World Jewish News

To avoid the 'blame game' Israel delays advancing settlement plans

Israel delayed advancing plans for new settler homes as a public relations gesture to focus international public opinion on the Fatah Hamas unity deal as the true stumbling block to peace.
“If we were to declare that we had advanced plans [for new settler homes] now, it would distract attention away from the issue of Hamas,” an Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Last week Israel suspended negotiating with the Palestinians to protest Fatah’s unity with Hamas, a terrorist group which has refused to recognize Israel or renounce violence against it.
It’s important to maintain the focus on the problem of negotiating with a terrorist group and not sideline the situation with news of more building plans that would only make the international community point a finger at Israel, the official said.
The delay was first publicized by Army Radio and the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea and Samaria.
According to its deputy head Yigal Dilmoni Wednesday’s meeting of the Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria was canceled on orders from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.
Typically, he said, the council receives the agenda in advance of the meeting. But when the Agenda failed to arrive by Monday morning, the council became concerned and started making inquiries, he said.
Officials they spoke explained that the timing was bad for such a meeting because Israel didn’t want the frozen talks to be blamed on settlement activity, Dilmoni said.
By now, he said, the council is use to watching diplomacy interfere with what should be a normative planning process for the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
The council had been gearing up to fight a potential freeze on building plans and tenders for new settler homes that would likely have been imposed if the negotiations had been extended, Dilmoni said.
The break-down of the talks last week, should have removed any threat of a freeze, Dilmoni said.
So he was surprised, he said, that now, in the absence of negotiations, Netanyahu was now delaying the advancement of please to appease international opinion.
“There is no reason for this to be happening,” he said.
In Washington State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told The Jerusalem Post at a press briefing that the US considers settlement building to be illegitimate and that it caused “serious problems” during the negotiations.
If activity were to cease that would be a “good step,” she said.
“But I’m not going to overstate the benefit of a delay of a meeting,” Psaki said.
To underscore the extent of the ongoing settlement activity, Peace Now published a report on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, that generated the kind of headlines Israel had hoped to avoid by canceling the meeting of the Higher Planning Council.
The report was published on the day, that marked the end of a formal US led negotiating period that began nine-months earlier in July.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF

JPost.com