JERUSALEM: Israel’s right-wing Likud party was to endorse on Thursday settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, with an eye to a building spurt when a moratorium on construction expires in September.
Some 2,500 members of the party’s policymaking central committee were to debate a motion that the body "supports building and developing throughout the Land of Israel including … Greater Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria."
Judea and Samaria are the biblical names for the West Bank. Greater Jerusalem includes mainly Arab east Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed immediately after.
Netanyahu reluctantly imposed a 10-month ban on new building starts last November following months of US demands for gestures to help relaunch peace talks with the Palestinians suspended during the 2008-2009 Gaza war.
The Palestinians nevertheless dismissed the move as insufficient because it did not include projects already under way, public buildings or east Jerusalem, which they claim as the capital of their future state.
Israel’s Peace Now group which monitors settlements said last week that so many projects were approved before the "freeze" began that it has has done little to slow the expansion of settlements.
Likud MP Ofir Akonis told public radio the motion endorsing settlement expansion was so popular that Netanyahu did not need to attend the meeting, although the premier did support the move.
But central committee chairman Moshe Kahlon, who is also communications minister, insisted that the motion did not make direct reference to the freeze or its September 26 expiry date.
"The debate today is not about the freeze," he told the radio.
Kahlon said Netanyahu would not attend the committee session in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, but added that there was no political significance to his absence.
Netanyahu is to meet on July 6 with President Barack Obama in the White House. Washington has repeatedly criticized West Bank settlement as an obstacle to the peace process.
"The last thing (Netanyahu) needs is that two weeks before the meeting with United States President Barack Obama he goes to a meeting of his own party that which seeks to oblige him to build in Judea and Samaria," the radio’s political reporter said.
The motion’s sponsor, hard-line legislator Danny Danon, said the party would not allow Netanyahu to extend the moratorium.
"After September 26, the freeze is finished," he told the radio.
The Palestinians grudgingly agreed to relaunch indirect US-brokered peace talks with Israel in May but have said they will not move to direct negotiations without a complete settlement freeze including in east Jerusalem.
The presence of nearly a half million Israelis in more than 120 settlements scattered across the West Bank and east Jerusalem has long been seen as a major threat to the establishment of an independent, viable Palestinian state.
