Israel further demonstrated its lack of commitment to any peace process today with the announcement that it plans to construct a further 350 housing units in the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
Housing Minister Isaac Herzog justified this decision with the logic that construction would take place within existing settlement boundaries, and that, by an Israeli consensus, Ma’ale Adumim is one of the settlement blocs that should be kept by Israel under any final status agreement.
He added that the move had been coordinated with the new Labour Party Chairman Amir Peretz, casting doubts over the sincerity of Peretz’s commitment to “ending the occupation” should he win upcoming elections in March next year.
The US-brokered Road Map, which Israel signed in June 2003, categorically states that the Israeli government must immediately freeze all settlement activity, including the natural growth of settlements, and that it must dismantle all settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
With some 29,000 inhabitants, Ma’ale Adumim is the largest of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, built illegally on land occupied following the 1967 war. Its strategic location on the outskirts of Jerusalem represents a long-term plan by Israel to gradually drive out any Palestinian presence from the city through the construction and continued expansion of a ring of illegal settlements encircling East Jerusalem. This is part of a wider and ongoing effort by successive Israeli governments to transform the demographic and geographic realities of Jerusalem in order to pre-empt any attempts by the Palestinians to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the entire city in the future.
This process has taken various forms, including:
- The physical isolation of Jerusalem from the West Bank through the construction of the