West Bank Jewish settlers protest in Jerusalem against construction limitations

Settlers protest in Jerusalem against freeze

JERUSALEM — About 10,000 Jewish settlers and backers staged a protest in downtown Jerusalem on Wednesday night in what they said would be the largest show of resistance to the government’s freeze on new housing construction in the West Bank.

The protesters gathered outside the residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The relatively large turnout on a rainy night reflected support for increasingly fierce settler resistance to the government building ban.

Settlers held signs and banners that read, “We will continue to build” and “Stop Iran’s nukes, not our homes.”

Settler leader Dani Dayan called the freeze unreasonable. “Not one Jewish home can be built now,” he said. “We are not an obstacle to peace. We make peace more possible.”

An area was set aside for those who preferred a separation between men and women for religious reasons. Most of the demonstrators were Orthodox Jews, many of them teenagers.

Netanyahu announced the 10-month halt in most new West Bank construction late last month in an attempt to restart peace talks, which broke down a year ago. The restrictions infuriated Jewish settlers and their backers in Netanyahu’s hard-line coalition. Government inspectors have been harassed while trying to enforce the ban.

The settlers have been struggling to regain their strength since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, uprooting all 8,000 Israelis who were living there.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself a settler, said the Jerusalem protest was legitimate.

“If someone came to you and froze construction on your house while you were building it, you would also object,” he told Israel Radio. “I just hope the struggle and the resistance remain within the framework of a legitimate political protest that is acceptable in a democratic state.”

While Netanyahu has painted his order as an unprecedented concession, the Palestinians have dismissed it as insincere and insufficient, since it does not include east Jerusalem or 3,000 homes already under construction in the West Bank. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem as parts of a future independent state. They say they will not resume talks until all settlement construction ceases.

Speaking after a meeting of top ministers and security chiefs on Wednesday, Netanyahu said the Palestinians seem to have adopted a strategy of “rejecting negotiations with Israel.”

“This is a mistake. There can be no genuine solution without direct negotiations with Israel, in the framework of which we will reach agreements and arrangements between the sides,” he said.

The Israeli settlement watchdog group Peace Now also cast new doubts on the building freeze, saying that building in the West Bank continues to take place at a greater pace than elsewhere in Israel.

“Beyond the political dispute going on around the settlements, the argument of the settlers that they are discriminated against is simply not true,” said Peace Now leader Yariv Oppenheimer.

Some 300,000 settlers live in the West Bank, in addition to 180,000 Jewish Israelis living in east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed soon after. Netanyahu opposes any withdrawal from east Jerusalem, which Israel considers part of its eternal undivided capital.

Also Wednesday, Israel’s parliament gave preliminary approval to a bill that would require a referendum to endorse a peace deal relinquishing Israeli control of land in east Jerusalem or the Golan Heights.

The measure was approved by parliament 68 to 22, but it needs to pass two more parliamentary votes to become law.

Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, and Syria demands return of the Golan Heights, also captured in 1967.