Here is a quote of the Israeli housing minister, from an AP article (via New York times):

Housing Minister Zeev Boim said the new housing would include 350 apartments in Givat Zeev, a West Bank settlement just outside of Jerusalem, and 750 homes in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of east Jerusalem.

Speaking to Israel Radio, Boim said the Givat Zeev construction initially began some eight years ago, but was suspended because of fighting with the Palestinians.

''When violence subsided, demand grew again and contractors renewed their permits to build there,'' he said. The Pisgat Zeev construction, he added, ''is inside Jerusalem's city borders.''

(My emphasis.)

So let's see: when Palestinians engage in less violence, Israel uses the opportunity to steal more of their land. This isn't what the editorialists tell me, though. Weird.
christian h. | 03.09.08 - 8:23 pm | #

Israelis denying the Nakba are like the a comedy routine I saw once, in which Germans perform "The I-Was-Not-A-Nazi Polka."
Montag | 03.10.08 - 4:27 am | #

On Al Jazeera last night there was some kind of headline about government declarations about the building of new settlements. Surely the PA cannot now go to these utterly phoney and meaningless negotiations?
johng | 03.10.08 - 9:44 am | #

PA....go to these utterly phoney and meaningless negotiations?

Come now john, as if..........
Mark Elf (aka levi9909) | Homepage | 03.10.08 - 12:29 pm | #

well yeah obviously. at the same time there is surely a limit.
johng | 03.10.08 - 2:10 pm | #

Funny how Abbas always lets Condi Rice talk him into--yet again--serving as the rear end of the pantomime horse. Of course Olmert, as the front end, gets to have the horse go in circles, with no hope of it ever reaching any useful goal. But then for the Zionists it's all about the journey and not the destination, isn't it? So from their perspective the longer the journey the better.
Montag | 03.10.08 - 7:19 pm | #

Utterly phoney and meaningless negotiations are really the only ones that it would make sense for the utterly phoney and meaningless PA to participate in.
Ernie | Homepage | 03.11.08 - 4:23 am | #

Now that I've read Mike's article, I note that the numbers are written like '1,00,000'. In case anyone finds this mysterious, it's not a typo. In Hindi-Urdu, higher numbers increment by hundreds rather than thousands - a 'lakh' is 100,000, a 'crore' 10,000,000 (written '1,00,00,000), etc. In the examples in the article in The Hindu, the first comma separates the lakhs from the tens of thousands.
Ernie | Homepage | 03.12.08 - 12:11 am | #