NEW YORK, August 25. /TASS/. Israeli authorities’ decision to establish a new settlement in the West Bank near East Jerusalem means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects improving relations with his Arab neighbors in the short-term perspective, Daniel B. Shapiro, former American ambassador to Israel (2011-2017), told the New York Times (NYT).
In his opinion, Netanyahu’s government will "end any near-term prospect of formal diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region and increase Israel’s international isolation, coming as the Israeli government plans to expand its military occupation of Gaza."
Construction in an area known as E1 "may or may not block a future Palestinian state; there are conceivable workarounds," Shapiro said.
According to the newspaper, "successive Israeli governments have coveted E1 — if quietly — to create a different kind of contiguity, one that would connect Jerusalem and the large Israeli urban settlement of Maale Adumim, just east of E1, and to seal Israel’s control of the high ground around its contested capital."
The NYT noted that Mike Huckabee, the current US ambassador to Israel, "said in a radio interview that large-scale development in E1 was a decision for the government of Israel to make, and so we would not try to evaluate the good or the bad of that."
In Shapiro’s opinion, the Netanyahu government has taken a major step toward rejecting any agreements based on the two-state solution and approached "the contours of indefinite dominance over the lands Israel conquered in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, dismantling the scaffolding of a future Palestinian state."
According to the diplomat, the decision became possible due to the growing influence of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party. "It’s Smotrich’s government now," he said. "Netanyahu can’t resist him, and Trump shows no appetite to push back," Shapiro added.
Smotrich said on August 8 that Israel now aims to "erase the Palestinian state." On August 14, he said the project to expand the Maale Adumim settlement complex and build new housing in the E-1 zone will be resumed.
In 2016, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement activities, but Israel refused to comply.