Israel seeks to expand Golan settlements

TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- bc-israel-golan 12-31

Israel seeks to expand Golan settlements

TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 31 (UPI) - Israel's Ministerial Committee on Rural Settlement decided to expand settlements on the occupied Golan Heights in an attempt to attract 900 more families in the coming three years, officials confirmed Wednesday.

The decision comes shortly after Syrian President Bashar Assad indicated interest in resuming peace talks with Israel, but government officials insisted the plan was initiated long before Assad showed readiness to resume negotiations.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war and then extended its law there, coming very close to a de facto annexation.

"The Golan is an inseparable part of Israel and we do not intend to give up our hold there... The message (from the new plan) is that Israel shall develop the Golan Heights, attaches considerable importance to settlement on the Golan, and it is good that everybody knows that it has no intention of easing its hold over the Golan," the committee's chairman, Agriculture Minister Israel Katz, said. Katz is one of the more hawkish members in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet.

Later Wednesday a senior government official tried to downplay the plan's implication. Briefing foreign correspondents on condition he not be identified by name or title the official said the plan, "Doesn't signal any change in our plans towards the Golan Heights. It doesn't send a signal, implied or otherwise to Syria."

The $61.5 million plan, devised with the Golan settlers, calls for expanding present settlements, developing household dairies, wineries, oil presses, jam producing facilities, to expand local businesses and attract tourists. The plan also calls for building more rooms for tourists, increasing their number from 750 to 1,350.

Some 18,000 Israelis now live on the Golan Heights and no new settlements are planned, the Agriculture Ministry's spokesman Benny Rom said.

Infrastructure Minister Joseph Parizky, of the centrist Shinui Party, said his party would bring the plan to the entire cabinet for reconsideration. Cabinet procedures allow for such a move in case ministers oppose a committee's decision.

Shinui's representative in the Ministerial Committee on Rural Development, Interior Minister Avraham Poraz, did not attend the meeting in which the decision was made, Rom said.

Slamming the plan Paritzky asked: "Now, when President Assad is making a somewhat pathetic attempt to start (talks), now is the time to go out against him? No, I don't think it's wise ... We don't have to appear around the world like those who ruin any peace prospect."

Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel should not leave the Golan Heights and withdraw to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Until a peace process with Syria begins Israel should not restrict itself but the plan's initiators "should tell us where they will get the money" for it.

Former Interior Minister Haim Ramon, an opposition Labor Party dove, said the plan as an attempt to bury negotiations even before the begin.

Israel had two towns and several rural settlements in the Sinai Peninsula but evacuated them under a peace agreement with Egypt. It handed over Ophira, at the southern Sinai Peninsula. Sharon who was then defense minister had the town of Yamit and rural settlements destroyed before Israel returned every inch of the area.