Foreign Office Summons Israel's Ambassador

Apartheid Risk Looms On Settlements

Updated: 1:22pm UK, Monday 03 December 2012

By Sam Kiley, Middle East Correspondent

Avenues of palm trees. Air conditioned shopping malls. European coffee shops humming with chatter in Russian, French, English - and Hebrew. This could be California.

It isn't. It's the vanguard of Israel's permanent occupation of parts of the West Bank.

Maale Adumim, a Jewish settlement which cascades down the hillsides of the Judean Desert towards the Dead Sea, is illegal under international law.

That detail has not stopped Israel from building homes for some 500,000 Jews in settlements on Palestinian land captured in 1967.

The accelerating pace of settlement construction grew into an international controversy over the weekend following revelations that Israel planned to build a new town in an area known as E1.

The area, currently a forest park on the eastern edge of Jerusalem behind the Mount of Olives, would seal the Holy City off from the rest of the Palestinian areas of the West Bank.

Joined with Maale Adumim, it would also cut the West Bank in half.

In the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the construction of a settlement at E1 would be "fatal" to peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

A quick look at any of the maps produced by Israeli campaigners against the settlements reveals just how far Israel is already planning to go with this scheme to chop the West Bank in two.

The planned extent of the separation wall that cuts through the West Bank and was built to protect Israel from terror attacks, would fence a vast tract of land far bigger than E1 or Maale Adumim into Israeli-held territory.

But a wall can be pulled down. A settlement is a fact on the ground.

One as big as Maale Adumim or E1 is for all practical purposes beyond negotiation.

Once built, it is Israel - and no future government of the Jewish state is likely to say otherwise.

Israel had promised its ally the United States that it would not go ahead with E1 plans.

Washington took this undertaking at face value, and then received a slap to the face when Israel announced that it was considering opening the settlement area up again, along with 3,000 other Jewish homes in Arab East Jerusalem.

The US had been one of only nine countries to vote against a UN motion to admit Palestine to the body with non-member observe state status last week.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, and William Hague, her British equivalent, have both condemned the Israeli plans for E1.

On Monday Daniel Taub, the Israeli ambassador to London, was summoned by Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office Minister, for a warning.

Among the sanctions being considered if Israel does not drop its E1 plans are withdrawing the British ambassador to Israel -  at least for a short time - and asking the European Union to reconsider trade agreements with Israel which give it access to European markets.

The international view is simple.

The chances of a two-state solution to the long-running conflict, which means an independent Palestine, are fast dwindling because Israel is chewing up so much Palestinian land so quickly that a viable state cannot be established.

Israel rejects this and demands that the Palestinians return to peace talks without conditions, which so far include the demand that Israel stops building settlements.

This impasse means that, in the view of many Europeans, Israel must freeze settlement building or face international censure.

The drift of opinion, even among staunch allies of Israel such as the UK, is not in Israel's favour.

Not least because no-one quite knows what looms on the horizon.

If there is no two-state solution, does this mean that there can be a single-state solution? In a Jewish state, what place would there be for the Palestinians?

Few, outside the Israeli left, will say the word but the implication is there: a single state could usher in an apartheid state.

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