US Press
Thirty Democratic senators asked Israel to cancel the E1 settlement tenders
Image credit: Senator Ruben Gallego — US House Office of Photography / Wikimedia Commons, public domain · License
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Thirty Democratic members of the United States Senate have asked Israel to withdraw the tenders it published this month for 1,234 housing units in E1, the corridor of occupied land between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim.
The letter was led by Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and reported on Friday by The Hill and by the Israeli daily Haaretz. Building in E1 would sever East Jerusalem from the main Palestinian population centres of the occupied West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state harder to reach, the senators wrote.
The names carry the political weight of the letter. They include the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic whip Dick Durbin, along with Jeanne Shaheen, Tim Kaine, Chris Coons and Mark Warner — senators with long records of support for Israel, several of them senior on the foreign relations committee.
The senators also asked the Trump administration to consider targeted sanctions against individuals and organisations involved in settlement expansion and in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The clock the letter is running against#
Israel's Ministry of Construction and Housing published the tender on 18 August. It covers seven residential compounds and gives contractors until 19 October to bid.
That deadline falls eight days before Israel's Knesset election, which places the E1 file inside a campaign in which both governing parties are competing for settlement votes. The land in question is the piece that planners on every side have long understood to be decisive for whether a Palestinian state can be territorially continuous.
For Palestinian readers the letter is a marker rather than a remedy. It carries no legislative instrument, and the administration it addresses has spent the year removing sanctions on settlers rather than adding them. What it does record is that E1 has again moved thirty American senators, including Israel's closest allies among them, to put an objection in writing eight weeks before the bids are opened.
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