Sunday October 24th 2021
Bennett against two-state solution
Israel is building new settlements in the West Bank
Anyone who thought that Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank would change with Netanyahu’s departure will now be taught better. 1300 new settler apartments are approved.
The Israeli government has announced the construction of more than 1,300 new settler homes in the West Bank. The housing ministry announced that “tenders for 1355 residential units” had been published. They are to be built in seven existing settlements. The Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, and there are often conflicts between settlers and Palestinian residents. Should there ever be a Palestinian state of its own, it should be in this area.
About 2.8 million Palestinians and 475,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank. The authorities had already approved the approval of 2,000 residential units in settlements in the West Bank in August. The Israel Defense Ministry was expected to give its final approval this week.
It was the first such decision by the new Israeli government under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Bennett has been the Israeli head of government since June and leads a broad coalition alliance to which both far left and far right parties belong. The 49-year-old prime minister is considered a fierce opponent of a two-state solution in the Middle East conflict. His Jamina party has many supporters among Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Despite Bennett’s personal positions, his government, unlike his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, is trying to bring about rapprochement with the Palestinian leadership in the conflict. Only recently, for the first time since 2009, the Israeli authorities issued registration permits to Palestinians without documents in the West Bank.
It was only on Friday that the Israeli government classified six influential Palestinian non-governmental organizations as “terrorist organizations”. The quasi-ban on the organizations sparked sharp criticism from the Palestinian Authority and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. The Israeli Defense Ministry accuses the six organizations of covert cooperation with the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).