Critical dispute over Jerusalem real estate

With international attention riveted on Gaza in the run-up to Israel's planned withdrawal there, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is shoring up Israel's hold on the Greater Jerusalem area.

Even as Israel handed over a second West Bank town - Tulkarem - to Palestinians yesterday, its plan to expand its largest settlement, three miles from Jerusalem, has angered Palestinians who say it's a direct violation of the peace process.

The idea behind building 3,500 residential units at the Maale Adumim, say both proponents and critics, is to fill the territory between it and existing settlements within annexed East Jerusalem with Israeli housing.

But those three miles make up some of the most sensitive real estate in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They help to determine which side enjoys territorial contiguity in and around traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians view as essential for having a viable capital of an independent state.

Israel sees the area as vital to its own hold on Jerusalem as an undivided capital.

"The implications are huge," says Jeff Halper, director of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions, which opposes the plan. "This puts the entire peace process in jeopardy."

The new housing plan, confirmed Monday, he says, will accelerate a process by which Israeli settlement construction and the building of the West Bank separation barrier are breaking up Palestinian areas in and around Jerusalem into isolated enclaves.

More specifically, the planned construction will help drive wedges between the Arab areas of a-Tur, al-Zaim, Anata, and Isawiya, he says. "East Jerusalem was developing organically, but this fragments East Jerusalem so that there is no contiguity," he says. The construction may pave the way, he adds, for Maale Adumim to be annexed as part of a Greater Jerusalem - which would include other large settlements that separate Arab areas of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev says the construction in no way forecloses peace negotiations. Rather, he says, it is in keeping with understandings reached with the US last April that settlements that are major population centers will remain in Israeli hands under future peace arrangements.

"Maale Adumim is the largest of the settlement blocs and it is clear it will stay in Israel," he says. "Maale Adumim is part of Israel in every peace plan, even the Geneva plan [by Israeli doves]."

The idea of expanding Maale Adumim, a settlement of about 27,000 people, by about 50 percent and linking it with Jerusalem is backed by some key figures in the Labor party, such as the Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog and Ehud Barak, former prime minister.

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