Settler leaders split on report Netanyahu seeking limited annexation

Two settler leaders are divided on a report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will apply Israeli sovereignty only to three large settlement areas, rather than annexing all Jewish West Bank settlements, with one dismissing the notion and the other saying it is a step in the right direction.

Davidi Ben Zion, deputy mayor of the Samaria Regional Council, calls the idea of partial extension of sovereignty a “disgrace.”

“Once again we are being dragged into a discourse of ‘what are the foreign interests, what will they say in the White House and how will the Jordanians protest,'” he tells Zman Israel, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language sister site.

Extending sovereignty is “entirely an Israeli decision,” he adds, saying the time had come for Israel to take action.

“There is no way to know if there were will be a better and more appropriate time to extend sovereignty,” he says.

“This is the right… measure, on condition that it doesn’t involve the establishment of a terror state in the heart of Israel,” Ben Zion says, referring to a future Palestinian self-ruled area in the West Bank.

However, Gush Etzion Regional Council chairman Shlomo Ne’eman says he would be “happy about this possibility if it comes about.”

Ne’eman says that as far as he is concerned there is no need to apply sovereignty on the whole Etzion Bloc, just a stretch of “300 meters to the Rachel’s Tomb” the religious pilgrimage site located in the nearby Palestinian West Bank town of Bethlehem.

Extending Israeli rule to replace the current military rule on settlements in the West Bank “breaks the embargo against sovereignty, and that is what is important,” he says.

Nonetheless, Ne’eman stresses that he would “always oppose a Palestinian state.”