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Jerusalem – In the first major Republican challenge to President Obama's Israel policy, former US presidential candidate Mike Huckabee visited a number of controversial Jewish housing projects in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem on Monday.
The former governor of Arkansas – a Southern Baptist minister who was one of the main contenders for the Republican Party's 2008 nomination for president – took issue with Obama's insistence that Israel freeze the expansion of all Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Standing next to a new Israeli housing compound wedged into the Arab neighborhood of Abu Dis and abutting the looming cement security barrier, he compared placing restrictions on where Jews can live to the racial segregation of his childhood in the American South, saying, "I can't understand it at all."
Mr. Huckabee, who may well have designs on another presidential run, is in Israel as the guest of The Jerusalem Reclamation Project, run by the settler group Ateret Cohenim. Under the project, the group buys real estate – both land and existing buildings – in Arab areas of Jerusalem where Palestinians hope to make the capital of their future state. A tax-exempt organization that receives most of its revenue from US donors, the group also regularly moves Jews into Arab neighborhoods, which would complicate any effort to partition Jerusalem as part of a peace plan.
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Huckabee also compared the talk of having Jerusalem partitioned so that it would be under the control of two governments, one Israeli and one Palestinian, to the US and Canada trying to share control of Detroit. "It's inconceivable that two sovereign governments claim control over the same piece of real estate," he said. "I don't know how it's workable."
Ir Amim, an Israeli group that opposes the work of Ateret Cohenim and other settlement efforts inside Jerusalem, criticized Huckabee's visit as an opportunistic trip that would frustrate attempts to reach a two-state solution.http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0817/p06s07-wome.html
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