Just days before US President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office, the Israeli government approved the construction of 800 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank — a move critics have deemed as an effort to take advantage of the final days of the pro-settlement Trump administration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced that it would be advancing plans for some 800 settlement units, which are currently in various stages of planning and development, AP reported.
While it remains unclear when construction on the new units will begin, Haaretz pointed out that Israel’s Supreme Planning Council is expected to advance construction of the units at its next meeting.
The new units are expected to be built in the settlements of Tal Menashe (Jenin district), Karnei Shomron (Qalqilya district), Beit El (Ramallah district), Oranit (Qalqilya district), Givat Ze’ev (Jerusalem district) and Itamar (Nablus district), while another 250 units in the settlement of Nofei Nechama (Nablus district) are expected to be retroactively legalized, according to reports.
“We are happy to announce today that 800 new apartments have been built in Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu tweeted, referring to the biblical name of the West Bank. “We are here to stay. We continue to build the Land of Israel!,” the PM said.
The move is largely being regarded as an attempt to secure as much settlement expansion as possible before Trump leaves office.
“It is an attempt to race against time and benefit from the last days of the current U.S. administration,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Reuters.
Settlement construction has boomed during the Trump era, with the administration going so far as to say that it did not consider settlements to be illegal — a fact widely agreed upon for decades by the international community and previous US administrations.
Settlement watchdog Peace Now has said that 2020 saw the highest level of settlement construction plan approvals per year in the past two decades, with over 11,000 new settlement units being approved this year alone.
The group estimates that under Trump’s influence and power, the number of plans promoted in the settlements increased 2.5 times during 2017-2020, compared to the previous four years.
While Monday’s announcement was celebrated by the Israeli right-wing, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the approvals an “irresponsible step” that would spark a “battle” with the new U.S. administration under Biden, who has previously voiced his disapproval of the settlements as a hindrance to peace in the region.
“The Biden administration has not yet taken office and the government is already leading us into an unnecessary confrontation,” Lapid tweeted.
People are speculating about what the new Biden-Israel relationship will look like. Well, look at the past – Peter Beinart’s book “The Crisis of Zionism”, written in 2012, has an entire chapter on how Netanyahu stuck his finger in the eye of the Obama-Biden administration by building more settlements. Page 140:
“The same day, Vice President Biden arrived in Jerusalem on a visit that was supposed to herald a new spirit of goodwill between the Obama and Netanyahu governments. While he was there, the Israeli interior minister announced that it was almost doubling the size of the Jewish East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo.”
Nathan Thrall · The Separate Regimes Delusion · LRB 8 January 2021
“The Separate Regimes Delusion, Nathan Thrall on Israel’s Apartheid”
London Review of Books, January 7, 2021
Perhaps Netanyahu challenges the new Biden administration. Will it spent political capital to oppose settlement expansion, or will it not?