Following Thursday’s U.N. vote granting non-member state observer status to Palestine, Netanyahu’s security cabinet voted to advance plans to build in the area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim known as E1, which would cordon off East Jerusalem from the West Bank, making a future contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital impossible. This would probably deal a fatal blow to the two-state solution given that borders and Jerusalem are two of the four final status issues that must be negotiated. But despite Israel’s attention-garnering announcement, the proposed neighborhood of Mevaseret Adumim will not be built in E1.
This is not the first time that Israel has made plans to build a new settlement in E1. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin first designated E1 as part of Ma’ale Adumim in 1994, and despite this designation there has never been any residential construction in E1. During Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister he did not build in E1, and both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert explicitly promised the Bush administration not to construct any new settlements there. Netanyahu launched his election campaign in September 2005 from an E1 hilltop, and yet he promised President Obama in 2009 that he would not build there either. Despite constructing access roads around E1 and situating a police station there, not one residential foundation has been laid since Rabin set it aside for new homes. The cabinet decision on Friday was also not an order to build, but a start to the process of zoning and planning, which is likely to play out interminably.
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