Another Israeli Housing Plan Fuels Controversy

MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank —  On a vast expanse of open land in the rocky hills west of this booming Israeli settlement, the next explosive housing controversy may be taking shape.

To Benny Kashriel, the mayor of Maale Adumim, the plans for a new neighborhood on the city’s outskirts will allow it to attract thousands of residents and Jerusalem-area visitors with hotels, shops and new homes.

“It’s a question of business,” Kashriel said of the proposal for 1,500 apartments and 3,000 hotel rooms. “It’s not ideological at all.”

But to Palestinians, Israeli liberals and Western diplomats, the 3,000-acre site, strategically located between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, is a significant new danger to Middle East peacemaking, already derailed by Palestinian anger over Israel’s decision in March to build a Jewish neighborhood inside traditionally Arab East Jerusalem. That construction, on a disputed hilltop called Har Homa in Hebrew and Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic, set off Palestinian riots and a suicide bombing that killed three Israelis at a Tel Aviv cafe.

The project for Maale Adumim--the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlement--appears poised to become the next scene of confrontation in a rapidly intensifying struggle over the West Bank lands Israel captured in 1967.

Israel characterized the Har Homa decision as a step toward alleviating a severe housing shortage in Jerusalem. Palestinians decried it as part of an Israeli plan to surround East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods, choking it off from the West Bank and keeping it from ever becoming the capital of an independent Palestinian state.

The Maale Adumim proposal is at least as controversial--partly because of a new U.S. government study that questions the need for more housing in the area.

The proposal, which supporters and opponents alike say is headed for government approval, comes amid a forceful new push by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank, fulfilling campaign promises to cement Israel’s hold over the occupied territory. The Israeli activist group Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity, says Netanyahu’s administration is approving new construction at a rate nearly twice as fast as that of previous governments.

This week, Netanyahu dug in further, rejecting the U.S. survey and vowing to provide settlers with additional construction and funding.

The survey, disclosed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and confirmed by U.S. officials, found that 26% of the homes in West Bank settlements and 56% of those in the Gaza Strip are empty.

Netanyahu immediately denounced the statistics as “false by an order of magnitude, to put it mildly.” The prime minister said he had no exact figures for the number of empty homes in West Bank settlements but said it is far less than 25% of all dwellings there.

“This is a groundless assertion,” Netanyahu declared this week. “I can assure you that this is not the situation.”

On Wednesday, leaders of the 145,000 settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip said there are almost no vacancies in settlements near Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and far fewer than reported even in other communities. But they said they could give no overall percentages.

Peace Now also described the American figures as inflated. The group, which views settlements as an obstacle to peace, uses Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics figures showing the overall vacancy rate for the West Bank and Gaza Strip at about 12%. However, those numbers, the most recent available from the government, are from 1995.

There is little doubt that the settlement issue is back on center stage. U.S. diplomats, who monitor settlement growth with site visits and, reportedly, with satellite photography, say Netanyahu’s insistence on expansion is complicating U.S. efforts to forge a compromise between Israel and the Palestinians.

Settler leaders said the leak of the survey, in the midst of the crisis in the peace talks, appeared aimed at pressuring Netanyahu to freeze construction in the lands they call Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the West Bank.

“It’s the first time I feel a psychological war against us by the United States,” said Pinhas Wallerstein, who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. “I don’t want to say this is a lie, but it’s a huge mistake.”

There are more than 140 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Many residents live in the communities for religious or ideological reasons, but others say their reasons are economic: Housing there tends to be cheaper than in Israel’s larger cities.

Palestinians view settlements as an attempt by Israel to establish “facts on the ground” that will preempt the final peace arrangement between the two sides. The Maale Adumim project would all but sever the link between Palestinian communities of the northern West Bank and Abu Dis, a village near Jerusalem often mentioned by Palestinian moderates as a possible compromise capital fo2 their hoped-for state.

“With this, Israel can close off any hope we have about Jerusalem,” said Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinians’ chief map maker. “Here, they can destroy the future of Palestine.”

Netanyahu says the interim accords that his predecessors signed with the Palestinians do not explicitly prohibit Israel from building in settlements.

Since Netanyahu took office in June, his government has given final approval to construction of about 2,400 apartments in four communities, Peace Now Director Mossi Raz said. Plans for 2,900 more units are awaiting authorization.

Several thousand more apartments are in earlier stages of regional and municipal approval, according to several sources.

In addition, Netanyahu’s government, unlike the previous, Labor administration, has embraced settlement growth in every part of the West Bank and not just in communities near Jerusalem or the 1967 Green Line.

Even more significant, Raz said, is a nearly palpable shift recently in the attitude of the Israeli public, which has become gradually more accepting of settlement growth.

Fifteen years after the first residents moved in, most Israelis no longer consider Maale Adumim a settlement, viewing it instead as a bedroom community for Jerusalem.

That reputation is likely to increase the chances of approval for the new neighborhood, Raz said. “It makes it very problematic to object because many people don’t think it’s a problem.”