Trump in apparent U-turn on Israeli settlement growth

USA president Donald Trump on Friday said that he believes Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank are not “good for pace”. And this summer will mark three years since Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, when Israel dropped an estimated 20,000 tons of explosives, killing at least 2,200 Palestinians, including 500 children. “I want to see peace happen”. The outpost’s buildings were either removed whole or demolished. Several human rights NGOs have already signaled their intent to petition the High Court to strike down the law.

Nearly two months since the UN Security Council decried Israel’s settlement policy in a strong-worded resolution, Benjamin Netanyahu decided not to send ambassadors back to its co-sponsors, New Zealand and Senegal, the Times of Israel reports. Not much, if anything at all. I’m not someone who believes that advancing the settlements is good for peace.

The Israeli Knesset passed the law on February 6.

In the brief excerpt of the interview with Israeli daily Yisrael Hayom, published on Friday, Trump walked a fine line between refusing to condemn Israel, while putting forward his belief about what was helpful and not helpful to the peace process. “And even if it does build beyond those borders, never mind”.

Netanyahu has used social media to praise Trump as well.

Although it is reasonable to assume that the British government backed the “theft bill”, there has been no overt mention of it from Downing Street. He sought to enlist British support for such efforts in a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May earlier this week.

The apparent U-turn followed an equally dramatic reversal in Trump’s position on China, after a phone call with President Xi Jinping in which Trump said he would not challenge Beijing by upending longstanding U.S. policy towards Taiwan.

So Netanyau is willing to compromise the future of both Israelis and Palestinians in order to satisfy a small group of extreme settlers for the sake of his own political survival.

This week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s ambassadors would not return to Dakar and Wellington, after they were recalled following the December 2016 passage of the resolution, according to the Times of Israel. Israel controls Jerusalem – a state of affairs the Arab world regards as illegitimate. Gaza, which shares borders with Israel and Egypt, is ruled by the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas.

“They had been pressuring Netanyahu to make use of this historic opportunity of the [sympathetic] Trump presidency, and now they were hearing, in his words from a friendly newspaper, that there was limited land and increasing settlements are bad for reaching peace”, Schulman said.