looked out over Jerusalem's Old City and dismissed the "extreme" view on the matter taken by his party's president.
He urged fellow American Jews to buy homes on occupied land rather than in traditional U.S. vacation spots.
"I'm trying to get a whole bunch of my friends to actually buy," said Hikind during a tour of settlement housing projects for several dozen potential U.S. investors.
"Rather than buying second homes in Florida, we want people to buy in Israel," he said, having watched a foundation stone laid for an extension to the Nof Zion, or Zion View, settlement.
Palestinians, whose leaders declared this week's Israeli government approval for more settlement building near Jerusalem a killer blow to peace, reject Hikind's description of Nof Zion as "Israel," as it lies on occupied land they want for a state.
But his views, shared by significant numbers of American Jews, many of them Democrat voters, are an indication of Obama's difficulties in holding to his demands that Israel halt its expansion of settlements in the interests of a peace agreement.
Hikind's active participation in the settlement policy that has seen Israel move close to a tenth of its Jewish population onto land captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war is not very common among Jews in the United States. But financial support from Americans, some benefiting from U.S. tax relief on charity, is a significant source of funding for West Bank settlements.
A small group of Israeli peace activists staged a protest against Hikind's tour on Wednesday. Israeli left-wingers echo Obama's line that expanding settlement for ideological and religious reasons is jeopardizing Israel's security.
Settlements, home to significant numbers of immigrants from the United States, also benefit from support from fundamentalist American Christians -- like Republican former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
"The thing that prompted me to organize this group is being so angry at the Obama administration," said Hikind.
"I WANT TO LIVE HERE"
As he looked out across the valley toward the Old City, where the gilded Dome of the Rock marks out the Muslim holy site that Jews revere as the site of their ancient Temple, he said:
"I don't want to displace anyone. I don't want to kick anyone out of their homes. I have no hate, no malice in my heart. I want to live here and I am trying to work that out."
Yet Palestinians in the city feel that is exactly what Israel and its international supporters are trying to do, displacing today's inhabitants with foreign-born Jews who claim an ancestral and religious right to land going back 2,000 years. Continued...
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