Israel defies US on settlements
The Israeli prime minister had defied US demands to suspend a settlement construction project in East Jerusalem, sparking what Washington calls "intense" negotiations between the allies.
Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he would not take orders on where Jews can live and reiterated the claim that a united Jerusalem is Israel's capital, which most of the world does not recognise.
"We cannot accept the fact that Jews wouldn't be entitled to live and buy anywhere in Jerusalem," Netanyahu declared, calling Israeli sovereignty over the entire city "indisputable".
Israeli officials said on Sunday that Michael Oren, the country's ambassador to Washington, had been summoned to the US state department and told that a project in the disputed section of the city should be abandoned.
According to the Israeli Army Radio, the US demanded that planning approval for the project, which is being developed by an American millionaire, be revoked.
Netanyahu's response places renewed focus on the strained ties between the allies over the settlements issue.
'Intense negotiations'
Speaking on a visit to India on Sunday, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said Washington was trying to reach an agreement with Israel on settlements.
"The negotiations are intense. They are ongoing," she said.
The old hotel lies in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where settlement building is illegal under international law.
Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, said: "If the Israeli prime minister continues with settlement activities, he will undermine the efforts to revive the peace process."
Most international powers consider Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem to be settlements and an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
Settlements have emerged as a major sticking point in relations between Israel and the administration of Barack Obama, the US president.
'Head-on collision'
Although Netanyahu recently yielded to US pressure to conditionally endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state, he has consistently resisted US demands for a total freeze on settlement expansion.
The US has reportedly demanded approval for the East Jerusalem project be revoked [AFP]
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Akiva Eldar, the chief political columnist for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said the dispute was an example of how settlement building had become a publicly acknowledged obstacle to the peace process.
"I think the high profile that both Israel and the United States, as well as the Arab countries and particularly the Palestinians, have put on the settlements is offering a good potential for a head-on collision," he said.
"According to the official Israeli position, it's not illegal and even the United States, for many years, and even now, is not making a point of the legal issues, they're just saying it's not helpful ... but no country, not even the United States, has recognised [Israel's] annexation of East Jerusalem."
Israel annexed East Jerusalem and declared the whole city its capital after the 1967 Middle East war.
Ziad al-Hammouri, the director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights that provides legal assistance to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, told Al Jazeera "what's happening in Jerusalem today ... is illegal".
"East Jerusalem is a part of the occupied territories which has to be given back and form part of a Palestinian state."
1 opmerking:
Israel’s plan to wipe Arabic names off the map
By Jonathan Cook
21-7-2009
Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land.
Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardized”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.
Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.
Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.
Arab leaders are concerned that Mr. Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.
“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”
Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”
The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.
In announcing the move on Monday, Mr. Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.
“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”
Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr. Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”
“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognize?”
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.
“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”
lees verder Tehran Times
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