Israel to the US: There is no intention to build a new settlement in Homesh - voila! news

In the video: Crowds march to Homesh on the one-week anniversary of the attack (Photo: Eliashiv Rakovsky/TPS)

Israel has made clear to the Biden administration that it has no intention of turning the illegal Homesh outpost deep inside the West Bank into a new settlement, according to three senior U.S. and Israeli officials.

Why it's important

• The illegal outpost of Homesh is located in a strategic area between the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Jenin in the northern West Bank. This is an area empty of settlements and allows Palestinian territorial contiguity.
• The Biden administration is concerned that rebuilding a settlement in Homesh will make it very difficult to establish a Palestinian state in the future.

Homesh (Photo by Hillel Maeir/Flash90)

Reminder

• During the implementation of its disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank in 2005, Israel evacuated the settlement of Homesh and three other isolated settlements in the area. After the evacuation, Israeli civilians were forbidden to enter the evacuated area.
• In exchange for evacuating the isolated settlements, the Bush administration agreed to recognize that the large settlement blocs in the West Bank adjacent to the 1967 lines would remain part of Israel in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians.
• The understandings between then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and then-US President George W. Bush were anchored in an exchange of official letters between the two governments.
• A few years later, extremist settlers established an illegal outpost in the area where the Homesh settlement was located, claiming it was a yeshiva. The IDF evacuated the outpost, which was located on private Palestinian land, but it was rebuilt shortly thereafter. Over the years, there have been several evacuations of the outpost, and time after time it has been rebuilt.
• Since the attack near the outpost in December 2021, the IDF has stopped evacuating it. Following a petition to the High Court of Justice, the justices ruled last January that the state must explain within 90 days why it is not evacuating the outpost even though it sits on private land.
• In March, the Knesset approved the Disengagement Cancellation Law in the northern West Bank. The repeal of the law, which allowed Israelis to re-enter the territory of the settlements evacuated during the disengagement pursuant to an order by the OC Central Command, was the first step on the way to "legalizing" the illegal outpost.

In the News Hub

• Last Thursday, the commander of the Central Command, Maj. Gen. Yehuda Force, signed an order allowing Israel to enter the area where the illegal outpost in Homesh is located.
• The new order was part of political understandings reached between Defense Minister Yoav Galant and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The new order was necessary, among other things, in order to deal with the petition in the High Court of Justice on the issue.
• The Defense Ministry said that following the signing of the order, procedures would begin to legalize the outpost by relocating it from its current location on private Palestinian land to a new location on ostensibly state land.

What they say

• On Sunday night, the US State Department issued a strong statement against Galant and Smotrich's move, claiming that the new order signed by the commander of Central Command "is inconsistent" with the Israeli commitment included in the Bush-Sharon letters.
• U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the new order also violated the commitment the current Israeli government made to the Biden administration on settlements as part of a diplomatic meeting in Aqaba in February and another in Sharm el-Sheikh in March.
• "Promoting construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an obstacle to achieving a two-state solution," Miller said.

Homesh (Photo: official website, Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)

Backstage

• U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides and other senior U.S. officials protested the signing of the order in closed talks with Prime Minister Netanyahu's advisers, Israeli and U.S. officials said.
• The Israeli and American officials said that the Israeli side had made it clear to the Biden administration that the government had no intention of rebuilding the Homesh settlement, and stressed that the new order was signed to allow the transfer of the illegal outpost from private land to state land.
• Israeli officials told their American counterparts that the move was made due to political constraints and to prevent Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners from destabilizing the government, the U.S. and Israeli officials said.
• The Prime Minister's Office declined to comment. Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer's office did not respond.

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Between the lines

• Israeli officials said that during closed talks with the Biden administration, the Israeli government rejected the claim that it had violated commitments it had made as part of the Bush-Sharon letters.
• The Israeli side argued that it was the Obama administration that already in 2009 denied the existence of the letters and commitments that President Bush gave to former Prime Minister Sharon, and therefore the Biden administration has no legitimacy to claim that Israel violated its commitments, senior Israeli officials said.
• State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said during a daily briefing to reporters Monday evening that the U.S. position on the letters has remained the same over the years regardless of who the president is. "We did not back down from this letter. We also don't think the Israelis have backed down from the commitments they made in the letter," he said.

Worth paying attention to

• Last week, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry responsible for the settlements, held discussions with officials in various government ministries about a plan to double the number of settlers in the West Bank from half a million to a million.
• U.S. and Israeli officials said that during the five-year discussions, Netanyahu's advisers made it clear to their counterparts in the Biden administration that Smotrich's plan did not represent the prime minister's position and that there was no intention to implement it.

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