Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly has approved planning for at least 1,000 new housing units in Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem.
At least 600 of the apartments will be in Ramat Shlomo and 400 in Har Homa, according to Israeli media reports citing unnamed officials. The approval is only for the planning of the housing units, not the building of them.
Netanyahu also reportedly ordered the advancement of infrastructure projects in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including the paving of roads, which will serve Israelis and Palestinians.
Reports of the approvals, which the Prime Minister’s Office had not officially announced or commented on as of midweek, came a day after Israel’s Channel 2 reported that the government is planning to build 2,000 more housing units in settlement blocs in the West Bank. Those plans, as well as the infrastructure improvements in the West Bank, reportedly are to appease Netanyahu’s coalition partner, the Jewish Home party.
Speaking Oct. 27 at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session, Netanyahu said Israel “has the full right to build the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem,” the Times of Israel reported.
“The French build in Paris, the English build in London, the Israelis build in Jerusalem. Should we tell Jews not to live in Jerusalem because it will stir things up?” he asked.
Finance Minister Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, criticized the reported plan to build new homes in the West Bank. “This plan will lead to a serious crisis in Israel-U.S. relations and will harm Israel’s standing in the world,” he said.
While he doesn’t oppose building in the major settlement blocs, Lapid added, the timing of the proposals will hurt Israel.
The U.S. State Department was “deeply concerned,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki during an Oct. 27 news briefing.
“If Israel wants to live in a peaceful society, they need to take steps that will reduce tensions,” she said. “Moving forward with this sort of action would be incompatible with the pursuit of peace.”
Netanyahu on Oct. 28 rejected the criticism. “I have heard a claim that our construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem makes peace more distant. It is the criticism which is making peace more distant. These words are detached from reality.”
Netanyahu also said, “The violence against us is not an outcome of the building in Jerusalem. Terror comes from our enemies’ desire that we shouldn’t be here at all, in no place and in no part of Jerusalem. Not in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Since the dawn of Zionism, construction has been the natural and crushing answer to those who are harassing our existence and want to uproot us from our land.”
In remarks to the Knesset on Oct. 29, Netanyahu said that recent verbal attacks against him from the United States were merely because he was “defending Israel”and vowed to carry on with his policies despite the vitriolic rhetoric, the Associated Press reported.
He was responding to a report in The Atlantic this week in which unidentified U.S. officials lambasted him for his settlement policies and for undermining American peace efforts. — jta