Recently, the European Union adopted harsh new Iran sanctions, strongly supported by Israel. Shortly thereafter, Israel announced new East Jerusalem settlement construction. The EU's top official Catherine Ashton, who was about to visit Israel, condemned the announcement in measured terms; Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, publicly told her, in effect, to shove it. Imagine if in response, Ashton had indefinitely postponed her trip. Imagine that Israeli ambassadors in EU capitals were summoned to the local foreign ministries and read the riot act. Imagine that Israeli press had been alerted, leading to headlines about how Prime Minister Netanyahu and Lieberman were squandering the friendship of the EU and European support on Iran for the sake of settlement expansion.
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APN Resource Page on the Gaza Crisis
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It is tempting to impute retroactive intentionality to yesterday's events. As Gershom Gorenberg felicitously puts it, we mistakenly assume "that if things turned out a certain way, someone planned it that way." Looking back now, it may seem a foregone conclusion that Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank (and in Golan, too) was from the beginning an evil design, intended to encroach on Palestinian rights rather than to solve immediate problems. But the effort to draw a straight line of intentionality from then to now obscures more than it clarifies.
Last month saw an assault in Congress on Palestinian refugees--an effort to use legislation to re-define the Palestinian refugee issue out of existence. This week the other shoe dropped, when a bipartisan group of members of Congress introduced a new bill embracing the cause of "Jewish refugees from Arab countries" in a way that Congress has never replicated on the Palestinian side (for more info, see this list of all bills/resolutions dealing with Palestinian and/or Jewish refugees since 1989).
On July 30th, the Calcalist published a major report [Hebrew] examining the
issue of Israeli government spending on settlements. Among other things, the articles note that
government spending on settlements increased by 38% under the Netanyahu government (from 2010 to 2011). The
articles also note the fact that Israeli government spending on settlements from 1992-2011 totaled NIS 27 billion
(in 2011 terms). To get a sense of the magnitude of this spending, the article notes that in 2010 the Israeli
government allocated a budget of NIS 27.5 bilion over ten years "for the first stage of project to introduce into
[the entire country of] Israel a network of fast highways and railway lines." All articles translated by
Israel News Today (INT).