Israel's Right, Cheering Donald Trump's Win, Renews Calls to Abandon 2-State Solution -... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...p-palestinian-settlements.html
war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Israel Palestine 2-state-solution
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 16
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Emboldened by the Republican sweep of last week’s American elections, right-wing members of the Israeli government have called anew for the abandonment of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians.“The combination of changes in the United States, in Europe and in the region provide Israel with a unique opportunity to reset and rethink everything,” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister and the leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, told a gathering of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem on Monday.Mr. Bennett, who advocates annexing 60 percent of the occupied West Bank to Israel, exulted on the morning after Donald J. Trump’s victory: “The era of a Palestinian state is over.”That sentiment was only amplified when Jason Greenblatt, a lawyer and co-chairman of the Trump campaign’s Israel Advisory Committee, told Israel’s Army Radio that Mr. Trump did not consider West Bank settlements to be an obstacle to peace, in a stark reversal of longstanding American policy.
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Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and other rightist politicians jumped to make hay of the change. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Yoav Kish, a Likud member of Parliament, called for the expansion of Israeli sovereignty into the West Bank; Meir Turgeman, the chairman of Jerusalem’s municipal planning committee, said he would now bring long-frozen plans for thousands of Jewish homes in the fiercely contested eastern part of the city up for approval.
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Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected a government request for a seven-month delay of the demolition of an illegal West Bank outpost built on privately owned Palestinian land. The court-ordered demolition is slated for Dec. 25, and the government had argued for the delay in part to temper a potentially violent settler response.On Sunday, a ministerial committee of rightists within the Likud party and the governing coalition approved a contentious bill to retroactively legalize illegal settlement on privately owned Palestinian land. Prompted by the effort to salvage the Amona outpost, it may be a precursor of things to come.Although the pro-settler camp was promoting the bill long before Mr. Trump’s victory, the decision was taken, unusually, over Mr. Netanyahu’s vehement objections and despite his exhortations for it to be postponed.
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Israeli analysts point out that the Trump campaign has spread contradictory messages. While many here assume that he will have more pressing priorities than the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that he would like to seal an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, calling it the “ultimate deal.”
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Acknowledging that Mr. Trump’s positions are not entirely clear, Mr. Bennett, the leader of Jewish Home, said, “We have to say what we want first.”
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But Mr. Gold suggested that a Trump administration was likely to roll back the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 lines and support borders that are more accommodating to Israel. “Trump’s policy paper spoke about Israel having defensible borders, which are clearly different from the 1967 lines,” he said.