13/4/97

Har Homa: Wind and hot air

   Wind.
   Wind, and if you're looking for anything else on Har Homa, that's it. There's nothing more because Har Homa has no legacy, no ghosts of history, no reason for anyone to care who claims it.
    The Arabs never wanted it until the Jews did; the Jews now have to build on it -- and the Arabs kill for it -- because of political vanity, a principle for which innocent people have to die.
    Har Homa. Until recently, folks living across the street had never heard of it. Now, it's a household name to three or four billion people, few of whom understand that the place isn't even worthy of mention on local maps.
    Choose a rock and sit for a while, and imagine. Over there, perhaps, a gas station. Down there, Yitzhak's or Yossi's or Ya'acov's, a family grocery next to a kindergarten. Candy wrappers blowing about. Over there, a good place for the community center, or synagogue. Will the main street run this way or that?
    Will there be space among the dense concrete habitation for the wind?
    Har Homa. The only reason anybody's interested is because of the interest it has sparked. It's the latest round of that popular peace-process game, Pickax  Polemics: the Israelis decide they want to dig something somewhere, and, stupidly, make a lot of noise about it. Then the Palestinian objectors, right on schedule and speaking from a well-worn text, wail they are appalled and the Jews are stealing their land and this proves the Jews are not serious about peace and don't be surprised if the agonized Palestinians rise up to defend their sacred dust.
    Then the Israeli Left gets hysterical about hypothetical moral rights, and the Israeli Right gets hysterical about hypothetical historic rights. Cars stop where no car ever had reason to stop and journalists get out and run to the battlefield and fail to notice there's nothing there.
    No matter. Har Homa, Hebron, the Tunnel, the Efrat hills, Orient House -- what's the difference? To the klatsch of international policymakers, who like to think they can put their own spin on the Earth's axis, this is a chance to speak of grave concern and dismay about commitment to the peace process. The friendlies of the Arab world state, as they have stated a hundred times before about every issue that has come up, that they cannot consider normalization with Israel until this provocation ends.
    The Europeans, the Americans, the developed, underdeveloped, developing and undevelopable countries: ג€œgrave concern and dismay about blah blah blah.ג€ (Do I think that the whole world hates us? No. I just read the papers.)
   But in Haifa and Beersheba and Tel Aviv, and even in nearby Gilo and Talpiot, people wonder: who cares? Is it a personal insult to every Palestinian if we do build on Har Homa, and is it a capitulation on United Jewish Jerusalem if we don't?
By now, yes, it is, because an issue has been fabricated, political lines have been drawn, emotional barricades erected and flags are aflutter, over nothing more consequential than this rock we sit on.
    This rock has been here since before 1967, before 1948, well before Moses or Abraham. Soon it will be trucked away to make way for a pizza joint, or a  McDonald's.
The spectacular view it has enjoyed, if indeed rocks enjoy views, will be blocked in every direction by the current style of dense, soulless suburban development. Who knows? Maybe your next house will be built right here. Ramot, Ma'aleh Adumim, Gilo, Pisgat Ze'ev, Efrat -- each has a house where there had been nothing but a rock like this one.
    What makes Har Homa different from the Jerusalem suburbs already established is a profoundly changed political climate: then, settlement was a frantic effort to build facts on the ground in preparation for a possible territorial showdown; now, that showdown has begun, and it is too late. If Har Homa was to be settled, it had to happen 20 years ago.
If Har Homa had been ignored, as it has been throughout history, it would still be of no importance to either side. The Israelis and the Palestinians would have gone on to build their fractious little nations without the help or hindrance of a neighborhood here. And given time, this wind would have eroded the hill to nothingness. And nobody would have noticed.