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TechnoratiIsrael Approves 50 New Settler Homes in West Bank
JERUSALEM - Israel has said it has approved the construction of 50 homes in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, despite weeks of pressure from its closest ally Washington.
"The defence ministry has approved the construction of 50 housing units in the settlement of Adam," a statement said.
![[Palestinians harvest wheat next to the Adam settlement in the West Bank in May 2009. Israel has said it has approved the construction of 50 homes in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, despite weeks of pressure from its closest ally Washington. (AFP photo)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/settlements-2_0.jpg "settlements-2.jpg")
The decision to build the houses in Adam, north of Jerusalem, came despite repeated US calls for Israel to halt all settlement activity in order to relaunch peace talks with the Palestinians.
The houses will be built for the relocation of some 200 settlers from nearby Migron, one of the largest so-called wildcat outposts -- small settlements which lack Israeli permits.
A defence ministry document says 1,450 units could eventually be built in Adam, but a spokesman insisted only 190 are currently being planned.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his right-wing government will not build new settlements in the occupied territories but will not halt "natural growth" expansion of existing settlements either.
That position has put Israel on a collision course with US President Barack Obama's administration, which has demanded a complete halt to settlements and vowed to vigorously pursue the Middle East peace process.
The decision came shortly before Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak was to fly to New York to meet US Middle East envoy George Mitchell on Tuesday, after a meeting between Mitchell and Netanyahu was cancelled last week.
On Sunday, Israeli media reported that Barak planned to offer a three-month building freeze in the settlements, excluding existing projects that are nearing completion, as a compromise to the White House demands.
Barak declined to confirm or deny such a plan, telling reporters that the issue "hasn't been fully finalised yet" and that settlements were one of several topics he planned to discuss with the US envoy.
The possible freeze would not apply to settlements in mostly Arab east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied and annexed in 1967 and which the Palestinians have demanded as the capital of their future state.
It would also not cover some 2,000 buildings in West Bank settlement blocs that are currently at an advanced stage of construction, mainly public buildings, Israel's mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported on Sunday.
Israelis insist they have a commitment from the administration of former US president George W. Bush permitting some growth in existing settlements. They say the US position was laid out in a 2004 letter from Bush to then Israeli premier Ariel Sharon.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier this month the Obama administration had received no record of any such deal, but Israeli Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor insisted on Monday: "We had an agreement ... (on) freezing settlement activity including natural growth.
"And alongside that there was an understanding, an agreement on the interpretation of what freeze is, and this interpretation is part of the agreement," he told foreign correspondents.
Yediot Aharonot recently reported that about 3,200 new housing units were under construction in the West Bank at the end of 2008.
The presence of more than 280,000 Israelis in more than 120 settlements scattered across the West Bank has long been one of the thorniest issues in the decades-old conflict.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has said he will not hold any talks with Israel until it halts all settlement activity, which the Palestinians say endangers the viability of their future state.
The international community considers all settlements built on land occupied in the 1967 Six Day war to be illegal, and last week the Group of Eight and the Middle East diplomatic Quartet -- the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- called for a complete settlement freeze.
12 Comments so far
Show All1) "Israelis insist they have a commitment from the administration of former US president George W. Bush permitting some growth in existing settlements"
Response: Bush had no power to permit growth in existing settlements
2) This article reports another example of Israel thumbing its nose at the US. We appear to only be the 2nd most powerful nation in the world.
3 lines on a graph are going to cross,
1st. Israel continues it's killing, torturing, ethnic cleansing and inhuman barbarity, driving it's vicitm's and sympathizers mad-violently suicidally mad for REVENGE.
2nd. W's of MD become smaller, more sophisticated, chemical, bio, nuclear.
3rd....The clock keeps ticking.
And deadly Means, radical Motive and ultimately Opportunity will manifest themselves one night in Tel-Aviv.
This will happen unless motive is eliminated.
This is the "balanced journalism" Chris Hedges was warning about in his latest article here (highly recommended: The Truth will not set you free...)
Lucitanian - Thank You for your candor. This is the kind of rhetoric that tells us what is really going on, not the sanitized version our media present...
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(I have posted this comment before but think it is still relevant:)
Auschwitz Survivor:
“I can write up an endless list of similarities between Nazi Germany and Israel. The capturing of land and property, denying people access to educational opportunities and restricting access to earn a living to destroy their hope, all with the aim to chase people away from their land...”
Whole Interview: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22912.htm
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According to classical Judaism Non-Jews are not considered to be human beings:
“We have a case of let us differentiate between totally different species:... the body of Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members) of all nations of the world.”
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, quoted in “Overcoming Zionism” p.29
This is the perfect Zionist excuse to treat the Palestinians as "Untermenschen" - dehumanize them and therefore eliminate all guilt and responsibility for cruel, injust and inhumane treatment...they have to be sacrificed for a "higher goal" ...(the similarities to Nazi thinking are frightening...)
"The most moral army in the world" - http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html
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“SEND THE ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS” (settlers' graffiti in Hebron)
Watch the whole video (the daily hell in the West Bank) here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13749.htm
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Recently German state televison showed a remarkable and ironic development in Israel: More and more young Israelis of German descent are applying for a German passport...
http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/media/panorama268.html
“I am a patriot (currently serving in the IDF), I wanted to give everything for Israel but this state is somehow insane. Life here isn’t normal.”
(Rotem Pappe, a young Israeli woman, holder of a German passport)
Between 2000 and 3,500 Israelis of German descent apply for a German passport every year, says Tel Aviv attorney Dan Assan. Almost 50% of Israelis (with German grandparents) are now German passport holders. They may feel threatened by Hamas, Hisbollah, Ahmadinejad (the invented new "Hitler") but the real threat comes from within (a state founded on grave injustice and organized terror cannot provide safety ...)
The promise of the Jewish (read: Zionist) state to provide a better, safer life for Jews has failed:
60 yrs after its founding Israel is the most dangerous place on earth for Jews (because it has been set up to be perpetually at war and a Zionist state (being inherently racist) can by definition not be a democratic state...)
The behaviour of the Jewish state has provoked a worldwide outpouring of rational condemnation (for grave violations of human and political rights) and a resurgence of Judaeophobia (but no legal sanctions against the state!)
Zionists denounce all criticism of Israel as “anti-semitic” (springing from the twisted heart of the “goyim” not from the criminal and cruel actions of a colonial settler-state)
Despite the enormous aid given to it by its American protector and others, Israel remains a society in grave economic and social crisis, with rampant unemployment, pockets of outright hunger, and many signs of social disintegration (it now has the greatest gap between rich and poor in the industrialized world.
Non-religious “settlers” in the West Bank are enticed with heavy subsidies...most of them could not afford a house on their own within Israel’s accepted borders.
About 800,000 Israelis are now living abroad and the number is rising... preferred destination: Germany ....
If liberal science and humanism are the keys to sustainability, why is so much of the world still ruled by conservative superstition and bestiality?
Even the Ziotrolls won't touch this one. It's THAT bad.
Continued:
The only way for such a "just" solution to be applied would be by militarily obliging Israel to comply with international law. Something their US sponsors will never do and will not allow done.
It is obvious therefore that the USA is complicit by and in non-productive stalling tactics while colonization proceeds and will never compromise their "special relations" with Israel. Together Israel and the US will continue to be complicit in this 60 year and on going crime.
As in the Spanish Civil War, the only way to defeat these new fascists is for the citizens of the world to demand an end to injustice to support the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people directly. The implications are clear. Peaceful means have failed. We are all Palestinians
I don't think military force needs to be used, since an embargo was sufficient to break the back of South Africa's Apartheid regime, to name an example of a similar case. Israel isn't as self-sufficient as SA was, so it's more vulnerable to an embargo and one could work quite fast.
Cutting Israel off from international trade and money transfers would already go a long way to forcing it to abandon racism, occupation and apartheid in favor of a peace deal along the lines of the Saudi plan.
We can contribute by choosing to buy products not made by companies that have extensive connections in Israel. Intel for example has a large chip factory as well as r&d functions in Israel, whereas AMD doesn't.
I wish you were right and that there was a peaceful way to resolve this 60 years of injustice.
The Arab League Boycott, has run since before the Zionist state was founded and in recent years a wider “Boycott Israel” campaign
has been promoted.
They have not made significantly or sufficiently deep cuts into the Israeli economy to change any policies. Israel continues to be supported heavily from overseas.
Without organized global sanctions voted and enforced by the UNSC, which would be undoubtedly rejected well before they could be vetoed by the US, I fear spontaneous global socially economic embargoes will only be a limited irritant, far less significant than the vast aid and subsidies granted from the US to the Zionist rogue state.
Never the less every action is necessary and helps, and we all need to do what we can with the resources we have.
Two terrorist states America dominated by the MIC and Zionist war criminal entity of Israel do a dance and pretend to compromise with each other about the degree of their crimes against the Palestinian people. They move, they stop, and when it suits them they turn to their designated corrupt Palestinian puppet Abbas, and get their gains rubber stamped, calling it an agreement. They then renege even on their own agreements and start another dance, while the people of Palestine die. This they call a peace process.
It is not a secession of illegal construction that is needed but a complete withdrawal of all settlements behind ‘67 lines and full compensation for the illegal occupation, siege, imprisonments, killings, injuries, damages and all the other suffering brought to the Palestinians involved.
America's unconditional support for these never ending war crimes brought down the Twin Towers and bankrupt our treasury. What is Isreal going to give the American people now, cancer?
Squatters' Outposts?
While the acts referred to in this article are tragic and illegal, the title is biased towards normalizing international crimes, especially article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
>>Art. 47. Protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present Convention by any change introduced, as the result of the occupation of a territory, into the institutions or government of the said territory, nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power, nor by any annexation by the latter of the whole or part of the occupied territory.>>
The title should be:
"Israel Approves 50 New Illegal Colonizing Homes in Palestine"
Craig Brown, can you title these articles they way you want?