Now is the time to step up the fight
against a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Construction and Housing Minister
Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi) said on Wednesday night at a meeting of the settler
leadership in Jerusalem.
Transportation Minister Israel Katz
(Likud) said he believed Palestinians should be autonomous in the West Bank and
should affiliate with Jordan.
“I am opposed to a Palestinian
state,” Katz said at the start of an executive meeting of the Council of Jewish
Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
“It is unacceptable, mainly because
of our rights to this land,’ Katz said. “In my eyes, the right diplomatic
solution is an autonomous Palestinian entity, but with Jordanian civilian and
political affiliation.”
Katz added that Gaza should be
severed from Israel and connected to Egypt.
Ariel said, “We need to state
clearly that there won’t be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.”
He noted that even as the settler
leadership met, others were working to rekindle talks for a two-state solution
in the West Bank. The time to start the battle against those talks and its
outcome is now, he said.
“These kinds of things need to be
killed when they are small. Otherwise, it becomes harder and more complicated,
with less chance of success,” he said.
“Now is the time to act. The
responsibility falls first and foremost upon us,” he said.
“We do not ring the alarm bells
enough. This time we will not turn the other check,” he said.
“We will fight [politically] for the
Land of Israel with all our strength,” he said, explaining that it was
important to work within the political parties that make up the coalition.
Both he and Katz said they opposed
any form of a construction freeze over the pre- 1967 lines.
“This illness in which Jews freeze
Jews is a very serious disease that can return in many forms,” he said. “A
freeze cannot be within the Jewish nation’s lexicon, certainly not in the Land
of Israel.”
It has been close to a year since
new homes have been marketed in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Ariel said.
“I won’t lend a hand in any way to a
freeze in Judea and Samaria and in east Jerusalem,” he said.
“According to my political
assessment, there is not a majority for it in the Knesset,” Ariel added.
He repeated a statement he made
earlier in the day at the Knesset Finance Committee debate on his ministry’s
budget, in which he blamed the country’s housing shortage in part on Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to authorize permits for homes in West
Bank settlements and east Jerusalem.
“We have the ability to market
10,000 housing units in [east] Jerusalem and the settlement blocks in Judea and
Samaria,” Ariel told the Knesset Finance Committee during a meeting on the
housing budget for 2013-2014.
This includes plans for homes in the
settlements of Beit Aryeh, Ofarim and Elkana, Ariel said.
Jerusalem is one of the areas in the
country with an acute housing shortage, Ariel said. As a result, he said,
prices have risen by 41 percent between 2008 and 2012, compared to a 27% hike
in the rest of the country for that same period.
High purchase prices translate into
high rental fees, he said.
Ariel’s comments come in the midst
of a de facto freeze since January on the
publication of housing tenders in east Jerusalem and West Bank
settlements, as part of Netanyahu’s efforts to help create a supportive climate
for US Secretary of State John Kerry’s
efforts to rekindle the frozen peace talks with the Palestinians.
On Wednesday afternoon Avi Ro’eh,
who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza
Strip, wrote a letter to Netanyahu urging him to lift the de facto freeze and
begin marketing homes.
Meretz party leader MK Zehava Gal-On
accused Ariel of manipulating the country’s housing crisis to push for more
housing over the pre-1967 lines.
Opposition leader Shelly Yacimovich
(Labor) called Ariel the only honest member of the coalition.
“Ariel took the mask off the face of
the Netanyahu-Lapid- Bennett government,” she stated.
“Lapid promised cheaper housing but
enacts cruel budget cuts and raises taxes on middle- class homeowners without
creating even one mechanism for stopping housing prices from skyrocketing. Then
he covers everything with empty slogans.”
At the same time, Yacimovich said,
Ariel revealed the government’s total unwillingness to try to bring a peace
treaty, in trying to create a mass influx of young couples into settlements by
having inexpensive housing only there.
Ariel’s housing plans will be “the
death blow to our chances for a peace treaty.”
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