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Israelis Say Bush Officials Agreed to Limited Settlement Growth

[New York Times] Ethan Bronner - Senior Israeli officials said they had clear understandings with the Bush administration that allowed Israel to build West Bank settlement housing within certain guidelines. The Israeli officials said that repeated discussions with Bush officials starting in late 2002 resulted in agreement that housing could be built within the boundaries of certain settlement blocs as long as no new land was expropriated, no special economic incentives were offered to move to settlements and no new settlements were built. When Israel signed on to the Roadmap for a two-state solution in 2003, the officials said, it did so after a detailed discussion with Bush administration officials that laid out those explicit exceptions. One of the officials said Israel agreed to move ahead with the removal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 on the understanding that settlement growth could continue. A former senior official in the Bush administration said Tuesday, "There was never an agreement to accept natural growth....There was an effort to explore what natural growth would mean, but we weren't able to reach agreement on that." However, another former Bush administration official, Elliott Abrams, who was on the National Security Council staff, wrote an opinion article in the Washington Post in April that seemed to endorse the Israeli argument. Dov Weissglas, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote Tuesday in Yediot Ahronot that in May 2003 he and Sharon met with Abrams and Stephen J. Hadley of the National Security Council and came up with the definition of a settlement freeze (described above), and that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, signed off on that definition later that month.
2009-06-04 06:00:00
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