Skip to main content

29 April comes and goes

You may not recall, but 29 April was the then projected end-date for the conclusion of the so-called Peace Talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.      The informed view was that the talks would fail - as they have!     Of course, for the Israelis it has been convenient to protract the talks.    If one ever wanted evidence of how Israel has moved things along "on the ground" in the West Bank contrary to international law - even during the talks - proof comes to light today.

"Israel approved the construction of nearly 14,000 homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem during nine months of peace talks, the dovish Peace Now NGO said in a report released Tuesday, the day marking the formal expiration of the crisis-stricken Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

In a report published Tuesday morning, the left-wing watchdog Peace Now claimed that during the nine months of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s orchestrated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government approved tenders and plans for at least 13,851 housing units in the settlements and East Jerusalem.

“This is an unprecedented number representing an average of 50 housing units per day or 1,540 per month,” the group said.

Tuesday is the last day of the nine-month period allotted for negotiations that were supposed to propel the two sides towards peace. Instead, the last month has witnessed a collapse in talks.

Jerusalem did not commit to freezing settlement construction during the negotiations when talks were announced nine months ago in July, though it had been a key Palestinian demand.

The Peace Now report also indicated that 73 percent of the plans were for the construction of housing units in “isolated” settlements, far from the Green Line, and that the number of tenders granted in the last year was four times greater than in the past.

Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer said the numbers showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was moving further from peace efforts.

“The figures don’t lie,” he said, according to the Walla news site. “Courtesy of the peace negotiations, Netanyahu broke all building records in the settlements and damaged even further the chance of creating two states.”

 See also "Mideast talks in tatters as peace deadline expires" from The Daily Star.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more