Israel Matzav

Prime Minister Netanyahu: No more 'settlement freezes'

Prime Minister Netanyahu has told the Jerusalem Post that he will not impose another 'settlement freeze' in a bid to entice the 'Palestinians' back to the conference table.

“We already gave at the office,” Netanyahu said, referring to the 10- month settlement freeze he initiated in November 2008 that did not succeed in enticing the Palestinians back to talks.

Netanyahu, in a Rosh Hashana interview with the Post – just hours after returning from his five-day trip to the US, where he battled against the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN – said that by coming back to the issue of the settlement freeze, the Palestinians were indicating that they didn’t really want to negotiate.

“It is a pretext they use again and again, but I think a lot of people see it as a ruse to avoid direct negotiations,” he said.

Netanyahu said he had no intention of intervening with the Interior Ministry’s District Planning Committee that is scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the construction of more than 700 housing units in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, located over the Green Line, even though the Quartet – in its statement Friday – called on “the parties to refrain from provocative actions if negotiations are to be effective,” a veiled reference to construction beyond the pre-1967 lines.

“I don’t think there is anything new,” Netanyahu said of the plan.

“We plan in Jerusalem. We build in Jerusalem. Period. The same way Israeli governments have been doing for years – since the end of the 1967 war.

“We build in Jewish neighborhoods, the Arabs build in Arab neighborhoods – that is the way the life of this city goes on and develops for its Jewish and non- Jewish residents alike.”

Netanyahu said Americans “know this; they have followed this a long time. There is really nothing new.”

The full interview will be in the Post on Wednesday.

It will be interesting to see how this issue came up. I suspect that it came up because Netanyahu told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Friday that he was willing to talk about it. Hopefully, one of his advisers told him that was not a great idea, and now he has backtracked from it.

US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro told Army Radio on Tuesday that he also does not believe that a 'settlement freeze' ought to be a precondition to talks.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Dan Shapiro, settlement freeze

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:18 PM