JERUSALEM – The Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to curb settlement activity will bolster Palestinian hardliners and hinder peace efforts, a senior Israeli cabinet minister has said.
Tensions with Washington flared three weeks ago, and have simmered unresolved since, over the announcement of an Israeli blueprint for 1,600 more homes for Jews in areas of the occupied West Bank that Israel annexed to East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians, who want statehood in the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem, backed out of planned US-mediated peace talks with Israel, demanding that the new project be scrapped.
Benny Begin, a member of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s inner cabinet, described Washington’s scrutiny on Jerusalem as departing from previous US administrations’ view that the city’s status should be resolved in peace negotiations.
“It’s bothersome, and certainly worrying,” Mr Begin told Israel Radio. “This change will definitely bring about the opposite to the declared objective. It will bring about a hardening in the policy of the Arabs and of the Palestinian Authority.” Hoping to salvage negotiations, the US has been seeking unspecified goodwill gestures from Israel toward the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Palestinian officials said yesterday that Israel had announced it would allow a shipment of clothes and shoes to be delivered to the Gaza Strip for the first time in its almost three-year-old blockade. The first 10 truckloads would be arriving via the Israeli-controlled Gaza border on Thursday. – (Reuters)