WASHINGTON: The White House lashed Israel with heavy criticism on Tuesday after the Jerusalem city government moved toward the construction of 900 additional housing units in a Jewish neighborhood in annexed East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as the capital of their future state. President Barack Obama has made restarting peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians a top foreign policy goal. To that end, he has demanded that Israel cease building new or expanding existing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, land the Palestinians want for an independent state. Israel insists that East Jerusalem will never be surrendered to Arab rule, and the entirety of the city will remain the capital of the Jewish state. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordanian control in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it. The city is considered holy by the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered restraint on settlement building in the West Bank but has refused to budge from Israel s long-standing insistence that the status of Jerusalem is not open for negotiation. In criticizing the Israel housing plan, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said: We are dismayed. He said the Israelis were making it more difficult for our efforts (toward peacemaking) to succeed. Netanyahu s office quickly fired back that the Jerusalem neighborhood in question, Gilo, is an integral part of Jerusalem. ... Building in Gilo has continued unabated for decades, and there is nothing new in the current planning and construction. The Palestinians, predictably angered by the Israeli housing plan, said it was a rejection of Obama s peacemaking efforts. This is a message to President Obama that Israel does not care about the American position, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told The Associated Press. There should be real American pressure on the Israelis to stop all these acts. Such acts prove that Israel does not want peace and does not want to revive the peace process, and it really puts the interests of the United States at stake. The speed with which the White House reacted to developments in Jerusalem - a statement from Gibbs who is with Obama in China - may have been the result of fallout over remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton three weeks ago in Jerusalem. She said then that Netanyahu was showing restraint about future settlements in the West Bank and called that positive movement forward. Arabs were outraged at Clinton s comment because Netanyahu s statement did not change Israel s position on housing activity in Jerusalem. Clinton had to make an unplanned visit to Egypt to walk back her statement. The Palestinians insist that a complete freeze on settlement building is a requirement for restarting peace talks. -Associated Press Writers Barry Schweid in Washington and Mark Lavie in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
