Israel to Approve Flurry of West Bank Building/US attacks Israel over West Bank settlements

Israel to Approve Flurry of West Bank Building
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/world/middleeast/05mideast.html?ref=global-home


JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will approve the construction of hundreds of new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the coming days as a prelude to a building freeze of six to nine months aimed at restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, senior Israeli officials said on Friday.

The plan is an attempt to ease pressure on Mr. Netanyahu from within his own Likud Party, which wants settlements to continue unimpeded, and from Washington, the Palestinian Authority and the rest of the Arab world, which want a total halt to such construction.

The new units will be in addition to 2,500 units under construction. All will be in the West Bank. The officials said Jerusalem would remain unaffected by the expected construction moratorium. In exchange for the agreement to stop building in the West Bank, Israel expects gestures from several Arab states, including the reopening of Israeli offices and flyover rights for Israeli planes on their way to Asia.

While the new units and exemption to Jerusalem could prove deeply problematic for the Obama administration and the Palestinian Authority, American officials seem to believe they are on the verge of an announcement in the next few weeks of a renewed Middle East peace process. The target is late September at the gathering of the United Nations General Assembly, which Mr. Netanyahu, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and President Obama will all attend.

A leading Israeli political journalist, Nahum Barnea, wrote in his Friday column in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that a senior American official telephoned him this week to lay out what Mr. Netanyahu would receive in exchange for the freeze: “an improved personal relationship with President Obama; he will get gestures from the moderate Arab states that the Israelis can appreciate, including a reopening of the interests offices in a number of states, tourism and trade relations, flight rights.”

Mr. Barnea attributed the phone call, which he said came from a very top official, to a new policy in Washington of reaching out to the Israeli public after months in which opinion surveys here have shown that Israelis are highly suspicious of Mr. Obama’s policy to the Middle East.

Mr. Abbas repeated this week that he would not meet with Mr. Netanyahu until the settlements were frozen but he also said at a news conference in Paris that the freeze might be accomplished by the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His top peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, condemned the plan for new housing starts, saying the only thing it would freeze was the peace process.

Two Israeli officials returned Friday from meetings with the Obama administration’s envoy to the conflict, George J. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell is expected in Jerusalem late next week in hopes of wrapping up the negotiations over the renewal of the peace process. A renewal is being defined as direct talks with the Palestinians and supportive gestures from the Arab world, in exchange for the freeze and continued on-the-ground improvement in the West Bank by the Israeli occupation authorities.

Mr. Abbas, who besides being the Palestinian president, is head of the Fatah movement, the rival to Hamas, which rules in Gaza. He has increased his popularity among Palestinians as West Bank conditions improve and Gaza stagnates under an Israeli-led siege, according to two new opinion polls. That may encourage Mr. Abbas to go ahead with talks.

The Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research, which conducts quarterly surveys, found that support for Mr. Abbas and Fatah over Hamas and its leader, Ismail Haniya, continues to grow both in the West Bank and Gaza. A five percentage point advantage three months ago has nearly tripled to 14 percentage points, it reported, based on a mid-August survey. It also found a big increase in a sense of personal safety in the West Bank, something Mr. Abbas’s security forces have been trying to create, as well as a belief among many of those surveyed that American involvement in peace talks will bring results.

A separate survey, carried out in July and August by Stanley Greenberg, an American who has long polled for Democrats, also found enthusiasm for the Obama administration’s role, and found that Fatah would beat Hamas by 10 points if elections were held today in both the West Bank and Gaza.

The Greenberg survey was carried out for The Israel Project, which seeks to improve Israel’s image and has started to focus efforts in the Palestinian areas as well as in Egypt and Jordan.

Both the Palestinian Center and Greenberg polls found substantial support among Palestinians for a two-state solution, where the two are described as Palestinian and Jewish states. The Palestinian survey found the public evenly divided — 49 percent to 49 percent — over a final accord of mutual recognition and end to conflict. The Greenberg poll found greater enthusiasm in the West Bank — 69 percent to 29 percent — than in Gaza, where 33 percent favored such a two-state solution compared with 56 percent opposed.

The Greenberg polls found that The Israel Project had its work cut out for it in building Israel’s image in the Arab world. Asked separate questions about their attitude toward Israel and Jews, Palestinians and Jordanians had a universally and completely negative response to both. Egyptians were only somewhat less hostile.

On the other hand, a plurality of Egyptians — 46 to 36 percent — approve of their country’s diplomatic relations with Israel. In Jordan, it went the other way — 51 percent opposing those relations and 42 percent approving.

Moreover, the survey found, most Jordanians and Palestinians and a plurality of Egyptians believe that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed not at creating energy, as Iran publicly asserts, but at building nuclear weapons — and they consider that a good thing. At the same time, Egyptians and Jordanians said Iranian nuclear weapons could be a threat to them, but Palestinians did not.



US attacks Israel over West Bank settlements
By Daniel Dombey in Washington and Vita Bekker in Jerusalem
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: September 4 2009 13:32 | Last updated: September 4 2009 21:55
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc6cffd6-994e-11de-ab8c-00144feabdc0.html


The Obama administration attacked Israel on Friday for giving the green light to the building of hundreds of new homes in the occupied West Bank even as the two sides negotiate a freeze on settlement construction.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is set to approve the new homes in the coming days, a move that appears aimed at softening opposition within his rightwing Likud party to a temporary settlement freeze.

An official close to Mr Netanyahu who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue said the PM would consider freezing building “for a few months” only after giving the green light to the construction of the new units for Jewish settlers.

“We regret the reports of Israel’s plans to approve additional settlement construction,” said Robert Gibbs, White House spokesman. “The US does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate.”

George Mitchell, the Middle East envoy for Barack Obama, the US president, is due in Israel next week to continue the settlements negotiations, which Washington hopes will facilitate a resumption of stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

The Obama administration has indicated it could sign up to less than the complete freeze on new building that it has demanded. “In a negotiation, people always stake out a variety of positions,” a state department spokesman said on Thursday. “Will that be the final position? Who knows?”

The Israeli official said the new expansion would be in addition to some 2,500 units already being built in the West Bank. None of the new homes will be in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

According to the Israeli official, a suspension of construction would be authorised only if the “conditions are right”, including if Arab countries made efforts to normalise ties with the Jewish state.

The US has sought to persuade Arab states to make gestures to Israel, such as allowing it to open local trade offices and organising meetings between Israeli and Arab officials.

Mr Netanyahu is under pressure from members of his own party and from the pro-settler, rightwing allies in his governing coalition to resist the call for a settlement freeze.

Israeli media have suggested Mr Mitchell and Mr Netanyahu could announce an agreement next week ahead of a possible summit between Mr Netanyahu, Mr Obama and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, during the United Nations General Assembly late this month.

However, Palestinians have so far resisted taking part in such a meeting, insisting that only a total freeze on construction would prompt the resumption of peace talks.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, an aide to Mr Abbas, was quoted by Reuters as saying that “a partial settlement freeze is not enough”.