Israel OKs More West Bank Housing

The Israeli government has approved a 1,200-unit project in the heart of the West Bank, its third major effort to expand Jewish settlements in the occupied territory within the last month.

The building planned for the community of Emmanuel was announced this week by settlement leaders. It is the first new construction approved by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a settlement well beyond Israel’s pre-1967 border. And it is all but certain to create further obstacles to the troubled Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The project--which will include a country club, school and senior citizens center--was welcomed by Emmanuel officials Tuesday but greeted with dismay by Palestinians and peace activists, who view it as the clearest sign yet that Netanyahu will move forward with his stated intention to increase West Bank settlement.

“If the principle of land for peace is the reference point of the peace process, then what kind of peace can be achieved as settlements continue to encroach on the remaining Palestinian lands?” the East Jerusalem daily Al Quds asked in an editorial Tuesday. “What is left on which to negotiate?”

Mossi Raz, who heads Israel’s Peace Now movement, also condemned the plan as likely to impede any progress toward peace.

An ultra-Orthodox community of 3,000 to 4,000 residents, Emmanuel sits near the Palestinian-controlled city of Nablus, deep inside the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

Under the interim peace agreement between the Palestinians and the previous Israeli government, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority now controls six of the seven major population centers in the West Bank. The seventh, Hebron, remains under Israeli occupation, and Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared no closer than ever Tuesday to reaching an accord on the overdue Israeli pullout from the town.

Although most of the West Bank area is still in Israeli hands, Palestinians hope this Israeli government will one day agree to what was a tacit understanding with the previous administration--that the territory ultimately will form the basis of a Palestinian “entity,” and perhaps an independent state.

But the Netanyahu government in August lifted a four-year freeze on settlement activity. Since then, it has approved the sale of 3,000 already built apartments in West Bank communities and construction of 1,800 new units linking the settlements of Kiryat Sefer, Nachliel and Mattityahu, north of Jerusalem.

The Emmanuel project, approved quietly by Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai, brings the total of housing units in the pipeline to at least 6,000 since Netanyahu took office in June. Shmuel Lanza, Emmanuel’s mayor, said construction on 500 units will begin in January.