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Rice appears ready to tell Olmert off
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| By Israel Insider staff January 8, 2008 |
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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the US rejects the building of homes in Jerusalem "beyond the Green Line" that once separated Jerusalem, specifically citing the neighborhood of Har Homa as objectionable. Israel has authorized building there although PM Ehud Olmert has recently waffled on his willingness to go forward with the home construction projects.
Rice went further than US officials have ever gone before in defining the American position on the issue, but stopped short of rejecting any building over the Green Line. Still, her remarks created the potential for a direct clash over the issue when Rice and US President George W. Bush visit Israel this week and try to move the peace process forward. Bush, in interviews with the Post and Yediot Aharonot, has tried to play the "good copy" referring to his April 2004 letter to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he agreed, in a non-binding fashion, to take into account realities on the ground as a factor in the future borders between Israel and a possible Palestinian state.
Israel which annexed "east Jerusalem" after the 1967 war and distinguished the capital's Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line with communities located beyond the city's municipal borders. Therefore, it does not consider building there to be covered by its undertaking to freeze settlement building, as demanded by the Quartet "road map".
Rice, however, said that the US considers that parts of east Jerusalem to be "settlements" in which Israel must stop building as part of its commitment to implement the first phase of the road map. She said "the United States doesn't make a distinction" between settlement activity in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and that the road map obligations are on "settlement activity generally." She cited Har Homa as one such "forbidden" neighborhood.
"Har Homa is a settlement the United States has opposed from the very beginning," she said, but would not be drawn in to say whether other Jerusalem neighborhoods over the Green Line, such as Gilo and Ramot, were also settlements in the eyes of the United States. "The important point here is that we need to have an agreement so that we can stop having this discussion about what belongs to Israel and what doesn't," she said, evasively.
The US has long maintained an ambiguity concerned construction in these neighborhoods, which is opposed by the Palestinians and many European countries but until now has not described Jerusalem neighborhoods as "settlements."
Bush told Reuters last week that he considered settlements an "impediment" to peace, but the Olmert government has long assumed that the US would allow Israel to retain built-up neighborhoods in the capital. That assumption has now been called into question.
While Olmert has affirmed that "the State of Israel will not build new settlements and will not confiscate land for this purpose," he has also indicated that construction would proceed in Har Homa and has spoken of Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, including the West Bank suburb of Ma'aleh Adumim, as integral parts of the city.
"Ma'aleh Adumim is an indivisible part of Jerusalem and the State of Israel. I don't think when people are talking about settlements they are talking about Ma'aleh Adumim."
As a result, the United States and Israel are now on a collision course that may or may not find expression in the current visit but will not be going away anytime soon.
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