Israel agreed to halt settlement activity in the Occupied Territories. What they "meant', however, is that they would simply re-define the term "settlement" and "annex" the territory they wanted to settle.
Rice's potential "crowning acheivement" could very well be dead before talks begin due to Israel.
Rice warns Israel against East J'lem construction
Housing Minister Ze'ev Boim said Saturday that nothing should prevent Israel from following through on a plan to build 300 housing units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, a plan which U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said could jeopardize peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Secretary of State Rice should be blessed for her efforts in the relaunching of the peace process," Boim said, "but it cannot be that on every occasion this [peace process] will be tied together with the cessation of construction in Jerusalem."
"The Har Homa neighborhood is situated within Jerusalem's municipal borders where Israeli law applies," Boim added. "Therefore, there is nothing preventing the construction there, just as there is nothing preventing construction anywhere else in Israel."
Meanwhile Saturday, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat appealed to the United States to compel Israel to halt the expansion of settlements in the West Bank as dictated by the road map peace plan.
"We loudly ask the U.S. administration to act as the judge and compel Israel to implement its commitments which the Road Map plan specified," Erekat told Voice of Palestine radio.
The first phase of the road map calls on Israel to freeze settlement activities and the natural growth of the settlements.
Erekat pointed out that the tender for the Har Homa construction came about one week after the end of a U.S.-hosted conference in Annapolis, Maryland, which set December 12 as the date for Israel and the PA to start negotiating a lasting solution.
"If Israel went on, this will destroy all the efforts that aim at launching a meaningful peace process leading to ending the Israeli occupation which started in the 1967," Erekat added.
On Friday, Rice warned Israel that the construction plan threatened U.S.-backed efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
"We are in a time when the goal is to build maximum confidence with the parties and this doesn't help to build confidence," she said in rare U.S. criticism of Israel.
"There should not be anything which might prejudge final-status negotiations," Rice said after talks with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on the sidelines of a NATO meeting of foreign ministers.
"It's even more important now that we are on the eve of the beginning of the negotiations. I made that position clear," she told a news conference.
Israel has issued a tender for the construction of some 300 apartments in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa.
The United States fears the move could scupper peace talks launched last week in Annapolis. Peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian teams are due to begin on December 12.
Haaretz reported on Friday that the U.S. has requested that Israel provide clarifications on the building plan.
Palestinian leaders have said the plan undermines the peace process, aimed at reviving talks that had been dormant for seven years.
Under obligations contained in the 2003 U.S.-backed roadmap framework for Middle East peace, Israel must cease settlement activity.
But Israel has said it does not consider the site, known as Abu Ghneim by Palestinians, as part of the West Bank territory the Palestinians want for a state.
The Palestinians demand East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, for their future capital. Israel annexed the area after the war.
2 comments:
And what do you think of Obadiah Shoher's arguments against the peace process ( samsonblinded.org/blog/we-need-a-respite-from-peace.htm )?
Those arguments seem pretty self-serving, and I imagine if the situation was reversed they would be radically different.
The Palestinians are not 'aboriginals'. To say they don't constitute a "nation" means that many countries in the world wouldn't be considered a nation. Israel itself is an amalgamation of people from many countries that nerely share a common religion.
I also think your poster is quite confused on history. The entity that we call Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948, in a process in which the U.S. deliberately deceived the Arab states as to our intention. Promises were made by the Israeli government regarding the Arab citizens, but those promises were not kept.
As for Jews being "attached to the land which the peace process gives to Palestinians", I kind of think that the people who lived there before the United Nations created a country out of someone else's land would feel kind of "attached" to it as well.
I guess if someone on the other side of the world decided that Chechens had suffered enough and 'generously' created a 'homeland' for them in my state, then I would not be to pleased. When the Chechens would come and take away my property because they felt "attached" to it, I guess that would strike me as pretty unfair. When they would decide that I was no welcome on "their land" or that I had no rights because my religion differed from them, I certainly wouldn't be cheering for them.
It's pretty silly for your poster to be advocating crushing your enemies because peace is impossible. It sounds kind of like something Hitler would have said about the Jews. He didn't negotiate peace with the Jews. He decided, much like Obadiah, that "peace is only achieved through crushing defeat of one’s enemy". I guess Obadiah only feels that way when it's * Jews * doing the "crushing". Or else he really admires Hitler and the Holocaust.
As I said, he's speaking the language of an oppressor. If the Palestinians had the upper hand, he would be crying for peace all day long. He is what is known as a hypocrite, and not a particularly * bright one *, either.
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