US tells Israel ‘refrain’ from settler building as de-facto freeze sets in

The United States publicly called on Israel to refrain from West Bank settlement construction as some settler leaders have warned that a half-year freeze on planning activity is already in place.

“I think there is definitely a de facto freeze,” Efrat Council head Oded Revivi told The Jerusalem Post, noting that the facts speak for themselves.

The last meeting of the Higher Planning Council for Judea and Samaria in which substantive projects were advanced was in January, before US President Joe Biden was sworn into office.

The Council typically meets four times a year, but to date no additional meeting has been held, save for one last month in which a few minor items were advanced.

To date the Higher Planning Council has pushed forward only 780 homes this year from the January meeting, compared to 12,159 last year and 8,457 in 2019. Unless another meeting is held, this will be the worst year for settlement planning in almost a decade.

In Washington on Wednesday a journalist asked US State Department spokesman Ned Price if the Biden administration was pressuring Israel to halt all settlement activity.

“When it comes to settlement activity we have been clear and consistent,” Price said.

“We believe its critical to refrain from unilateral steps that increase tension and make it difficult to advance a negotiated two-state solution.

“This is a message we have conveyed in public, as I have just now, but also in private,” Price said.

An Israeli source said the story that Israel had frozen West Bank settlement planning was “nonsense, “ adding that no such pressure had been applied.

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has charged that Biden had asked him to freeze settlement activity while he was in office. Indeed he did not convene the council.

Hagit Ofran of the left-wing NGO Peace Now said that the absence of planning should really be laid at Netanyahu’s feet since he had failed to convene the council for months, whereas Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had been in office for less than two months.

Bennett has taken other steps: He promised to work to legalize the West Ban outpost of Evyatar and the Civil Administration has scheduled a hearing for objections to the contentious E1 project.

The Yesha Council on Thursday called on Bennett and Defense Minister Benny Gantz to convene the Higher Planning Council immediately. Typically it has been united when it comes to accusations of a de facto freeze. Almost all council heads support parties in the opposition, while Yesha Council head David Elhayani is a member of the coalition member New Hope Party, and he was hard pressed to claim that a de facto freeze was in effect.

“There is no freeze,” Elhayani told the Post, adding that he also refuted the accusation.

“I am saying that if there is a freeze this government would not survive,” Elhayani stated dramatically, even though coalition members from the Meretz and Ra’am parties support a settlement freeze.

Elhayani said, however, that he was calling as the Yesha Council had for Bennett to convene the Higher Planning Council on a quarterly basis as had been done in the past when former US president Donald Trump was in office.

“This is a very worrisome situation,” the Yesha Council said, adding that thousands of plans were simply sitting gathering dust in drawers at the Civil Administration.

Revivi, who is a member of the Likud Party, minced no words in calling a spade a spade and pronouncing that a de facto freeze was in place.

“How long it will last,” he said, “it’s hard to say.”