Berlin criticizes Israeli settlement policy

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has called on the Israeli government to freeze its settlement program and support a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

In an interview on Deutschlandfunk national radio Westerwelle said,

Germany is convinced that the settlement program must be frozen. This is not just Germany’s stance, but of the European Union and the entire international community.
We want a two-state solution. A two-state solution is the only solution that can truly bring peace.

EU foreign ministers universally condemned Israeli policies at a meeting on Monday in Brussels, but remained at odds on how to put more pressure on the country. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, and the bloc has so far declined to impose trade sanctions.

But Carolin Goerzig, an analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris, told Deutsche Welle that if the EU wants to increase its leverage on Israel in order to stop the building of further settlements, the bloc should engage greater discussion with Hamas.

So far the little pressure that has been exerted on Israel has not proven fruitful really, and at the same time going to the other extreme could also backfire. So what could really pressure Israel is a moderation of Hamas, because then Israel would have to show face and react.

The issue of Israeli settlements is in some ways testing the EU’s – and Germany’s – international role. But Goerzig says the EU’s presence in the quartet was not as strong as it could have been.

The EU has been shy about asserting itself in the quartet, which could be related to its lack of coherence, There is a need for debate on this issue in the EU, and I think Germany could drive such a debate.

In the meanwhile, in the other side of the world, during a speech to America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby on Monday night, Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ridiculed opposition to Israeli construction in east Jerusalem even though it has been a central plank of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy since last year, and in a meeting with American president Barack Obama, Netanyahu said the suggestion that Jews were “foreign colonialists in their own homeland” was one of the “great lies” of our times.

The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.

The United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had warned the same audience that new construction undermined mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians and “exposes daylight between Israel and the US that others in the region hope to exploit”.

The path to the meeting was not smoothed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, who called the United States president Barack Obama as an anti-Semite on Israeli radio last week; nor by reports that the Prime Minister himself has referred to David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, both senior White House staff, as “self-hating Jews”.

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai made a fool of Joe Biden, the US vice president and a proven friend of Israel who ensured the Jewish state of the United States’ “absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security.” In response, Yishai ensured the approval of 1,600 new apartments in parts of East Jerusalem claimed by the Arabs.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then apologized for the unfortunate timing of the announcement and claimed he had not known anything about the 1,600 apartments.

The prime minister ? Unaware of the city’s single largest current construction project ?

The settlements in East Jerusalem did not just start growing last week. They have been growing, as Netanyahu boasted, for the past 42 years and they make fools of anyone who wants to help the Jews and Arabs find peace with each other.

Twenty years ago, the United States Secretary of State James Baker was in the same position that Hillary Clinton and her frustrated Middle East negotiator, George John Mitchell, find themselves in now. He handed the Israelis the White House switchboard number and told them:

Call when you are serious about peace.