UN Security Council set to vote on settlement construction
Egyptian-proposed resolution includes East Jerusalem, fails to address Palestinian incitement; Israeli envoy slams ‘UN hypocrisy’
The UN Security Council will vote on Thursday on an Egyptian-drafted resolution demanding that Israel immediately halt its settlement activities in the West Bank and construction in East Jerusalem.
A similar resolution was vetoed by the United States in 2011, and it remained uncertain if the measure would be adopted this time.
Egypt circulated the draft late Wednesday and a vote was scheduled for 3 p.m. (10 p.m. Israel time) on Thursday.
The United Nations maintains that settlements are illegal and has repeatedly called on Israel to halt them, but UN officials have claimed a surge in construction over the past months.
The draft resolution demanded that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Israel’s envoy to the world body, Danny Danon, lashed the resolution late Wednesday, calling it “the epitome of absurdity and of the hypocrisy of the UN.”
“A resolution like this won’t advance any [peace] process, but will only serve as a prize by the UN for the Palestinian policy of incitement and terror.
“It’s strange that while thousands are massacred in Syria, the Security Council is devoting time to debating censuring the only democracy in the Middle East. In recent months, we’ve been working with Security Council member states and using all our means to prevent the passage of this resolution.”
Referring to the US, which has a veto on the Security Council, Danon added: “We expect our greatest friend not to let such a one-sided and anti-Israel resolution pass.”
Israeli settlements are seen by much of the international community as a stumbling block to peace efforts as they are built on land the Palestinians want for their future state.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains that they are not an obstacle to peace, and that their status could be resolved in a peace accord with the Palestinians, but that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He argues that their failure to do so is the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By contrast, outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry earlier this month called the settlements a “barrier” to peace. Settlements, Kerry said at the Saban Forum, “are not the cause of this conflict. But…if you have a whole bunch of people who are strategically locating outposts and settlements in an area so that there will not be a contiguous Palestinian state, they are doing it to be an obstacle to peace.” Kerry said that he was certain that settlement construction was intended to serve as just such an obstacle. “I cannot accept the notion that [settlements] don’t affect the peace process, that they aren’t a barrier to the ability to create peace,” Kerry argued.
In that address, the secretary refrained from committing to veto any UN resolution intended to establish a Palestinian state, only promising a veto “if it is a biased, unfair resolution calculated to delegitimize Israel.”
The Egyptian resolution draft states that Israeli settlements are “dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution” that would see an independent state of Palestine co-exist alongside Israel.
It stresses that halting settlements is “essential for salvaging the two-state solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground.”
The measure seeks “immediate steps” to prevent acts of violence against civilians, but does not specifically single out the Palestinians to stop incitement to terror, as demanded by Israel.
UN diplomats have for weeks speculated as to whether the Obama administration would decide to refrain from using its veto to block a draft resolution condemning Israel.
The administration has expressed longstanding frustration over Israeli settlement policy, but some US officials have said in recent weeks that outgoing President Barack Obama is wary of implementing dramatic policy changes that would likely be opposed or reversed by the incoming Trump administration.
The Times of Israel Community.