As officials push for France’s Jews to move to Israel, Uri Ariel calls to scout out areas for new housing beyond the Green Line
Housing Minister Uri Ariel plans to move a possible influx of French immigrants to West Bank settlements and has instructed authorities to look at ways to expand existing settlements to make room for them.
In a letter sent Monday to the Yesha council of settler leaders, the minister told settlement officials to prepare to absorb a wave of French immigration that will be keen to join Jewish communities over the Green Line, Israel’s Channel 2 news reported Tuesday night.
“There is no doubt that the Jews of France feel a deep identity with the settlement movement in the West Bank,” he wrote. “And that is where they will want to establish their home.”
Ariel, a member of the national-religious Jewish Home party led by Economics Minister Naftali Bennett, ordered relevant authorities in his ministry and the Israel Land Authority to expand current settlements to receive the immigrants.
He also tasked the Yesha council, that coordinates settlement activity, to find suitable sites for expansion in Jewish communities in the West Bank, the report said.
Ariel has been an outspoken supporter of settlement expansion, even as the enterprise has come under increasingly severe criticism from the international community, which views settlement activity as a roadblock to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
France and other Western countries have leveled considerable criticism against settlement activity, with the EU threatening sanctions against Israel. In late December, Paris voted in favor of a failed UN Security Council resolution setting a two-year timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.