Jerusalem spending huge funds

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank get significantly bigger slice of Israeli government financial help than municipalities in Israel itself, according to a study published on Tuesday.
Their population is also growing more than three times faster than that of Israel proper, says the report, which traces the development of Jewish settlements since the 1967 Middle East war to today.
The United States is calling on Israel to freeze all settlement activity so that stalled talks can resume with the Palestinians on a comprehensive peace deal that would determine the fate of settlements in a land-for-peace swap.
"While Israeli municipalities as a whole receive 34.7 percent of their income from (the government) and obtain another 64.3 percent from their own income, settlement municipalities obtain 57 percent from the (government), and only 42.8 percent from their own income," it found.
Israel's government "allocates 4.1 percent its total budget for municipalities to settlements, although they constitute just 3.1 percent of the total Israeli population", the report adds.
The study by the Macro Center of the Israeli European Policy Network is entitled "Historical Political and Economic Impact of Jewish Settlements in the Occupied Territories".
It assesses the value of all buildings in the settlements, some of them commuter communities with no industry on-site to provide a significant source of revenue, at about $18 billion.
"Not only do settlements distort priorities of the Israeli government's decision-making process on economic, political and social issues-the government of Israel proactively funds more than half of their existence too," said director Roby Nathanson.
The study's analysis shows that the hey-day of settlement construction was between 1977 and 1983, under the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, when more than 56 percent of settlements were built.
"Settlement activity declined dramatically after 1985," it states. In the first decade after 1967 it was limited to areas of sparse Palestinian population but later spread to areas of dense Palestinian settlement.
The bulk of construction is residential, mostly three to four-room dwellings. The total Jewish population reached 276,045 by the end of 2007 and at median age of 20 it is the youngest of any segment of the Israeli population.
"In the past 20 years, despite ongoing peace negotiations, the population of settlers in the West Bank has more than doubled, at a growth rate much higher than that of the general Israeli population," says the report.
"This increase could not have been achieved without the active support of all of the Israeli governments in this period."
A senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party on Tuesday urged Israel not to build more settlements, warning it risked political suicide if it continued to do so.
In unusually strong comments for a German politician, Ruprecht Polenz, the head of parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, was quoted as saying Israel's aim of having secure borders would only be possible with a two-state solution.
If Israel did not stop building settlements it ran the risk "of gradually committing suicide as a democratic state", Polenz told the Rheinische Post daily.
Enjoying safe borders would only be conceivable for Israel if East Jerusalem could operate as the capital of a Palestinian state, said Polenz. But he added Israel was trying to cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank by building more settlements.
"Israel is overlooking the fact that neither Palestinians nor Arab states will agree to a solution without East Jerusalem," Polenz told the paper.
German politicians, who feel they have a special obligation to the country due to the Nazi Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed, tend to be softer in their criticism of Israel than many other countries.
Separately, European Union president Sweden urged Israel to refrain from evicting Palestinians and demolishing their homes in Arab East Jerusalem, where thousands are threatened with displacement.
A U.N. report in May said some 1,500 demolition orders were pending for homes built without a permit from Israel's Jerusalem Municipality in the east of the city.
The Swedish president said such actions were illegal under international law and called for them to end.
"These eviction notices follow other recent orders which adversely affect Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and, combined with the increase in settlement activity in East Jerusalem, further threaten the chances of peace."
Israel considers Jerusalem as its capital, including East Jerusalem which it captured in an 1967 and annexed in a move not recognised internationally, and which Palestinian want to make the capital of their own future state.