Israel Matzav

SO IF Olmert's planned retreat harms Jerusalem, what purpose does it serve? The sole goal that Olmert's partition plan advances is that of attempting to appease racist, anti-Jewish radical Islamic forces that claim that Jews have no rights in Jerusalem. Indeed, at its core, Olmert's plan internalizes this jihadist view by completely ignoring the security, municipal and demographic concerns of the city's Jews and non-jihadist Arabs.

This Israeli internalization of the jihadist view of Jews in Jerusalem also pervades the government's treatment of Jewish land purchases in eastern Jerusalem. Last week Ha'aretz reported that a month ago the State's Attorney, Eran Shendar, asked Police Inspector Yohanan Danino to undertake a covert investigation of Ateret Cohanim - a non-profit organization that works to bypass the Palestinian Authority's policy of defining land sales to Jews as a capital offense for which dozens of Arabs have been murdered since 1994.

Shendar's instructions came after an Arab Jerusalemite named Muhammad Marageh, who in the past worked for Ateret Cohanim, offered to attempt to criminally implicate the organization in exchange for receiving state's witness protection and, perhaps, money from the state. The Ha'aretz report makes clear that Israel's chief prosecutor is so convinced that there is something wrong with willing Arab sellers selling land to willing Jewish buyers that apparently, without being presented with any evidence of wrongdoing, he ordered the police to begin a secret criminal investigation of the Jews.

This anti-Jewish view is similarly manifested in the police's indifference to the fates of Arab land sellers. On April 12, the eve of Pessah, Jerusalem resident Muhammad Abu Al Hawa was tortured and murdered in Jericho for the "crime" of selling a building in Abu Tor to Jews. The week before his murder Israel's Channel 10 led prime time news broadcasts, on two consecutive nights, with hysterical reports about the land sale. The reports were precipitated by a court order for the police to evict illegal squatters from the building to enable the legal owners to take possession of their property - an eviction which Channel 10 filmed.

As I reported at the time, sources in Abu Tor stated that after the Channel 10 expose, it was only a question of time before Hawa was murdered. Those sources also said that far from protecting Hawa, the police were suspected of tipping off Channel 10's reporter on the scheduled eviction. This week, the spokesman for the police's Samaria and Judea District responsible for investigating Hawa's murder did not respond to repeated requests for information on the status of the investigation.

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