EDITOR: So what kind of animal is Israel?
You often hear the claim, when anti-BDS people speak against the boycott on Israel, that Israel is not like South Africa. Yes, this is true. In some areas, it is much worse. Below in Haaretz editorial, you can read about a parallel drawn with the Southern US before the Civil Rights victories. and yes, Israel is not like that, either, but worse, in this instance – there is a wide acceptance of the Ultra-Orthodox supremacy – after all, is Israel not a “Jewish democracy”? And who decides what is really Jewish? Obviously, not the atheists…
So Israel is an animal which you cannot find in the political zoo – it is like South Africa and not like it, it reminds us of the 1950s in the Southern US, but it is definitely different, it does many things like Iran, and it is also not Iran! So what is it?
Well, Israel is a unique society, indeed. It is a colonising nation, but with only the colon, and without an imperial, colonial base country; Israel uses apartheid, but bases it not on colour or race, but on nationality and culture; Israel is a Jewish theocracy, denying most rights to non-Jews, yet calls itself a Jewish democracy – an oxymoron, if there ever was one. Israelis are in a quandary – they have never decided, neither would they like to do so now – if they are Jews living in the Middle East in their own tribal theocracy, or Israelis pretending to be modern and democratic. They have also made this most difficult by both considering themselves a “Jewish democracy” and continuing with an aggressive and oppressive military occupation, controlling four million non Jewish Palestinians outside their state, and almost two millions inside. You can either have a ‘Jewish democracy’ or what should really be called a Judaic Republic, but not with six millions of non-Jews under your heel.
And they will not decide, of course, because decision means action, means clarity, means either getting out of the territories altogether, or annexing them and having a state of its citizens – both options not on the table for Zionism, or for its many supporters in the west.
So, as long as they decide not to decide, as long as they do not set the Palestinians free – they themselves shall not be free, men, women or children. Only the deluded will continue to refuse seeing the clarity of this equation, and to force the Middle East into further turmoil for probably long decades of suffering for all concerned.
This complex nettle is not grasped even by the most enlightened critics within Israel. Akiva Eldar – one of the most knowledgeable liberal thinkers and commentators with Zionist Israel, is as blind to this contradiction as some of his enemies on the political right… You cannot actually have a Jewish democracy which is not racist, and 7 decades should be long enough to prove this.
This is a debate which will run and run, but until the basic facts are admitted and faced, there shall be no respite from that quarter of Jewish liberalism. Maybe what is necessary is non-Jewish, Israeli liberalism, which seems have gone into the bunkers years ago.
Netanyahu must work to defeat religious bullying: Haaretz Editorial
Netanyahu did well to denounce those who accosted Rosenblit, but it does not suffice: The PM, his cabinet ministers and the entire public sector must mobilize to defeat extremist religious bullying.
Despite all the differences, it’s hard not to connect Tanya Rosenblit, the courageous passenger who, on a bus ride between Ashdod and Jerusalem refused to sit in the back, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks. In December 1955, the latter boarded a bus in Montgomery Alabama and, defying the racist segregation policy in effect at the time, refused to yield her seat to a white person. She was arrested, tried and convicted of disturbing public order. The incident led to the bus boycott led by the Reverend Martin Luther King; thereafter, the law mandating racist segregation was challenged in the courts. Toward the end of 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling, holding that Alabama’s segregation law for buses was unconstitutional.
Like Parks, it appears that Rosenblit simply wanted to “go home peacefully” – in this case to her workplace in Jerusalem, though she was turned into a heroine against her will. Her obstinate refusal to acquiesce to the violence of some of the Haredi men around her, and her decision not to compromise after a policeman arrived on the scene and tried to mediate between her and her assailants – this was proof that it is possible to stand up to fanatical elements who are trying to forcibly impose their discriminatory norms on the public, and that one must not be deterred by such elements.
Rosenblit thus drew the lines for a civil struggle. From this point, the struggle should be waged hour by hour, day after day, on all bus lines where the Egged company has yielded to pressure and allowed separation between men and women. This is a struggle of supreme importance that should not be relinquished; by the some token, it is totally wrong to allow women to be excluded from other public venues, or to allow their voices to be stifled.
Discrimination against women, and efforts to push them into traditional roles, constitutes just the tip of the iceberg in a process by which Israel is being transformed into a backward, fanatic and unenlightened country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did well Sunday to denounce those who accosted Rosenblit. But this denunciation does not suffice: The prime minister, his cabinet ministers and the entire public sector must mobilize to defeat extremist religious bullying. If they do not, they will be lending support to a dangerously anti-democratic trend.
Israel can be Jewish without being racist: Haaretz
What’s easier for a secular person to hate than an ultra-Orthodox Jew who sets fire to an Israeli flag on the holiday of Lag Ba’omer? The answer is a religious West Bank Jewish settler who torches a mosque on any old day.
By Akiva Eldar
What’s easier for a secular person to hate than an ultra-Orthodox Jew who sets fire to an Israeli flag on the holiday of Lag Ba’omer? The answer is a religious West Bank Jewish settler who torches a mosque on any old day.
The shared revulsion of those thugs who have acquired the nickname “hilltop youth” and whose hate crimes have euphemistically come to be called “price tag” attacks assuages the consciences of those who consider themselves secular liberals.
Like this summer’s wave of protests for social justice, the recent attacks on Israel Defense Force soldiers have created a national consensus, bringing together cheeseburger eaters and skullcap wearers. All of us are for equality, tolerance and love of humanity. All of us are against the band of rabbis who called for Jews not to rent to Arabs in Safed. All of us are against the fundamentalist rabbis from the settlement of Yitzhar whose students throw stones at army officers.
True, the young Jewish terrorists can usually be seen in the traditional side curls and tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by religious Jewish males. And in the initial years after the Six-Day War, it was in fact the religious Gush Emunim movement that spread the settlement plague, but there is no wall separating the religious from the secular. Jewish ethnocentrism – and the desire to erase the collective identity of the Palestinians and take control of their land – have been a thread linking religious and secular over the past 44 years.
The late settlement movement leader Hanan Porat resettled the Gush Etzion bloc after the Six-Day War with the blessing of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of the Labor Alignment. Yigal Alon, the deputy prime minister and a kibbutznik, visited Rabbi Moshe Levinger in his settlement outpost in Hebron. The orders issued by Labor’s Shimon Peres, who was defense minister at time, to arrest Gush Emunim activists on their way to the illegal Sebastia settlement “were either given half-heartedly or were negligently carried out,” as the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wrote. And Ariel Sharon, who was the settlers’ king of kings (until he withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 ) was a known fan of shellfish, hardly an item to be found in a kosher kitchen.
The most racist legislative proposals have been the product of Knesset members such as Avigdor Lieberman, Avi Dichter, Danny Danon, Yariv Levin, Faina Kirshenbaum and Anastassia Michaeli, none of whom have religious motives. In their holy writ – that is, opinion poll results – it is said that most of the Jewish population supports limiting the right to vote, allowing only those who swear allegiance to the Jewish state to have a say in who gets elected to run the country.
According to a 2010 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, most of the Jewish population also believes that Jews should be allocated more resources than Israeli Arabs. And the most important and sensitive resources are in fact being allocated, both from a legal and a practical perspective, by the Israel Lands Administration and the Jewish National Fund. It is these mainstream institutions, not the ultra-Orthodox Council of Torah Sages or the Yesha Council of settlements, that are implementing the worldview reflected in the poll. What is the difference between preventing rentals to non-Jews and banning the sale of land to the goyim?
In a courageous article in the most recent issue of the Shalom Hartman Institute journal Dorsheni, Prof. Ishay Rosen-Zvi writes that although arrogance and discrimination vis-a-vis non-Jews may be deeply rooted in the concept of chosen peoplehood, it is the state, guided by the national interest, that decides what the extent of Jewish nationhood is and what special rights derive from it.
“It was not religious people who coined the phrase ‘demographic problem’; it was not they who legislated the Law of Return [giving Jews abroad the right to immigrate to Israel]; it was not they who founded the Jewish National Fund; not they who declared the policy to make the Negev and Galilee more Jewish,” he writes.
Rosen-Zvi notes that the decision to expel the children of migrant workers was made by a government with a clear secular majority that provided a secular reason: the desire to maintain Israel’s Jewish majority. In the name of democracy, discriminatory ethnic laws of return are the equivalent here of naturalization laws in democratic Western countries. The laws here also grant special rights to relatives of Jews who are not themselves Jewish according to religious law.
At the end of a meeting held last week with rabbis and settlement leaders, President Shimon Peres said: “There is one thing that unites us all: not abandoning this country to a group of people who constitute a major danger to the existence of the state.”
Mr. President, it is not a marginalized “group of people” that constitutes the major danger to the existence of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, rather than a racist and Jewish one. The seeds of lawlessness were sowed by good secular people like you.
Israeli leaders are to blame for the religious segregation they decry: Haaretz
The sudden public outcry over gender segregation on ultra-Orthodox buses is misplaced: such practices have been going on for years. There are other new phenomena that should worry us more.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent the opening minutes of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday decrying ultra-Orthodox efforts to segregate women and men on public buses, after one female passenger refused to sit in the back of the bus on a trip from Ashdod to Jerusalem.
“I heard about an incident in which a woman was moved on a bus,” Netanyahu told his cabinet ministers. “I adamantly oppose this. Fringe groups must not be allowed to tear apart our common denominator. We must preserve public space as open and safe for all citizens of Israel.”
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni made a personal call to the woman, Tanya Rosenblit, and praised her for her “bravery” and “determination.”
“Her determination symbolizes the need for all of us who fear for Israel’s image to fight and not give in,” Livni said. “Tanya has shown personal bravery.”
Along with those politicians eyeing elections on the horizon, half of the state is currently outraged over what is actually a longstanding phenomenon, in place officially for more than 10 years, and in practice even longer. No new developments have occurred since the matter was approved by the Supreme Court in January of this year.
Nothing new has occurred and nothing has changed, except that the Israeli media, dealing with the issue at the highest possible decibel, is playing into the hands of Netanyahu, Livni and all the rest of the politicians, who morning and night issue declarations of condemnation and consternation over the phenomenon of “excluding women from public space”.
As of yet, nobody has asked them the underlying question, of how the phenomenon of segregation on buses emerged over the last decade with the approval of a long line of transportation ministers, many of whom are still prominent in the leaderships of the Likud, Kadima, and Yisrael Beiteinu: Ariel Sharon, Tzachi Hanegbi, Avigdor Lieberman, Meir Sheetrit, Shaul Mofaz and Yisrael Katz.
The bus on which Rosenblit was traveling that day, No. 451, is registered under the High Court of Justice as a ‘mehadrin line’, otherwise known as ‘strictly kosher’. This designation was given to more than 50 bus lines, serving both inter and inner city, for a “trial period” which has lasted for over two years already.
The court, which issued an order against adding any more bus lines during this “trial period”, has also refused to define them according to the popular-media term ‘mehadrin’. In actuality, the court has refused to define these bus lines at all.
It has dealt only with legitimizing the procedure under which passengers can board a bus through the back door, though it’s obvious that the only passengers boarding through the back are ‘she’s and not ‘he’s. That is, women passengers in the back, men in the front. For all intents and purposes, it is the court that made bus segregation kosher.
The High Court ruling in January made it possible for both the ultra-Orthodox ‘defenders of modesty’ and their opponents to declare victory: the opponents celebrated the explicit prohibition against forced segregation, but the ultra-Orthodox ‘defenders’ understood that these mehadrin lines are free to roam the streets of the country.
It is worthy to note that the demand to institutionalize gender segregation on these buses came originally from passengers on the overcrowded buses of Jerusalem and the “Eida Haharedit”, a sect of fanatical zealots who represent a mere minority in the ultra-Orthodox sector but set the tone for many a public issue.
Not a single ‘mehadrin line’ has been opened in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak. Furthermore, none of the public figures who identity as ultra-Orthodox – such as MK Moshe Gafni or Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman – have never uttered a word, neither good nor bad, about these mehadrin lines. This is not their battle, nor is it the central battle of the ultra-Orthodox sector. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz is much more to blame for the mehadrin line than Gafni.
It’s hard to know whether the current public debate will have any real impact on the relationship between the ultra-Orthodox minority and the non ultra-Orthodox majority, but it is clear that the outside noise is reverberating inside the home of the leader of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Jews, the ‘sage of this generation’, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.
Among those in the house of the ‘sage of this generation’, there now rages an intense and fascinating argument over what should be its true position regarding the mehadrin lines.
Although Rav Elyashiv is signatory to the ‘kol koreh’ document compiled a few years ago in favor of bus segregation, many of his closest associates are coming out to the media these days to clarify just how much they oppose forced segregation.
It is unprecedented for the spokesmen of such a rigid leader – who has never allowed communal opinion or public consideration to sway him from an unpopular stance – to come out one by one after the public media frenzy burst into the secular sphere.
It was also interesting to hear Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who sees himself as directly subordinate to Rav Elyashiv, declare on the ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Berama that “if we want there to be segregation, it would be most legitimate for us to create a special bus company for these specific lines, so that we can be their ‘landlords’. But as long as they pay as we do, and it is a public company that serves not only the ultra-Orthodox sector, what can we do?”
The incident in which Tanya Rosenblit found herself clashing with her fellow passengers on the bus to Jerusalem was unusual, but not unprecedented. It was not even the most serious incident to have occurred on board the mehadrin lines since they first began roaming a decade ago, as the High Court itself has clarified.
This particular incident has just emerged at a perfect time, when every event somewhat related – whether it is in fact or not – to the headline “Exclusion of Women from Public Spaces” is a potential bomb.
The age-old daily phenomena, such as segregation in public swimming pools, have suddenly been sensationalized into front page news, without opponents stopping to consider that there is no actual exclusion of women at these pools, that the hours are just divided for women and men accordingly; without stopping to consider that there is nothing new here under the sun.
What is new are the phenomena occurring on a much smaller level, those with high media profile, concerning the modesty revolution spiraling among the traditional religious circles, particularly among those who have become more religiously fervent than their parents.
One such phenomenon, which has angered the general population and with good reason, are the incidents involving the Israel Defense Forces soldiers – most of them graduates of nationalist Orthodox yeshivas – who refuse to be present at public ceremonies where women are singing.
This group of soldiers has received the backing of prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of Yeshivat Elon Moreh, who believes that the army has ceased to be a Jewish army.
Another such phenomenon is that of the shawl-draped ‘taliban’ women on the fringes of the ultra-Orthodox society, who have stirred a stormy debate of late within the Haredi sector.
In both of these phenomena, the controversy began first as internal debate before emerging into the public sector. Suddenly, every separate swimming hour held at the university pools looks like the ayatollah regime has descended.
EDITOR: Who is this Nazi?
Interesting stuff, isn’t it? Another Tory Nazi sympathiser bites the dust. What the Tory Friends of Israel seem to have forgotten, or denied, is the many fascist friens both Israel and the Conservative party have (in common) throughout Europe; it seems you cannot be a proper Nazi or fascist these days without immediately project undying love to Israel. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
And lower down, you can read one of these Nazis on a visit to the promised land; not so stupid, this Nazi – he has noticed that Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman is even more extreme than himself…
Tory MP who attended Nazi-themed stag party loses ministerial aide post: Guardian
Aidan Burley’s behaviour was offensive and foolish, says party, as Labour accuses PM of dithering over rising star
A Conservative MP, who had been destined for rapid promotion by David Cameron, has been sacked as a ministerial aide amid reports that he was involved in the preparations for a Nazi-themed stag party in France.
Aidan Burley, 32, was sacked as parliamentary private secretary to the transport secretary, Justine Greening, after the Mail on Sunday reported he had hired a replica SS uniform worn by the groom.
Burley, who was highly regarded by the prime minister, ran into trouble last weekend when the Mail on Sunday reported he attended a stag party for an Oxford contemporary at the French alpine ski resort of Val Thorens. Groom Mark Fournier, 34, was pictured in an SS uniform making a Nazi salute.
Downing Street initially declined to take any action against Burley, who captured Cannock Chase from Labour at the last election, after he wrote a lengthy letter of apology to the Jewish Chronicle.
Aides tried to arrange for him to join a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
But the Tory leadership moved against Burley after the newspaper reported on Sunday that he was responsible for hiring the Nazi uniform. This could leave Burley open to charges in France where it is a criminal offence to wear a Nazi uniform except in specified circumstances.
A Tory spokesman said: “Aidan Burley has behaved in a manner which is offensive and foolish.
“That is why he is being removed from his post as parliamentary private secretary at the Department for Transport. In light of information received, the prime minister has asked for a fuller investigation into the matter to be set up and to report to him.”
John Woodcock, the shadow transport minister who chairs Labour Friends of Israel, said: “It speaks volumes about David Cameron’s judgment that he dithered for a week before taking action against his MP. People will rightly conclude he was more concerned with avoiding another round of bad stories than the gross offence caused by this repugnant behaviour.
“Now Aidan Burley must confirm whether it is true that he actually hired the SS uniform worn by his friend. Evidence that he was actually at the centre of events would be at odds with his apology claiming he failed to walk away from the party when he realised what was happening, and would leave him with extremely serious questions to answer.”
Burley was being groomed for promotion by Downing Street. He graduated in 2001 from Oxford University where he was president of the all-male King Charles drinking club at St John’s College.
The MP will now face a tough fight to re-establish himself among the fiercely competitive 2010 intake after his sacking. He was present when one of the guests at the stag party was filmed saying: “Let’s raise a toast to Tom for organising the stag do, and if we’re perfectly honest, to the ideology and thought process of the Third Reich.”
French National Front heads to Israel to stump for support ahead of election: Haaretz
Louis Aliot, partner of rightist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, is in Israel to persuade those eligible to vote in the French presidential election to give their vote this spring.
By Yair Ettinger
The National Front has its roots in French fascism and it has always had a racist and anti-Semitic image, but one of its representatives is in Israel to recruit supporters.
Louis Aliot, the partner of National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, is in the country trying to persuade those eligible to vote in the French presidential election to give her their vote in this spring’s balloting and to boost her image en route to the Elysee Palace.
“For us this visit is a precedent,” Aliot told Haaretz. “This is the first time a National Front leader has visited Israel. It’s true that relations were tense for a time, but it’s time to warm up the atmosphere.”
Aliot is on a 48-hour trip and on Monday visited the Western Wall.
The visit was first reported on the website JSS News.
On Monday, he also met with “a few elected officials and political figures who prefer not to be named.” When pressed, he confirmed that none of the elected officials were Knesset members. On Tuesday he plans to visit churches in Bethlehem.
The high point of Monday’s activities was his meeting in a Jerusalem hotel with 40 French Jews he said had invited him in order to hear Le Pen’s platform. Marine Le Pen is the daughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a far-right nationalist and former presidential candidate who periodically made xenophobic, anti-Semitic statements.
“They invited me so they could hear our worldview and Marine Le Pen’s platform, particularly in the face of the Arab Spring,” Aliot said. The group comprised “Frenchmen who live in Israel, many of them of Algerian origin.”
What did he think of them?, we asked. “What was interesting was that it’s not important what position you have on Israeli politics, you will always have strong ties to the land. We share that position,” he said. “Just as the Jews are defending their right to Israel, we in France are fighting to defend our identity and our land.
“We don’t always see eye-to-eye on Israel’s foreign policy but we have the same position on the dangers posed by radical Islam, which exists in Europe and also threatens Israel, which we call ‘the western island,'” Aliot said.
Does he think that Jews are antagonistic toward the senior Le Pen and his ideas? “Marine is a different person,” Aliot replied. “She belongs to a generation that never knew war, any war. Her perspective is different from that of people who went through wars.
“Today there is a global problem of immigrants, and here there is a specific problem of the rise of religion, what we call Islamization. Here there are deep differences of opinion. Alain Juppe, France’s foreign minister, argues that there is a moderate Islam, while others argue that there is no such thing as moderate Islam.
“The Frenchmen we met in Israel all strongly believe that Marine is not the monster they might have thought. They share our stance with regard to immigrants in France,” he said.
“By contrast, we have a very balanced position on the peace process, while the French people we met in Jerusalem are far more nationalistic. Sometimes they say things that we can’t say in France.
“But I must say that we don’t live here, we don’t have the same pressure, we don’t face the same dangers. It’s natural that they should say things that are more defensive. We are strangers here,” Aliot said.
EDITOR: Terrible news for Israel
Well, well… Israel is running out of enemies fast, and will have to work twice as hard to stay where it is, with enemies all around it. With Hamas abandoning armed struggle, Israel will be looking for candidate organisations to fill that vacant post. Send application forms in triplicate to Avigdor Lieberman, please.
Hamas moves away from violence in deal with Palestinian Authority: Guardian
Islamic party that has controlled Gaza for five years is to shift emphasis away from armed struggle to non-violent resistance
Hamas has confirmed that it will shift tactics away from violent attacks on Israel as part of a rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority.
A spokesman for the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, told the Guardian that the Islamic party, which has controlled Gaza for the past five years, was shifting its emphasis from armed struggle to non-violent resistance.
“Violence is no longer the primary option but if Israel pushes us, we reserve the right to defend ourselves with force,” said the spokesman, Taher al-Nounu. On this understanding, he said, all Palestinian factions operating in the Gaza Strip have agreed to halt the firing of rockets and mortars into Israel.
The announcement on Sunday does not qualify as a full repudiation of violence, but marks a step away from violent extremism by the Hamas leadership towards the more progressive Islamism espoused by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
The approach was concluded at recent talks between Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in Cairo. Senior delegations representing the two factions met again in the Egyptian capital on Sunday to forge ahead with efforts to form a reconciled Palestinian government.
Iran recently cut its financial support to Hamas in a punitive response to moves within the Palestinian faction to relocate its exiled leadership, including Meshaal, from its base in Syria. Many among the Hamas rank and file have criticised their former ally, President Bashar Assad’s violent assault on Syrian civilians.
Hamas believes the events of the Arab spring, in which uprisings have thrown off the old autocratic order and ushered in democratic, moderate Islamic governments in Tunisia and Egypt, have changed the landscape of the Middle East and is repositioning itself accordingly away from the Syria-Iran axis that has sustained it for decades, closer to the orbit of regional lslamist powers like Turkey and Qatar.
“European countries in particular see that the Muslim Brotherhood is a special kind of Islamic movement that is not radical. It could be the same with Hamas,” said Nouno.
In a further concession to international legitimacy, the Hamas leadership confirmed on Sunday that it could entertain discussions regarding a peace agreement with Israel if the Quartet of peacebroking powers agree to modify its preconditions. Hamas will accept the foundation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders but stands firm in its refusal to acknowledge the state of Israel.
This softened tone on the international stage is not yet evident in Haniya’s domestic rhetoric. Speaking at a rally in Kateeba Square, Gaza City, to mark the 24th anniversary of the foundation of the movement last week, the prime minister vowed to continue the “resistance”.
“The resistance and the armed struggle are the way and the strategic choice for liberating Palestinian land from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea,” he said.
The next step towards reconciliation will be made on Tuesday when representatives from all Palestinian factions meet in Cairo. Despite the process, officials within both Hamas and Fatah are sceptical that the effort will be successful. Hamas cites Abbas’ insistence that Salam Fayyad continue as prime minister in a reconciled government as an obstacle to unity.
Germany: Israel plan for new West Bank homes ‘devastating’ to peace: Haaretz
Comment by top aide to Chancellor Merkel comes after Housing Ministry publishes tenders for 1,028 homes to be built in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
Israel must refrain from constructing new settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a top aide of German Chancellor Angela Merkal said on Monday, following Israel’s announcement of over 1,000 new housing units beyond the Green Line.
Merkel spokesperson Georg Streiter said that Israel’s recent announcement that it would seek contractors to build apartments in both areas conveys “a devastating message with regard to the current efforts to resume peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.”
He said Germany “urgently calls on the Israeli government to refrain from inviting bids for the apartments.”
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks have been frozen for three years, in part because of continued Israeli settlement construction in the territories captured by Israel in 1967 and still claimed by the Palestinians.
On Sunday, the Housing Ministry published tenders for 1,028 homes to be built in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, part of a plan to build 6,000 housing units throughout Israel.
According to a statement by the ministry, 500 homes will be built in Har Homa in south Jerusalem, on land occupied during the 1967 Six Day War; 348 in the West Bank settlement of Betar Illit; and 180 in Givat Ze’ev, which lies between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
This apparently marks another step taken by the Israeli government to punish the Palestinians for their successful effort to join UNESCO in October.
The ministry estimates that construction will start at most of the sites within a year.
Previous decisions by Israel to construct homes on land captured during the Six Day War have aroused anger among Palestinians, and been heavily criticized by the international community.
In September, 1,100 new housing units were approved in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, prompting condemnation from around the world, including the United States and European Union.