After a recent spike in Israeli-American tensions over Israeli building plans for Jewish housing in contested East Jerusalem, there appears to have been a lull in the planning process.
Palestinians demand that East Jerusalem be the capital of a future state, and call for an end to settlement construction there.
Some municipal officials in Jerusalem have interpreted the lull as amounting to a tacit, if temporary, freeze in the advancement of new plans. Other municipal and government officials say that regular planning meetings have been held up for purely bureaucratic reasons.
Whatever the case, the recent hiatus has allowed the right-leaning Israeli government to stick to its official line that there be no building freeze in Jerusalem, over which it claims sovereignty. But it also allows Israel, at the same time, to avoid any provocative developments that could derail American efforts to start indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. The Palestinians demand East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state and call for an end to settlement construction there.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Israel Radio on Tuesday that nobody had informed the Palestinians of any change in building policies in East Jerusalem. “But as far as we are concerned, what matters for us are deeds and not words,” he said.
The issue of East Jerusalem construction flared last month when, during a visit here by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Israeli Interior Ministry announced plans for 1,600 new housing units in a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The announcement infuriated the Obama administration and derailed the pending American-brokered indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Since then, there have been no meetings of the Jerusalem district planning committee, an Interior Ministry panel of government and municipal representatives that must approve any sizable projects in the city.
The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, have publicly insisted that building will continue as usual in all parts of the city.
But some Jerusalem city officials suggest that there has been a de facto suspension of the planning process for projects in the parts of East Jerusalem that Israel annexed after capturing them from Jordan in the 1967 war.
Those officials said that while there had been no explicit order to halt planning, there were enough hints.
“There is no doubt that something has changed,” said Yakir Segev, a Jerusalem municipal council member from Mr. Barkat’s party who holds the East Jerusalem portfolio. “There is a certain atmosphere and a great sensitivity regarding everything that has to do with East Jerusalem.”
Contradicting such observations, other officials said that the district planning committee had not met in recent weeks because of Jewish holidays and other routine reasons.
“There is no freeze,” said Efrat Orbach, spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry. The district planning committee usually meets once or twice a month, on Tuesdays, she said, and three of the last five were holidays.
In addition, Ms. Orbach said, since the debacle during the Biden visit, meetings must be coordinated with a new committee established by the prime minister’s office, adding another layer of bureaucracy. When the planning committee does meet, she added, “all building plans will be discussed, though not necessarily approved.”
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said the prime minister wanted to ensure that he would never again be surprised by an East Jerusalem housing announcement.
The new mechanism was intended to improve oversight and coordination, Mr. Regev said, “so that the lower levels of government will not take steps that have an impact on national security and foreign relations.”
Before the Biden visit, Mr. Netanyahu asked Mayor Barkat to delay a plan to demolish some Palestinian homes to build a new complex in Silwan, a hotly contested area of East Jerusalem. Mr. Regev said that was the only case in which the prime minister had intervened.
Unlike the larger developments that the district planning committee must approve, small developments, which can be equally contentious, are reviewed by a local municipal committee.
That was the case with the plan for 20 residential units in the Shepherd Hotel compound in Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood populated mostly by Palestinians, and more recently by some Israeli nationalist Jews, just north of Jerusalem’s Old City.
But some municipal officials said that in the current diplomatic climate, the local planning committee was likely to be careful about what it approved as well.
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