JERUSALEM, 5 September 2006 — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said yesterday he had put his plan for an Israeli pullback from parts of the occupied West Bank on hold following a war in which Arab militants rained rockets on the Jewish state.
“I have no doubt that something has changed in the order of priorities I had believed to be correct,” Olmert told Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, according to an official who regularly briefs reporters on its proceedings.
“At this moment, the issue of the realignment is not in the order of priorities as it was two months ago,” Olmert said in his first appearance before the panel since 34 days of fighting with the Lebanese Hezbollah group ended in an Aug. 14 cease-fire.
But he stopped short of declaring dead a plan that was the centerpiece of a manifesto that won him election in March.
Under the proposal, Israel would remove dozens of isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank and bolster major enclaves it wants to keep, thereby setting a permanent border by 2010.
But resurgent violence in Gaza, which Israel evacuated last year, plus the Lebanon war appear to have dampened public support for territorial withdrawals.
Hezbollah’s firing of nearly 4,000 rockets at northern Israel from Lebanon during the recent conflict raised concern among Israelis that a West Bank pullback could leave central cities vulnerable to similar attacks by Palestinian militants.
An Olmert aide said last month the prime minister’s more pressing priority now was leading economic recovery in the north and repairing damage caused by the cross-border strikes.
Rightist opponents of the Gaza pullout have warned that another unilateral withdrawal would only embolden Palestinian militants who frequently launch rockets at southern Israel.
Palestinians are also cool to the West Bank plan, saying it would deny them a viable state.
“We must deal with the Palestinian issue but consider other ways to do so,” Olmert said, repeating a pledge to meet with President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah faction was defeated by the Islamic militant group Hamas in a January general election. Retreat from the West Bank proposal appeared to leave Olmert without a defining political platform save for an oft-repeated promise to attract investment for northern Israel.
But putting West Bank moves on the back burner could open the way for Olmert, head of the centrist Kadima party, to try to form alliances with right-wing factions and bolster a government under fire over its conduct of the Lebanon war.
Senior Cabinet ministers from his main coalition partner, center-left Labor led by Defense Minister Amir Peretz, have threatened to vote down the 2007 state budget over cutbacks aimed at covering Lebanon war costs.
In a step likely to win favor with the Israeli right, a government agency published notices yesterday requesting bids to construct 690 new homes in two West Bank settlements.
The projects, the largest announced in the occupied territory since Olmert took office, fly in the face of an obligation under a US-backed peace “road map” to halt such construction.
Palestinians also have failed to carry out their commitments under the peace plan.
The World Court has branded all Jewish settlements on occupied land as illegal. Israel disputes this. Some 240,000 Jewish settlers and 2.4 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, a territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
