Alarm over settlements pledge

PALESTINIANS voiced alarm while Israelis weighed the gravity yesterday of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sudden election promise to annex Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Some Israeli commentators saw the right-wing leader’s pledge on Saturday, ahead of tomorrow’s national ballot, as mainly a bid to siphon votes from ultranationalist rivals long advocating annexation.

But after years of resisting far-right calls to formally put West Bank land captured in the 1967 Middle East war under permanent Israeli hold, Netanyahu could be counting on support for a dramatic shift from his close ally US President Donald Trump.

“Who says that we won’t do it? We are on the way and we are discussing it,” Netanyahu, asked why he had not extended Israeli sovereignty to large West Bank settlements, told Israel’s Channel 12 News.

Last month, Trump broke with decades of international consensus by recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory Israel captured from Syria. That followed his December 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the US embassy’s move to the holy city in May last year.

Asked why he wasn’t pressing Trump now to approve a West Bank settlement status change, Netanyahu replied: “Wait until the next term.”

Taking Netanyahu at his word, Palestinians seeking statehood in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem called his settlement annexation remarks a violation of international law regarding occupied territory.

“His declaration is not just in the heat of… electioneering campaigns,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestine Liberation Organisation official. “This is the end of any chances of peace.”

A spokesperson for Hamas, the Islamist

EPA group that runs the Gaza Strip, said: “The response to (Israeli) crimes and foolishness will be met by popular resistance, armed resistance and by all our might.”

But Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the New Right party and author of a plan to annex parts of the West Bank, suggested Netanyahu was simply trawling for votes.

“For the past 10 years, Netanyahu has blocked applying Israeli law to even a centimetre of land,” Bennett tweeted.

In the settlement of Karnei Shomron, spice shop owner Yehezkel Shaul said he believed Netanyahu’s annexation pledge, calling him “the most reliable and honest person”.

At the local high school, Harel Levi, 18, was not so sure. “It’s an election promise and he’ll find some excuse later,” he said.

Settlements, which Israel’s B’Tselem rights group said cover about 10% of the West Bank, are one of the most heated issues in efforts to restart peace talks, frozen since 2014.

After decades of settlement-building, more than 400 000 Israelis now live in the territory, according to Israeli figures. The West Bank is home to 2.9 million Palestinians, the Palestinian Statistics Bureau said.

Trump’s predecessors publicly discouraged the expansion of settlements, arguing that they made it harder to negotiate a viable Palestinian state, viewed by administrations from both US parties as Israel’s likeliest route to peace.

Netanyahu’s annexation promise was met with scepticism by Shaqued Morag, director of Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlements group that closely monitors their expansion.

“The times dictate he makes these extreme declarations that he has no intention to follow through on,” she declared.

| TESTIMONY A MAN looks at the clothes of those who were killed in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, hung at one of the excavation sites in the suburbs of the capital, Kigali, at the weekend. Rwanda yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the genocide when Hutu extremists killed Tutsis and moderate Hutus during a three-month killing spree that resulted in, according to Rwanda, the death of more than one million people. Rwandan President Paul Kagame laid a wreath at the Gisozi genocide memorial site, where over a quarter a million of people are buried, kicking off a week of solemn ceremonies around the country.