ISRAEL has been organising with the US behind the Palestinians’ backs, over a ‘land swap’ deal, the Israeli media revealed last Wednesday.
Israel has asked the United States to ok a land swap deal that would give Palestine a section of land in the Triangle area adjacent to the Green Line in exchange for Israel annexing settlement blocks in the West Bank.
The Israeli daily Maariv reported that recent talks between the US and Israel have involved suggestions to cede to a future Palestinian state a section of the Triangle – a cluster of Palestinian towns in Israel’s Central District – in order to include all the massive West Bank settlements within the boundaries of Israel.
The discussions were not an official part of the main talks between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry, the report said.
Israeli officials are reportedly exploring the logistics of the plan, including the question of what would happen to the current Triangle residents’ Israeli citizenship.
The Triangle area is a concentration of Palestinian towns and villages in Israel adjacent to the Green Line. Approximately 300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel live in the area.
Palestinians make up 20 per cent of Israel’s population, and Israel is prepared to unload as many of them as possible into a ‘Palestinian statelet’, in return for making the massive settlement blocs in the West Bank part of Israel.
Peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians were relaunched in July under the auspices of the United States after nearly three years of impasse.
Israel’s government has announced the construction of thousands of housing units in illegal settlements since peace talks began.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
President Mahmud Abbas warned on Tuesday of legal and diplomatic action to stop Israeli settlement expansion.
Earlier that day 26 Palestinian prisoners were freed after languishing for decades in Israeli prisons.
The prisoners were the third batch of 104 detainees that Netanyahu pledged to release in four stages when the peace talks were revived in July.
All were imprisoned before the 1993 Oslo Accord, which launched the Middle East peace process.
The freed prisoners were welcomed back to Ramallah in the West Bank, with others to East Jerusalem and the remainder to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Hamas hailed the prisoner release, but reiterated their rejection of the peace talks and slammed the notion that freeing prisoners justified Israeli settlement expansion.
Gaza’s Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya said: ‘The release of any prisoner is a gain for our people.
‘But we reject negotiating with the occupation Israel and we do not accept that settlements should be expanded in exchange for that.’
Netanyahu, meanwhile, condemned the hero’s welcome given to the released prisoners, who had served 19 to 28 years.
He slandered the freed prisoners as ‘murderers’, whereas Abbas rightly described the prisoners as ‘heroes of the Palestinian cause’.
This is part of an ongoing deal as part of the US-brokered ‘peace talks’, which US Secretary of State John Kerry hopes to reinvigorate during his visit.
But as Kerry geared up for his 10th visit since March, Netanyahu’s government announced plans for further settlement construction.
Abbas warned that the Palestinians would take action to halt any such constructions.
Abbas said: ‘We will not remain patient as the settlement cancer spreads, especially in annexed East Jerusalem, and we will use our right as a UN observer state by taking political, diplomatic and legal action to stop it.
‘These actions show a lack of seriousness on the Israeli side in the negotiations and threaten to destroy the two-state solution.’
Kerry has been piling the pressure on to push for a ‘final peace agreement’ ahead of an agreed late April target date for the talks to conclude.
Any talk of the ‘final peace agreement’ including a Palestinian ‘state’ is nothing of the sort.
Netanyahu has made it absolutely clear that any such ‘state’ would not have an army, nor have any control over its airspace and, in fact, would be a bantustan.
An Israeli ministerial committee last Sunday gave approval to a bill annexing Jordan Valley settlements.
Abbas reiterated total rejection of Israel’s demand to maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley, which forms a third of the occupied West Bank.
He stressed: ‘We have said that the Palestinian people is the one most in need of security, and is the one who needs guarantees of protection against the aggression of the occupation and the settlers.’
Meanwhile in Hebron, residents fear that Israeli settlers will return after being evicted in 2008.
Before they were evicted, the Israeli settlers threw bottles of urine, attacked children and poisoned a horse, the Palestinian residents of Hebron said.
Israeli soldiers evicted the settlers in 2008 when they took over the Rajabi building in Hebron, which is still home to hundreds of radical Israeli settlers.
But the nightmare looks set to resume for Palestinians living near there and near another property called the Abu Rajab house, both of which have been claimed by settlers.
The settlers were forced out of the Abu Rajab house last year, but Netanyahu recently ordered they be allowed back in.
The Israeli Supreme Court is set to rule on the ownership dispute over the Rajabi building, with a verdict in the settlers’ favour likely to bring back both the violence and abuse of local Palestinians.
Both properties are located close to a holy site known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque and to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs in an area called H2, a tightly-controlled Israeli enclave where many key streets are off-limits to Palestinians.
A local Palestinian shoemaker, Bassem al-Jabbari, who lives opposite the property said: ‘We’re already living in a prison.
‘I can’t park my car outside my own shop because the army has closed this road to most Palestinian vehicles.
‘But when the settlers were there it was worse…They would physically attack us, including throwing bottles of urine at us and our children.
‘The settlers also poisoned my horse. They tried to steal it from me by telling the police it was theirs, but when I produced the paperwork showing I owned it, they got angry and came to poison it.’
Referring to the Abu Rajab house, Hatim Abu Rajab, who lives with seven members of his family, said: ‘The top two floors are now empty since they’re controlled by the Israeli state.
‘It’s ruling our area with an iron rod.
‘But they have the weapons and we don’t, so what can we do? And in the meantime, settlers still come by regularly and try to get in, or just come by to insult us.’
The headmistress of the girls’ school next door recalls the abuse her pupils suffered when the settlers were in residence, with settler children hurling both stones and verbal abuse at the schoolgirls.
But Ibtisam al-Jundi has resigned herself to the harsh realities of living in a city under military occupation, where teachers and pupils have to cross multiple checkpoints just to get to school.
‘They’re regularly searched, sometimes more than doubling the time it takes them to get here. What should be a 10-15 minute walk can take 40 minutes.
‘The children are used to it, it’s been happening all their lifetime.’
Settlers in Hebron, who are under the protection of the Israeli army, routinely attack and harass local Palestinians with impunity.
