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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| After new restrictions, settlers lower hopes for Trump era |
| 2017-04-03 |
| [IsraelTimes] In response to new curbs on West Bank construction, Israeli settlement supporters hoped for the best and expected the worst, tempering their initial euphoria at US President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... ’s election. Pro-settlement leaders who advocate Jewish control of the entire West Bank went as far as to cautiously welcome the government’s announcement Thursday that construction would be largely restricted to developed areas of existing Jewish communities in the West Bank. Others hoped the restrictions did not amount to a freeze on settlement building. "You need to understand that people built up an expectation that there would be a new president, the old era would end, and we’d be able to do whatever we want," Yesha Council foreign envoy Oded Revivi told JTA on Sunday. "All of a sudden, reality doesn’t look like our expectations." Much of the Israeli right anticipated Trump would give Israel a freer hand in the West Bank than had his predecessor, Barack Obama I am the change that you seek... . But since being elected, Trump has backed off his pledge to move the US Embassy in Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and made moves toward the final status agreement he has said he wants to broker between Israel and the Paleostinians. Having welcomed Trump’s election in January by announcing: "The era of a Paleostinian state is over," Education Minister Naftali Bennett expressed cautious optimism Sunday at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. "The arrangement is a fitting one, but the proof will be in the pudding," Bennett said, according to the Walla news website. They were the first comments by Bennett, the head of the fiercely pro-settlement Jewish Home party, since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday announced the new settlement policy in a meeting of the security cabinet. Netanyahu told his top ministers that the policy was a goodwill gesture to Trump, who last month said settlement expansion "may not be helpful" in achieving peace and asked Netanyahu to "hold back on settlements a little bit." "This is a very friendly administration and we need to be considerate of the president’s requests," Netanyahu said, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz. The policy Netanyahu laid out was that settlement construction would be limited to previously developed areas of the West Bank. But where security or topography prevented this, new homes would be built as close as possible to the developed areas. Israel would not allow the creation of any new illegal outposts, he said. Hours earlier, the security cabinet decided to establish the first entirely new settlement in two decades for families evicted last month from Amona, an illegal West Bank outpost. That settlement would not be affected by the policy. Most of the world considers all Israeli construction in the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War illegal. But Israel disputes this and allows government authorized settlements on land not demonstrably owned by Paleostinians. While Israel stopped establishing new settlements in the early 1990s, it has retroactively approved outposts and let existing settlements expand. |
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