Group items tagged

The United Nations has called on Israel to end its programme of demolishing homes in east Jerusalem and tackle a mounting housing crisis for Palestinians in the city.

Dozens of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem are demolished each year because they do not have planning permits. Critics say the demolitions are part of an effort to extend Israeli control as Jewish settlements continue to expand

Although Israel's mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, has defended the planning policy as even-handed, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in March described demolitions as "unhelpful". An internal report for EU diplomats, released earlier and obtained by the Guardian, described them as illegal under international law and said they "fuel bitterness and extremism". Israel occupied east Jerusalem in the 1967 war and later unilaterally annexed it, a move not recognised by the international community.

Construction has begun on approximately 60 new homes in a Jewish settlement in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, the Israeli campaign group Peace Now says. The work, in East Talpiot settlement, is aimed at creating a belt around East Jerusalem that would sever it from the rest of the West Bank, the group says.

Settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law. Israel disputes this and also argues that East Jerusalem is not subject to its pledge to freeze settlement work. Israel's claim is based on its annexation of East Jerusalem, unrecognised by the international community, which it captured along with the West Bank and other Arab territory in the 1967 war.

Israelis view settlements such as East Talpiot as neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. Such areas tend to be well integrated into the city's infrastructure.

Barak is expected to propose a temporary and partial freeze on the construction of homes for Jews in the West Bank. That falls far short of Barack Obama's demand made to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, at a difficult meeting in Washington last month for a complete halt to building as evidence of a commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state

Tel Aviv newspapers reported Israeli officials as saying that Barak would meet Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, in New York tomorrow to propose a three-month freeze on construction in settlements outside Jerusalem.

Israel is using its rapid construction programme to surround Jerusalem with Jewish housing and separate Arab districts from the rest of the occupied territories.If construction work continues it is not only likely to surround Jerusalem with Israeli housing but result in a Jewish majority in the east of the city which Israel would use to buttress its claim over all of Jerusalem at peace talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed a Palestinian state beside Israel for the first time on Sunday, reversing himself under U.S. pressure, but saying the Palestinians would have to lay down arms, a condition they swiftly rejected.

A week after President Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world, Netanyahu said the Palestinian state would also have to recognize Israel as the Jewish state -- essentially saying Palestinian refugees must give up the goal of returning to Israel.With those conditions, he said, he could accept ''a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.''

'Netanyahu's speech closed the door to permanent status negotiations,'' senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said. ''We ask the world not to be fooled by his use of the term Palestinian state because he qualified it. He declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, said refugees would not be negotiated and that settlements would remain.''

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that the Holy Basin area of Jerusalem would be under no sovereignty at all and administered by a joint committee of Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, Palestinians and Americans, the former prime minister told Newsweek magazine in an interview in the current issue.

The proposal to internationalize the Holy Basin was intended to achieve a breakthrough in the negotiations around the issues of sovereignity over holy sites in Jerusalem, the issue which had reportedly caused the breakdown of the Camp David talks in July 2000.

Olmert's proposal implies Israeli willingness to give up sovereignity over the Temple Mount, the Old City and the Mount of Olives. The offer appears to contradict Olmert's promise to Shas never to negotiate over Jerusalem and was never revealed to the Israeli public while he was in office

The Israeli military occupation around Bethlehem is severely restricting its growth, undermining its economy and compromising its future, according to a UN report.The combined effect of Israeli annexation, the West Bank barrier, settlements, settler bypass roads, closed military zones and Israeli nature reserves, has left only 13% of the 660 sq km Bethlehem governorate available for Palestinian use, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.

While there are about 175,000 Palestinians living in the Bethlehem area, there are now at least 86,000 Israelis also living there in 19 settlements, and their number is growing, even though settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law. Two-thirds of the governorate is under full Israeli security and administrative control.

The barrier around the Bethlehem area, part concrete, part steel, is still being built, but when finished will seal off the city itself from east Jerusalem and prevent growth to the north and west. On the western side of the barrier about 64 sq km will be isolated, home to 21,000 Palestinians living in some of the most fertile agricultural land in the area. The Palestinians there will face reduced access to trading markets and health and education services.

The deal to reduce nuclear warheads and work together to limit nuclear proliferation signed in Moscow this week by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev carried all the pomp of a milestone. But the official communiqués ignored an elephant lingering at the summit: Russia has a deal, signed in 2007, with Tehran to supply a state-of-the-art S300 antimissile defense system that could make a possible strike (by the U.S. or Israel) on Iran's nuclear facilities much harder. Even more than a lucrative deal for Moscow, though, this is Russia's diplomatic ace in the hole: the $1 billion system is really a bargaining chip between the powers.

Though the Iranians insist that the deal is on track, Russia has held back on delivering key elements of the S300 system. One key reason for the delay is a full-court diplomatic press by Jerusalem and Washington. In the week before Obama's visit to Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ask that the deal be stopped. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak also buttonholed Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, at the Paris Air Show late last month with the same request.

Russia has already been rewarded for its cooperation. In April, Russia's deputy defense minister, Vladimir Popovkin, confirmed that Russia had signed a deal to buy $50 million worth of Israeli-made pilotless drones to replace the Russian-made version that performed disastrously during last summer's war with Georgia. Until recently, Israel had supplied pilotless drones, night-vision and antiaircraft equipment, rockets, and various electronic systems to Tbilisi, and the Georgian military received advanced tactical training from retired Israeli generals (including one who commanded Israeli ground forces during the 2006 offensive against Hizbullah). Now, says independent Moscow-based military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, there is "a clear understanding" between Moscow and Jerusalem that the Israeli government will discourage private Israeli contractors from helping Georgia modernize its military.

JPost.com » Israel » Article Apr 24, 2009 0:14&nbsp;|&nbsp;Updated Apr 24, 2009 13:54 'World leaders must drop their slogans' By DAVID HOROVITZ AND AMIR MIZROCH PrintSubscribe articleTitle = ' \'World leaders must drop their slogans\' '; showOdiogoReadNowButton ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566',articleTitle,'0', 290, 55); E-mailToolbar + Recommend: What's this? showInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566', '0', 290, 0); Talkbacks for this article: 117 &nbsp; | &nbsp;Avg. rating 4.61 out of 5</s

The international community has to "stop speaking in slogans" if it really wants to help the new Israeli government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, in his first interview with an Israeli newspaper since taking the job.

"Over the last two weeks I've had many conversations with my colleagues around the world," he said. "Just today, I saw the political adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Chinese foreign minister and the Czech prime minister. And everybody, you know, speaks with you like you're in a campaign: Occupation, settlements, settlers..." Slogans like these, and others Lieberman cited, such as "land for peace" and "two-state solution," were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said.

As a state senator in Chicago, Mr. Obama cultivated friendships with Arab-Americans, including Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar and a critic of Israel. Mr. Obama and Mr. Khalidi had many dinners together, friends said, in which they discussed Palestinian issues.

Mr. Obama’s predecessors, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, came of age politically with the American-Israeli viewpoint of the Middle East conflict as their primary tutor, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. While each often expressed concern and empathy for the Palestinians — with Mr. Clinton, in particular, pushing hard for Middle East peace during the last months of his presidency — their early perspectives were shaped more by Israelis and American Jews than by Muslims, Mr. Levy said. “I think that Barack Obama, on this issue as well as many other issues, brings a fresh approach and a fresh background,” Mr. Levy said. “He’s certainly familiar with Israel’s concerns and with the closeness of the Israel-America relationship and with that narrative. But what I think might be different is a familiarity that I think President Obama almost certainly has with where the Palestinian grievance narrative is coming from.”

None of this necessarily means that Mr. Obama will chart a course that is different from his predecessors’. During the campaign he struck a position on Israel that was indistinguishable from those of his rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain, going so far as to say in 2008 that he supported Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (He later attributed that statement to “poor phrasing in the speech,” telling Fareed Zakaria of CNN that he meant to say he did not want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.)

The new government of Israel is seeking to reorient the country’s foreign policy, arguing that to rely purely on the formulas of trading land for peace and promising a Palestinian state fails to grasp what it views as the deeper issues: Muslim rejection of a Jewish state and the rising hegemonic appetite of Iran.

Israel’s effort to switch the discussion to Iran is likely to be met in Washington and in European capitals with the assertion that it is precisely because of the need to build an alliance to confront Iran that Israel must move ahead vigorously with the Palestinians as well as with the Syrians.

It seems likely that the plan that Mr. Netanyahu will present to Mr. Obama will have a strong regional component in an attempt to fend off pressure on Israel to accept the Arab League peace plan, which calls on Israel to return to the 1967 borders as well as to accept a right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel. The new Israeli government completely rejects both.

"The biggest obstacle today is the settlements," Hagit Ofran of the Israeli anti-settlement watchdog group PeaceNOW told Al Arabiya. "There is no land left for Palestinians." "We believe it is easier for the government of Israel to stop settlement activities than trying to find excuses for their continuation," Ophran stated. Ophran added Israel's claims of "natural growth" are bogus given that 40 percent of the settler increase is due to immigration to settlements either from within Israel or abroad. "Natural growth in the settlements is not simply a matter of births from within but includes continuous flow of immigrants," Ophran explained. Settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have continued to expand at a rate higher than the population growth inside Israel. Some 180,000 additional Jews have been permitted to settle inside Israel’s Arab sector in East Jerusalem.