Right seizes on Trump plan
Critics say document sanctions apartheid
JERUSALEM: Israel’s hawkish defence minister has called for Israel to establish sovereignty over nearly a third of the occupied West Bank, acting on US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a Middle East peace plan that Palestinians branded apartheid.
The remarks by Naftali Bennett, a coalition partner in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government, led Palestinians to say Mr Trump’s plan had given the green light for Israel to formally annex its Jewish settlements in the West Bank occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East War.
Mr Trump’s plan envisages a twostate solution with Israel and a future Palestinian state living alongside each other, but with strict conditions that Palestinians have baulked at.
He proposed a four-year schedule for the creation of a Palestinian state, with Palestinians first having to agree to halt attacks by the Islamist militant Hamas movement, which controls the enclave of Gaza.
The plan also gave US recognition of Israel’s West Bank settlements — deemed illegal under international law — Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, and a redrawn, demilitarised Palestinian state that would meet Israel’s security requirements.
Jerusalem would be the undivided capital of Israel, it said.
With Mr Netanyahu still outside Israel after attending the plan’s presentation in Washington, Mr Bennett outlined his hardline interpretation of what the White House had offered Israel.
“Last night history knocked on the door of our home and gave us a one-time opportunity to apply Israeli law on all settlements in Samaria, Judea, the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea,” Mr Bennett said, using the Hebrew names for areas in the West Bank occupied by Israel.
He had ordered a team to be set up to apply Israeli law and sovereignty on all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
It was unclear whether the present caretaker government had a legal mandate to carry out such a move after two inconclusive elections in 2019. Mr Bennett is vying with Mr Netanyahu for support from right-wing voters in an election set for March 2.
Mr Netanyahu on Wednesday reiterated his support for Mr Trump’s plan, telling Fox television: “We will not contradict in any way the outline that the president put forward.”
But Amir Peretz, head of Israel’s leftist Labour Party, said no unilateral plan could work. “Now more than ever it’s clear that we need a diplomatic compass,” he said.
Israel’s military issued a statement saying that based on an assessment of the situation, it was reinforcing divisions for the West Bank and Gaza with additional combat troops.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Mr Trump’s plan the “slap of the century” after it was announced.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Wednesday Mr Trump’s team had simply “copied and pasted” the blueprint that Mr Netanyahu and Israeli settler leaders wanted to see implemented.
“It’s about annexation, it’s about apartheid,” he said in Ramallah in the West Bank. “Moving to the de jure annexation of settlements is something that was given the green light yesterday.”
Palestinians also dismissed the proposal for a capital in Abu Dis in the West Bank, east of the Old City.