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U.S., Israel square off over settlement expansion
Wed May 27, 2009 8:54am EDT
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By Ari Rabinovitch and Eli Berlzon
EFRAT, West Bank (Reuters) - On a hillside neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, workers construct a foundation that will expand a building toward a nearby playground.
Such construction, which Israel terms "natural growth" to meet the needs of growing Jewish settler families, threatens to cloud relations with its main ally, the United States, whose president, Barack Obama, is to address the Muslim world in a speech in Egypt on June 4.
"I think that most Israelis are in favor of people living in these areas," said Efrat settler Tom Shmeltzer. "Historically this is Israel. It's a unifying factor, not a divisive factor."
In reality, however, support in Israel for settlers in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians want to build part of a state that would include the Gaza Strip, fluctuates depending on what is meant by "these areas."
About half a million Jews live in settlements and smaller outposts built in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
A 2003 U.S.-sponsored "road map" that was supposed to set Israel and the Palestinians on a course toward peace calls for a halt to Israeli "settlement activity," including natural growth.
At odds with Israel over the issue, Obama said after White House talks on May 18 with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that "settlements have to be stopped for us to move forward" toward peace.
Netanyahu has said natural growth will continue, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who will meet Obama this week, has ruled out restarting long-stalled peace talks until Israel halts all settlement activity.
The Palestinians say settlements, which the World Court has deemed illegal, could deny them a viable and contiguous state in the territories Israel captured in a 1967 war.
Half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements Israel has built since the 1967 Middle East war and occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, territory in which close to 3 million Palestinians live.
SETTLEMENT BLOCS
Efrat is part of Gush Etzion, one of the larger Jewish settlement blocs, and one Israel hopes to keep in any peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Support for major settlement blocs, which account for most of the settler population, is high among Israelis, experts say, but it wanes dramatically for the scores of smaller settlements and "outposts" that dot the hilly West Bank landscape.
Such outposts, often a group of caravans inhabited typically by a few dozen people who many Israelis see as part of a fringe minority, were built without government authorization.
The distinction in Israel between the settlement blocs and the smaller outposts is one of mainstream pragmatism versus religious and nationalist ideology that stakes a biblical claim to the West Bank. Continued...
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