These are the same units reported on by YNET. The Governments strategy is use the house construction as a punishment and at the same time it is destroying very small number of units in places further away. This further justifies our position. If there is no deal, we can always rebuild these few units. Also withholding the payments to the PA serve another purpose. It gives us something to give back later in a gesture. Ted Belman
Details emerge of Israeli construction plans approved to punish Abbas for UNESCO move.
By Gil Ronen, INN
Details are emerging of the plans approved by the government Tuesday for new construction in Judea and Samaria, as punishment to the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its unilateral moves to gain UN recognition as a state. The plan was approved by an eight member inner cabinet and is said to be the first installment in a larger plan to be decided upon in the near future. It also includes a freezing of the transfer of funds to the PA under extant agreements.
Makor Rishon newspaper wrote Wednesday that the construction approved includes 277 new housing units in Efrat, about 2,000 units at Har Homa and Ramot, and another 40 units in Maaleh Adumim.
Sources close to the Prime Minister told the paper that these are final approval for construction and not just a bureaucratic step toward that aim, and that the projects are new ones, not “recycled” projects – i.e., ones approved in the past and made to seem as if they were newly approved.
Sources in Netanyahu’s bureau were quoted as saying he was aware of the international implications of the decision, but “chose to go down the difficult path.”
All the construction approved is located within the so-called “settlement blocs” that are to remain in Israeli sovereignty is any future deal with the (PA). Israel continues, meanwhile, to tear down communities built in areas it believes may be handed over to Arab hands in a peace deal.
A subtle shift in justification for further expansion into J & S, would send out two important messages.
1. Israel is building new communities in J & S as a matter of right. Palestinian rights to that land do not exist, or if they do, they are inferior to Israeli rights.
Israel could have said in that context that in past, she chose not to assert her rights to J & S and was even prepared to relinquish her rights to the land in favor of the Palestinians for their own state, but only if the Palestinians were prepared to negotiate a 2 state solution that brought real peace and an end to any further Palestinian claims.
2. With recent circumstances only adding more proof positive that the world cannot deny that the Palestinians are not invested in a 2 state real peace solution, Israel is taking the only option the Palestinians have left her and that is she is now asserting and acting on her rights to J & S.
Such messaging would doubtless offend world opinion because it justifies an end result that world opinion does not want to see.
Such messaging however, is important in the context of those who would seek to challenge not just the action, but the logic behind the action of expansion, and there will be leaders and advocates who do, would look like fools because the logic such explanation brings is logically unassailable.
I agree. Bibi’s “justifying it’s settlement of the land of Israel as a punishment to the Arabs” indicates that he is willing to stop construction as soon as the Arabs do or say something different. The true Zionist commitment to Eretz Israel, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with what the Arabs think, say, or do: It’s between the Land, the Jews and their God.
What impresses me far more than the vagaries of Israel’s “settlement” policies, is this:
The Jericho 3 has a range of some 4500 miles with a 1650 lb. warhead (read, “big nuclear”). The DEBKA article discusses the implications of the test concerning whether Israel will or will not attack Iran with conventional bunker-buster bombs. The message I see, however, at this time when Obama, Erdogan and other world leaders are toying with the idea of attacking Israel, is that Israel can retaliate big-time and destroy any enemy — including the US. Another way of putting this, is,
“Here we stand. We will not move.”
THAT message warms 2000 years of cockles in my heart.
The Insane and feckless Israeli government is justifying it’s settlement of the land of Israel as a punishment to the Arabs who usurped our moniker, “Palestinian”. In this perverted thinking the Zionist ideal to settle all of the land of Israel is mandated by the need to punish the Arabs. My ancestors who dreamed for 2,000 years for return to Zion are spinning in their graves!
There will never be a peace deal with the Arabs.
Some Israelis remain on crack, after all that’s happened!
We have seen how much the value of the Arab word is worth. The measures Israel took are insufficient to address the scope of the PA’s abrogation of the Oslo Accords.