Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed fears increasingly expressed by settlers leaders regarding the US peace plan’s vision for the West Bank, saying in an interview published Thursday that the mapping process is ongoing and that they were criticizing elements of the plan that still haven’t been determined and published.
In the interview with the right-wing Makor Rishon newspaper, Netanyahu said he didn’t believe Jordan would annul the peace accord if Israel goes forward with its plans to annex some West Bank land including the Jordan Valley, and said any settlement construction freeze as part of the Trump plan would also apply to Palestinians in Area C — which is controlled by Israel.
Netanyahu said he was committed to extending Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank in July, after a joint Israeli-US team completes a process of mapping the exact vision for the future of the territory based on a conceptual map released by US President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this year.
Many settler leaders have expressed concern about the Trump plan’s inclusion of a Palestinian state, even though it outlines many conditions for that state that are vehemently opposed by the Palestinian Authority, which has rejected the plan outright, calling it biased in favor of Israel.
They are also roiled by the fact that at first, Netanyahu had indicated that Washington would immediately recognize Israeli sovereignty in all settlements and the strategic Jordan Valley within days of the plan’s announcement, before the administration clarified that the process would take many months.
The settler leaders have drawn their own map, but that has reportedly not affected the committee’s work, leading to outcry and internal discord.
Netanyahu said the declaration of annexation will not include a word on accepting a future Palestinian state, as some on the right have feared: “The issue is separate. There isn’t supposed to be any cabinet decision on the matter.”
In a separate interview, with the Israel Hayom newspaper, also published Thursday, Netanyahu said the Palestinians living under Israeli rule in an annexed Jordan Valley would not receive Israeli citizenship. Such towns and villages will remain “Palestinian enclaves” under Palestinian rule but Israel security control, he explained.
In his conversation with Makor Rishon, Netanyahu said the conceptual map for annexation “gave a general idea that has to be broken down into details, and that’s exactly what we’re doing at the moment. We will, of course, show it to the settlers.”
The premier repeated that the important part of the plan was the paradigm shift in which “thus far Israel was always the one that had to compromise, give up and withdraw. That was the basic idea of every peace deal we were handed. Now President Trump and his people come and change the direction. They say Israel doesn’t need to compromise, the Palestinians do.”
The Trump plan also includes a freeze for at least four years of all settlement construction outside existing settlements in Area C — which represents some 60% of the West Bank under full Israel civil and military control, where some 450,000 settlers live alongside an estimated 240,000 Palestinians.
Netanyahu told Makor Rishon that any such freeze would equally apply to “both sides,” meaning also to Palestinian construction in Area C. He said that was written down in the plan, even though the interviewer noted that it isn’t written in its publicly released parts.
