Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Friday that the U.S. government now considers new Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories to be “incompatible with international law,” marking a reversal of a policy put in place under the Trump administration and a return to a decades-old . The US position on the issue at issue.
Mr. Blinken spoke at a press conference in Buenos Aires after Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, made an announcement on Thursday, saying thousands of new homes would be added to the settlements. Mr Blinken said he was “disappointed” with the announcement.
“It has been long-standing US policy under both Republican and Democratic administrations that new settlements are counterproductive to achieving lasting peace,” he said. “They are inconsistent with international law. Our government maintains strong opposition to settlement expansion. And in our judgment, this only weakens—not strengthens—Israel’s security.”
Mr. Blinken was in Argentina for meetings with the newly elected president, Javier Milei, and the foreign minister, Diana Mondino.
In Washington, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, echoed that stance in comments to reporters. “That’s a position that’s been consistent across a number of Republican and Democratic administrations — if there’s one administration that hasn’t been consistent, it was the last one,” he said.
State Department officials declined to say what action, if any, the United States might take to hold Israeli settlers or the government legally accountable for building new settlements.
For years, settlements have proliferated in the West Bank, Palestinian territory occupied by Israel, without the United States pushing for any legal action. About 500,000 residents now live in the occupied West Bank and more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem.
In November 2019, President Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reversed four decades of US policy by saying the settlements do not violate international law. State Department lawyers never issued a new legal determination supporting that policy change, and Mr. Blinken’s shift back to the old policy is consistent with a long-standing legal finding by the department.
Beginning in 2021, when President Biden took office, diplomatic reporters asked State Department officials whether Mr. Blinken planned to reverse Mr. Pompeo’s move, but the officials each time said there was no change in policy.
Some State Department officials had become concerned last year about a sharp increase in violence by settler extremists. After the October 7 Hamas attacks, violence increased in the West Bank and Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken began to denounce the actions and settlement expansion.
On Friday afternoon, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal Jewish American advocacy group that tries to shape policy on Israel, praised Mr. Blinken’s announcement.
“Now, the government must make it clear that, especially in light of the volatility of the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, there must be no further expansion of the settlement operation,” he said in a statement. He added that the Biden administration will have to show that it “will take further steps to enforce its view — and the view of the international community — that the creeping annexation of the West Bank must stop.”
Mr Pompeo’s move in 2019 strengthened the position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who had pledged during two elections that year to annex the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu’s new governing coalition has several far-right ministers who support this direction, and it is these politicians who have helped Mr. Netanyahu stay in power despite widespread criticism of his failure to protect Israel from attacks. of the 7th of October. Hamas and its moves to undermine the authority of the judiciary.
On Thursday night, the office of one of those ministers, Mr. Smotrich, announced that an existing Israeli planning committee overseeing construction in the West Bank would be convened.
He said the commission would move forward with plans for more than 3,000 homes, most of them in Ma’ale Adumim, near the site of a Palestinian shooting attack earlier in the day. Mr. Smotrich’s office described the settlement expansion as an “appropriate Zionist response” to the attack.
“Let every terrorist who plots to harm us know that raising a hand against the citizens of Israel will be met with death, destruction and a deepening of our eternal grip on the entire Land of Israel,” Mr. Smotrich said in a statement.
Mr. Smotrich’s office did not say when the committee would be convened, whether the housing units would be new homes or what stage of the planning process they are at.
Mr. Blinken also said he would decline to judge the post-war plan for Gaza that Mr. Netanyahu had begun circulating among Israeli officials. Mr Blinken said any plan must be aligned with three principles: Gaza must not be a base for terrorism. the israeli government must not reoccupy gaza. and the size of the territory of Gaza must not be reduced.
“There are some basic principles that we laid out many months ago,” he said, referring to the outcome of a diplomatic conference in Tokyo, “that we believe are very important when it comes to the future of Gaza.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
