RAMALLAH, West Bank, 16 January 2008 — Israeli authorities yesterday began the construction of 60 housing units in the Jewish in the Jewish section of East Jerusalem’s Ras Al-Amud neighborhood. The Jerusalem Municipality has approved the project, which sources on the Israeli right have said could impede the creation of a Palestinian corridor between the West Bank to the east and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter.
The activists ascribe great significance to widening Jewish construction in Ras Al-Amud, and to realizing ownership of lots and buildings that it has managed to acquire in recent years in that vicinity.
According to the daily Haaretz, 51 Jewish families already live in the area known as Ma’aleh Zeitim, built on land purchased 15 years ago by the American millionaire Irwin Moskowitz, patron of the Ateret Cohanim (a religious Zionist movement situated in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem involved in buying property from Arabs in the Old City and its environs).
The neighborhood’s initial construction provoked an international storm in September 1997, and the United States pressured Israel not to go ahead with the plan. The pressure was rebuffed by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and backed by Jerusalem’s mayor at the time, Ehud Olmert. The new construction is being carried out by Kedumim 3000, a company headed by contractor Nahman Zoldan, a settler whose son Ido Zoldan was killed about two months ago in an attack by Palestinian militants near the settlement of Kedumim in the northern West Bank.
Meanwhile, the former US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, yesterday said that President George Bush’s tenure has been largely characterized by a “lack of commitment” to the Arab-Israeli peace process, and it seems unlikely that the outgoing president will be able to bring peace to the region before the end of his term. Kurtzer said that “Bush inherited a much more challenging (situation) than (former President Bill) Clinton, yet throughout his seven years, he failed to look for or exploit opportunities that presented themselves — and there were opportunities.”
In another development, Olmert will try today to keep his coalition government intact by hoping to persuade an important right-wing party not to quit over peace talks with the Palestinians.
Olmert is set to meet Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, but his hopes of keeping the 11-seat party in his coalition, which currently numbers 78 members, appear slim. An official at Olmert’s office confirmed the meeting would take place, but did not give a time.
