Opposition Mounts to US Plan for Israeli Settlement Freeze - Voice of America

Robert Berger | Jerusalem 21 November 2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairing the weekly meeting of his Cabinet (file photo)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his Cabinet to try to shore up support for a 90-day moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank that is aimed at reviving Middle East peace talks.

Israel ended a 10-month moratorium in late September, prompting the Palestinians to suspend negotiations.

The United States has offered to sell Israel 20 advanced stealth fighter jets and to block anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council in exchange for the settlement freeze.

But Mr. Netanyahu is having trouble winning support from his right-wing coalition partners.

Cabinet Minister Eli Yishai said his ultra-Orthodox Shas party opposes the freeze. But he said the party might reconsider, if the U.S. guarantees that it will not demand any further restrictions on settlement construction when the 90-day period expires.

The dovish Labor Party, on the other hand, supports the freeze.

Labor Cabinet Minister Avishai Braverman urged the prime minister to move quickly to get the peace talks back on track.

Outside of the Cabinet meeting, some 2,000 Jewish settlers held a noisy protest against the moratorium.

"We will never allow the Land of Israel to be divided!" said settlement leader Dani Dayan.

Speaking in Cairo, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also rejected the freeze because it only applies to the West Bank.

He said he would not return to peace talks, unless Israel also stops settlement construction in disputed East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state. Israel says Jerusalem is not a settlement, and it reserves the right to build anywhere in the city.

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Egypt: New Israeli building permits a signal talks could collapse - Ha'aretz

 Egypt has described Israel's building permits for 238 new housing units in East Jerusalem as a provocative step and a sign the direct peace talks could collapse, the foreign ministry said Saturday.

Construction renewed in the settlement of Ariel.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said that Egypt considers this step as a negative Israeli response to all efforts made to save the direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

"The Israeli side withdraws day after another from its commitments to peace efforts, and it clearly prefers to increase the pace of colonial settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian land than to engage seriously in the negotiation," he added.

The building tenders sparked angry Palestinian and U.S. reaction, with worries that the move that could further jeopardize the uncertain resumption of the direct talks.

The Palestinians and their Arab supporters are contemplating turning to the United Nations for recognition of their right to a state within the border of before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

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Israeli Freeze Terms Rejected by Palestinians; Talks in Limbo - BusinessWeek

October 11, 2010, 7:01 PM EDT By Calev Ben-David

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set terms for the renewal of a West Bank settlement freeze that were swiftly rejected by the Palestinians, leaving the status of U.S.-brokered peace talks in limbo.

Netanyahu told parliament yesterday he was ready to convene his Cabinet and ask for an extension of a freeze on settlement building if “the Palestinian leadership tells its people in an unequivocal manner that it recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said Netanyahu’s demand was “unacceptable.”

The comments come as the U.S. is trying to keep peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians alive after Israel’s 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank expired on Sept. 26. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will only return to talks if Israel reimposes the construction moratorium.

“There is no way that the Palestinian Authority is going to make this declaration,” said Jonathan Spyer, a political scientist at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. “The government of Israel is trying to educate the U.S. administration on why there is no basis for a productive peace process at this point.”

The Palestinians reject Israel’s demand that they recognize it as the state of the Jewish people on the grounds it undermines the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel says recognition of it as a Jewish state is necessary to ensure the Palestinians don’t make additional claims once a peace treaty has been signed.

‘Work Constructively’

“The parties must work constructively to create conditions for the negotiations to continue,” U.S. State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said in an e-mail. “Both sides need to take steps if we are going to move forward.”

The Arab League last week backed the Palestinian Authority’s position not to resume direct peace talks until Israel renews the freeze, and gave U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration more time to revive the peace effort.

Israel had signaled last week that a compromise may be in the works. “The U.S. has come back to Israel with a number of suggestions, incentives if you would, that enable the government to maybe pass a limited extension of two or three months,” Ambassador Michael Oren told the Washington Post.

Shtayyeh said Netanyahu was “adding additional complications” to the renewal of talks. “We hope that the international community will bring Israel into the talks without any conditionality,” he said.

West Bank

About 500,000 Jews have moved to the West Bank and east Jerusalem since Israel captured the territory in 1967.

The United Nations says that settlements are illegal, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says they breach the Fourth Geneva Convention governing actions on occupied territory. Obama has said the settlements aren’t legitimate.

Israel says the settlements don’t fall under the convention because the territory wasn’t recognized as belonging to anyone before the 1967 war, in which Israel prevailed, and therefore isn’t occupied.

Netanyahu, who spoke at the opening of the winter parliamentary session, told lawmakers that security arrangements for Israel were vital in ensuring that “the peace was maintained.” He said they would also safeguard the country “in the regrettable but possible event that the peace was violated.”

Israel and the Palestinians agreed last month to try and reach an agreement on the framework for a comprehensive peace accord within a year. All the issues at the core of the conflict would be on the table, including the borders of a future Palestinian state, security arrangements for Israel, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the status of Jerusalem.

Spyer said he expected more bargaining in the month before the Arab League meets again to discuss the peace process. “There will be a series of proposals and counterproposals,” he said.

--With assistance from Alisa Odenheimer in Jerusalem. Editors: Peter Hirschberg, Louis Meixler.

To contact the reporter on this story: Calev Ben-David in Jerusalem at cbendavid@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem at

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America should fund Israeli settlers to leave - Financial Times

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By Diana Buttu

Published: October 10 2010 19:28 | Last updated: October 10 2010 19:28

The latest round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is already on shaky ground. At issue, once again, is Israel’s insistence that it can build and expand settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Its 10-month moratorium expired on September 26, and while Barack Obama, US president, said Israel should extend it – and according to some reports offered incentives including upgrades to Israel’s advanced weapons systems and an increase in the $3bn in annual aid for nothing beyond a 60-day extension – he, like his predecessors, has refused to insist on a total halt.

As a former adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team, I witnessed numerous failures in the peace process because of this issue. Now it threatens to derail the process again. A statement from the Arab League on Friday supported the right of the Palestinians to withdraw from talks, while even a temporary extension of the moratorium will only delay briefly the moment at which this problem returns. So a longer-term solution is needed; one in which the US provides much stronger incentives to encourage settlers to leave.

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Israeli settlers respond to mosque burning allegations - Christian Science Monitor

Tel Aviv

A day after a mosque was torched in a village near Bethlehem, Jewish settlers' reaction to assertions that one of their own had carried out the attack was a mix of annoyance and contrition.

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The mosque in the Palestinian village of Beit Fajar became the fourth in the last two years to be the target of arson. Many Israelis assume the attack was the work of a small group of Jewish extremists who have embarked on a campaign of vigilante violence – known as "price tag" – to derail the peace process and deter the government from evacuating settlements.

On Tuesday, a delegation of settler rabbis visited the torched mosque and made statements that implied that they, too, assumed that an extremist was responsible.

"This is not the way of the Torah or of Judaism,'' said Rabbi Shlomo Brin, from the nearby settlement of Alon Shvut, according to Israeli news website Ynet News. "This incident does not add anything to the settlements."

On Monday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak condemned the attack as inspired by Jews.

But some in the settler community see the finger-pointing as an attempt to slander Israeli settlers in the West Bank ahead of a possible new settlement freeze and the resumption of peace talks.

They argue that despite many arrests and interrogations, the Israeli police have yet to indict anyone in the previous cases of mosque arson.

"The immediate hand-pointing is irresponsible. [Mr. Barak] is trying to achieve political goals," says David Ha'Ivri, a resident of the settlement of Kfar Tapuach, referring to Israeli's left-leaning politicians who want to restart the peace process and stop settlement expansion.

"It's productive of them to give a bad image of the residents of Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the areas making up the West Bank), and by doing that they smear an entire community," he says.

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Palestinians: Peace talks hinge on Israeli settlement construction - Washington Post

JERUSALEM - The Palestinian leadership said on Saturday that there would be no resumption of peace talks without a halt to Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, backing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a dispute that has imperiled recently renewed negotiations.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded by appealing to Abbas to continue the negotiations. "The way to achieve an historic peace agreement between our two peoples is to sit around the negotiating table, seriously and continuously, and not to leave it, because that is the place to resolve our disagreements,'' he said in a statement.

Abbas met at his headquarters in Ramallah with members of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the central committee of his Fatah movement ahead of consultations at an Arab League summit in Libya next weekend.

"The leadership affirmed that the resumption of negotiations requires tangible steps that demonstrate their seriousness, first and foremost halting settlement without qualifications or exceptions," said a statement read out by Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior PLO official.

"The Palestinian leadership holds the Israeli government responsible for the suspension of the negotiations and the political process," the statement said, accusing Israel of seeking "to use the negotiations as a cover to pursue this settlement policy."

The U.S.-sponsored talks, renewed in early September, have foundered after a 10-month moratorium on new construction in Israeli settlements expired last Sunday and Netanyahu said it would not be renewed, despite pressure from Washington.

The U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George J. Mitchell, failed to break the impasse on Friday after two days of shuttling between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders. On Saturday he traveled to Qatar and Egypt to enlist the help of Arab leaders to broker a compromise.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Abbas, said that the Palestinian president would address Arab foreign ministers and leaders at the Arab League meeting, seek their advice "and then we'll come back to the Palestinian leadership in order to take the right decision." The Arab League had sanctioned the direct talks with the Israelis.

"The Palestinian position is clear: There will be no negotiations as long as settlement building continues," Abu Rudeineh said, adding that if the Israelis "are not restraining such activities, how are we going to agree on the final status issues?"

Palestinian officials assert that by expanding settlements, Israel is seizing land the Palestinians want for a future state before its fate is decided in negotiations. Netanyahu has argued that limited building in the settlements during the year allotted to reach an agreement would not affect the final drawing of borders, and that halting settlement construction was never a precondition for previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

"For 17 years the Palestinians conducted direct talks with Israeli governments while building went on in Judea and Samaria," Netanyahu said in response to the Palestinian statement, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. "I hope that now, as well, they will not turn their backs on peace and continue the negotiations in order to reach a framework agreement within a year."

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, said that there was a firm consensus among all factions at the Ramallah meeting that talks could not proceed as long as Israeli settlement building continued.

"How can you have a two-state solution if you are eating up the land of the other state?" Ashrawi said. "The Israelis have to understand once and for all that they just can't continue with this approach. . . .We can't afford it anymore. The two-state solution is disappearing."

Greenberg is a special correspondent.

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