[The settlement projects are so ingrained in Israeli behavior, including deep levels of support from within the government to support new illegal settlement outposts and illegal settlement expansion, that you need to suspend disbelief and add a lot of quotation marks around the words “settlement freeze.” – editor ]
Israel will announce a freeze in West
Bank settlement construction prior to peace talks with the Palestinians
in the US, it was reported today.
But the moratorium would probably
exclude large settlement blocs that Israel wants to retain in a final
peace agreement, the Israeli paper Haaretz said.
The Palestinians
are demanding that all of the West Bank, which Israel captured in the
1967 six-day war, be included in a future state.
The Israeli
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent top officials to Washington yesterday
to work out exactly what the settlement freeze would entail, Haaretz
reported.
Bank settlement construction prior to peace talks with the Palestinians
in the US, it was reported today.
But the moratorium would probably
exclude large settlement blocs that Israel wants to retain in a final
peace agreement, the Israeli paper Haaretz said.
The Palestinians
are demanding that all of the West Bank, which Israel captured in the
1967 six-day war, be included in a future state.
The Israeli
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent top officials to Washington yesterday
to work out exactly what the settlement freeze would entail, Haaretz
reported.
It
said the move follows US pressure on Israel to issue the declaration as
a gesture to the Palestinians, to make up for its refusal to discuss
the core issues of a final peace agreement before the conference, which
is due to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, before the end of the year.
Israel has said it is willing to discuss the core issues, which include the fate of West Bank settlements, after the conference.
The
US wants a demonstration from both sides of their willingness to comply
with the road map – a long-stalled peace plan that calls on Israel to
freeze all settlement activity.
The Palestinians say they have
begun cracking down on militants – a condition of the road map – but
Israel says they must go much further.
The Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said it was not good enough to partially-halt settlement activity.
“Israel
cannot be selective and say we will expand in some places and not in
others,” he said. “Settlement activity must be frozen totally. So no
games.”
Haaretz said Israel would also announce a willingness to dismantle dozens of settlement outposts, as required in the road map.
Settlers
launched a campaign yesterday to prevent the government from hampering
settlement activity, according to Israeli army radio, though it was not
immediately clear how they planned to do this.
Nearly 270,000
Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank. In a report issued
earlier this month, the settlement watchdog group Peace Now found that
construction is ongoing in 88 of the 122 settlements.
A spokeswoman for Olmert would not comment on the Haaretz report.