US Wants Israel to Cancel Building Plan
March 20, 2010 by Jerry Reth · Leave a Comment
The United States and the Obama Administration are calling for Israel to halt the plans for their building project in East Jerusalem. They are calling for this in hopes that it will ease the tension between the Israeli’s and the Palestinians, and be a show of good faith for both sides of the argument. The fighting in Jerusalem has been exceptionally violent in recent months, and has come to a bubble in recent weeks after several suicide bombers have killed a number of Israeli citizens in the streets of Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister of Israel does not seem as open to canceling the building project as many in the Obama Administration had hoped that he might be. He responded to these claims by saying that their building plan in east Israel would “in no way” be bothersome to Palestinians. While this might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to those who are unaware of what has been going on therein recent weeks, to most experts it is clear that this building project will only cause a flare up of violence in the area.
The Israeli’s had announced that they would be building over 1,500 apartments for Jewish tenants int he Ramot Shlomo neighborhood. The neighborhood is an area that has been home to limited violence in recent years, but always has been a contested area that both parties lay claim to. It is uncertain how building these apartments would settle with their Palestinian neighbors, and the US feels that it would help diplomacy if Israel would just agree to drop or move the project to another, less hostile location. The US has been pushing Israel for quite some time to sit down and start negotiating for peace once again.
