Nicola Nasser: Israel's Doomsday E-1 Settlement

Diabolical Encroachment to Prospective Palestinian State: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has definitely crossed an international red line to vindicate a swift and firm rejection from Israels closest allies, when he announced plans recently to build a new settlement on a corridor of occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, which will render any prospective Palestinian contiguous state territorially impossible. Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, has condemned it as the doomsday settlement, and not a routine one. Netanyahu risks a diplomatic confrontation, that will not develop into a diplomatic isolation of Israel, because Israels allies have decided to pressure him to backtrack, by incentives and disincentives instead of sanctions, in the words of the British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Summoning Israeli ambassadors to protest Netanyahu's plans by Australia, Brazil, France, UK, Sweden, Denmark and Spain was nonetheless an unusual international outcry, because if implemented, his plans would alter the situation, with Jerusalem as a shared capital increasingly difficult to achieve, according to William Hague, thus seriously undermining the two state solution of the Palestinian Israeli conflict, according to the French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot, which is a solution without which there will never be security in Israel, according to the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr. The international outcry is not against the Israeli policy of settlements on Palestinian occupied land per se, but against this one particular E-1 settlement, which was Netanyahus answer to the overwhelming recent recognition of Palestine as a non member state by the UN General Assembly. Because, on the ground, the site of some 4.6 square miles (12 square km) of this settlement on the easternmost edge of eastern Jerusalem will close the only territorial link between the north and south of the West Bank, and sever it from East Jerusalem, the prospective capital of the State of Palestine, thus undermining any viable and contiguous Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and turning the recognition of the UN General Assembly on November 29, 2012 as merely a Palestinian paper achievement.