PNI Condemns Israeli Plans to Expand Illegal West Bank Settlement

24 November 2005

Israel further demonstrated its lack of commitment to any peace process today with the announcement that it plans to construct a further 350 housing units in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

Housing Minister Isaac Herzog justified this decision with the logic that construction would take place within existing settlement boundaries, and that, by an Israeli consensus, Ma’ale Adumim is one of the settlement blocs that should be kept by Israel under any final status agreement.

He added that the move had been coordinated with the new Labour Party Chairman Amir Peretz, casting doubts over the sincerity of Peretz’s commitment to “ending the occupation” should he win upcoming elections in March next year.

The US-brokered Road Map, which Israel signed in June 2003, categorically states that the Israeli government must immediately freeze all settlement activity, including the natural growth of settlements, and that it must dismantle all settlement outposts erected since March 2001.

With some 29,000 inhabitants, Ma’ale Adumim is the largest of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, built illegally on land occupied following the 1967 war.  Its strategic location on the outskirts of Jerusalem represents a long-term plan by Israel to gradually drive out any Palestinian presence from the city through the construction and continued expansion of a ring of illegal settlements encircling East Jerusalem.  This is part of a wider and ongoing effort by successive Israeli governments to transform the demographic and geographic realities of Jerusalem in order to pre-empt any attempts by the Palestinians to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the entire city in the future. 

This process has taken various forms, including: 

• The physical isolation of Jerusalem from the West Bank through the construction of the "Jerusalem Envelope", Israel's Separation Wall around the city;

• Choking the construction of Palestinians neighbourhoods through the denial of building permits, the destruction of Palestinian property and the confiscation of Palestinian land;

• Arbitrarily revoking the residency and social benefits of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem; and

• The deliberate underdevelopment of municipal services in East Jerusalem through discriminatory budget allocations between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian parts of the city.

Such expressions of unilateralism have long been typical of Israel’s attitude towards “peace” with Palestine, and are well illustrative of the imbalance of power that has characterized this conflict since its very beginnings.  In a context whereby Israel is able to act in such flagrant and open violation of international law and peace agreements that it itself has signed, and where it is so consistently and successfully able to place the onus for change on the Palestinians, prospects for the resolution of this conflict in the near future are all but bright.