Israel Builds, Obama Administration Squirms

News from Jerusalem:  This week Israel’s Civil Administration approved a plan to build 500 housing units in the West Bank community of Shiloh. U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner complained like clockwork that such building is not “constructive.”

In so doing, he was following a U.S. practice of frequently publicly criticizing its ally Israel. No other U.S. ally gets this treatment; when was the last time you heard Washington publicly take Britain, Germany, or Japan to task? And this in a week when the U.S. is already heavily pressuring Israel both publicly and behind the scenes not to defend itself against a growing existential threat from Iran.

But is Toner right about the Israeli building plans not being “constructive”? In a world where there are mounting crises in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, severe human rights abuses in America’s trading partner China, and so on, are housing units in Shiloh what Washington should fret about? In fact, these building plans not only pose no problem for the U.S. but are constructive, for several reasons.

1. They give people in Shiloh places to live. It’s natural for a community—especially a very life-affirming one like Shiloh, where people make a point of having children—to grow. One has to have a very crabbed perspective to want a place like Shiloh to freeze in place, so that parents can’t provide homes for their kids, no one can move in from outside the community, and so on. It’s a throwback to the early days of the Obama administration, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thundered against “natural growth” in such Israeli communities. Isn’t this supposed to be an election year, with the Obama administration cooling it toward Israel and wooing Jewish votes?

2. Shiloh is a modern-day iteration of the ancient biblical city of the same name, the center of Israelite religious and political life for about three hundred years before Jerusalem took that honor. Having a modern-day Jewish community there is a renewal and revitalization of one of the ancient roots of Western civilization.

Of course, many contemporary Western people no longer have the faintest idea or give a hoot what Shiloh was. This is particularly true in heavily secularized Western Europe, with its catastrophically low fertility rates and burgeoning Muslim presence. Can the United States and Israel—which still care enough about Western civilization to fight for it—afford this kind of contempt for its roots? Since taking office in 2009, the churchgoing President Obama’s behavior suggests that he sees any Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as essentially scandalous and the Palestinians—part of the geographically starved Muslim umma—as the sole rightful possessor of this territory. Is Jew-free Judea (and Samaria) really an American desideratum?