White House: Israeli housing plans dismaying - TO HELL WITH STINKING ISRAEL
Johnny Asia
By STEVEN R. HURST, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON � The White House rebuked Israel with heavy criticism
Tuesday after the Jerusalem city government moved toward the
construction of 900 additional housing units in a Jewish neighborhood
in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim for the capital of their
future state.
President Barack Obama has made restarting peace talks between Israel
and the Palestinians a top foreign policy goal. To that end, he has
demanded that Israel cease building new or expanding existing Jewish
settlements in the West Bank.
Israel insists that East Jerusalem will never be surrendered to Arab
rule and that the entirety of the city will remain the capital of the
Jewish state. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordanian control in
the 1967 Mideast War and annexed it.
The city is considered holy by the three monotheistic religions �
Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered restraint on
settlement building in the West Bank, where Palestinians want to
create an independent state, but has refused to budge from Israel's
long-standing insistence that the status of Jerusalem is not open for
negotiation.
In criticizing the Israeli housing plan, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs
said:
"We are dismayed," and he criticized the Israelis as making "it more
difficult for our efforts (toward peacemaking) to succeed."
Netanyahu's office quickly fired back that the Jerusalem neighborhood
in question, Gilo, "is an integral part of Jerusalem. ... Building in
Gilo has continued unabated for decades, and there is nothing new in
the current planning and construction."
The Palestinians said the Israeli housing plan was a rejection of
Obama's efforts.
"This is a message to President Obama that Israel does not care about
the American position," Nabil Abu Rdeneh, spokesman for Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas, told The Associated Press. "There should be
real American pressure on the Israelis to stop all these acts. Such
acts prove that Israel does not want peace and does not want to revive
the peace process, and it really puts the interests of the United
States at stake."
The White House reacted rapidly to developments in Jerusalem, with
Gibbs statement issued as he was traveling with Obama in China.
It made clear that the administration did not accept Netanyahu's
argument that the expansion of housing in East Jerusalem was
irrelevant to attempts to resume Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
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