"Boutique Apartheid"

Khelil sent me this (with the title above):  "This is what Travel & Leisure had to say about a new hotel in Israel: "It’s hard to believe that two Ottoman-era mansions in Acre, a beach-lined port city in Israel’s northern Galilee, sat empty until local restaurateur Uri Jeremias saw the site’s potential." This of course is bullshit. The idea that two mansions on the Mediterranean would be vacant until some Zionist came along is what Israeli propaganda is made of. I found this on Ha'aretz: "The northern one, also known as the Shukri house, belonged to a wealthy family of Acre merchants; the southern structure, the Afifi house, served in recent years as a community center and kindergarten….the ceiling paintings were apparently done by a Jerusalem artist named Salibeh Yohanna, who was active in the second half of the 19th century and was commissioned to decorate the homes of wealthy families in the north of the country." And even T&L writes that there is a 900-year old seller underneath the homes. These are stolen Palestinian homes, of course. But T&L and Ha'aretz both make it sound cute that an Israeli occupier is building boutique hotels on someone else's property. And this article cites the lousy hotel as an example of the Jewish-only apartheid gentrification of Acre meant to drive out the Arabs: "In recent years there has been an influx of nationalist-religious Jews, associated with the hardline West Bank settler movement, seeking to “reclaim” mixed cities such as Acre and prevent their Arab populations becoming a majority. In the new city of Acre, housing developments reserved exclusively for religious Jews have alarmed Arab residents.""