Israel defied its Western allies by expanding the number of officially sanctioned settlements in the West Bank for the first time in 12 years.
Israel defied its Western allies yesterday (Tuesday) by expanding the number of officially sanctioned settlements in the West Bank for the first time in 12 years.
Ignoring pleas from the United States made only the day before, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, took the unprecedented step of retroactively legalising three settler outposts built on occupied Palestinian land.
The announcement represented a significant victory for the radical pro-settler lobby in Netanyahu's Right-wing coalition but was seen by Palestinian officials as a particularly provocative rebuff to their latest conditions for peace talks.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, sent Netanyahu a letter last week reiterating his demand for a freeze of all Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a condition for resuming negotiations. One Palestinian official said the announcement amounted to an "emphatic and deeply offensive rejection of a reasonable demand".
While Netanyahu's government has repeatedly clashed with the West and the Palestinian Authority over his settlement policies, the issue of outposts is considered even more noxious than that of regular settlements.
Although international law considers all Jewish settlements built on land captured by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967 illegal, outposts are illegal even under Israeli law because they were not built with government permission.
Instead most were built by radical settlers, often on privately owned Palestinian land, with the intention of staking Judaism's God-given claim to the Holy Land in its entirety. Under the terms of the Bush-era Road Map, Israel promised to freeze construction in settlements and dismantle dozens of outposts.
Palestinians fear that the decision to legalise the outposts of Sansana, Rehalim and Bruchin will embolden more extremist settlers to begin building wherever they please in the belief that they will eventually win the backing of their government. Others worry that some of the other 100 unsanctioned outposts will be given similar legal protection.
An aide to Netanyahu denied that the prime minister had embarked on a controversial new policy, saying that the three outposts were one-off anomalies because they had received a degree of government approval.
Planning permission, for instance, has been given to build Sansana in Israel, but it was built on Palestinian land instead.
The official also maintained that the decision did not increase the settlement population in the West Bank, although he did not deny that the three outposts were now officially protected in a way they were not before. It means that the number of officially sanctioned settlements in the West Bank increases from 121 to 124.
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