In the midst of the international lobby war leading up to the September UN General Assembly, the Israeli authorities made an announcement that undoubtedly annoyed more than one person in the White House.
Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai gave the official and final green light on Thursday for the construction of 1,600 new flats in Ramat Shlomo, a settlement in the north of East Jerusalem. Ramat Shlomo is the same Israeli colony that drove US-Israeli relations to a low point last year. Back then, President Barack Obama put his foot down and pressured his partner Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze the planned expansion. The situation today, however, is completely different.
One year later, the Israeli government not only confirmed that the building of these 1,600 new apartments is on its way, but a few days earlier further announced the expansion of yet another settlement in East Jerusalem. The plan is to build 930 flats in Har Homa, the massive colony constructed just in front of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
Europe, Washington, Russia, the UN (also known as the Quartet) and Turkey reacted immediately, condemning Israel’s new settlement expansion. “Such unilateral actions work against efforts to resume direct negotiations and contradict the logic of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties", criticized the American State Department in an official statement.
But as happened last year, the Israeli authorities appear to be immune to these mild warnings. Interior Minister Yishai concluded his statement on Thursday with another announcement: in the next few days the government will approve the building of some 2,700 new apartments; he didn’t say where or when they will be constructed.
The international community, with the Quartet leadership, is negotiating against the clock to convince the Palestinian Authority (PA) to accept restarting a bilateral peace process, thus abandoning its aim of gaining international recognition in the United Nations in September. But in order to have any chance of convincing the PA, the Quartet must first convince their Israeli counterparts to stop expanding the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, recognized internationally as illegal and under a military occupation. Ramat Shlomo has become the latest symbol of the international community’s defeat and Israel’s victory.
Home of some 18,000 ideologically-motivated settlers, Ramat Shlomo is part of the Israeli strategy to expand its presence in the surroundings of Jerusalem, well inside the internationally recognized Palestinian territories. Most of its residents are ultra-orthodox Jews, who moved there in the mid 1990s when the colony was initially established. They are convinced that God gave them this land and, therefore, they refuse any discussion or negotiation about the legitimacy of their presence there. “It’s in the Torah”, is the final answer that they gave to every international journalist that visited the colony last year during the US-Israeli diplomatic impasse.
Israeli authorities discuss this expansion as a solution to the housing shortage for these middle class families, most of them with five or six children,and young people who don’t want to leave their “neighbourhood” and need affordable houses.
More and more this argument is presented in the mainstream Israeli media as part of the same message of the massive protest movement in Israel’s major cities, such as Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. But while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems obsessed with granting every settler’s expansionist wish, the students, doctors, teachers, impoverished families and left-wing protesters in Israel are having a harder time convincing him of their agenda.
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Sabtu, 10 September 2011
Israel Announces Expansion of East Jerusalem Settlements as International Community Scrambles
07.30
Bayu Yudistiro
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