The State Department expressed dismay Monday at reports that the Israeli government helped Jewish settlers acquire a building in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
“Today’s admission by the Israeli Housing Ministry that it subsidized the settlers’ action is deeply disturbing,” said department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler.
She also called the settlers’ activity, launched during the Christian holy days immediately preceding Easter, an “insensitive and provocative action.”
The controversy erupted April 11, when 150 Orthodox Jewish settlers moved into a building owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, which they claimed to have leased from an Armenian businessman.
Their presence, the first settlement of Jews in the Christian Quarter since Israel captured the Old City in 1967, touched off interreligious strife in Jerusalem and sharp criticism of Israel abroad.
Israel’s High Court of Justice is now considering whether the lease was legal and whether the settlers should be evicted, as a lower court ruled.
Charges that Israel’s Construction and Housing Ministry had provided nearly $2 million of the funds used to lease the building were levied Sunday by a left-wing Israeli Knesset member and confirmed late in the day by the ministry.
If the money used came from U.S. foreign aid dollars, that would violate U.S. policy, which bars the use of U.S. funds beyond Israel’s 1967 borders to help non-Palestinians.
Tutwiler said that the U.S. ambassador in Israel, William Brown, has officially complained to the Israeli government.
AJCONGRESS SHARPLY DENOUNCES MOVE
In New York, the American Jewish Congress said it was “appalled” that “members of a narrow Israeli caretaker government, operating during a political (transition period) without a democratic mandate, have participated in a clandestine effort to settle Jews in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem.”
AJCongress said the settlement activity “underscores once again Israel’s desperate need for electoral reform,” aimed at preventing small political parties from having hold over the large ones.
Tutwiler had no assessment when asked if the incident could delay passage by Congress of a bill that would provide Israel with $400 million in loan guarantees to house Soviet Jews in Israel proper.
But AJCongress argued that “this controversial and polarizing action can endanger the prospect of U.S. support of Israel generally and of desperately needed housing guarantees for Soviet Jews specifically.”
“It also threatens to complicate the difficult task of raising unprecedented sums of money from world Jewry,” the group said.
“By its complicity in this activity,” the group added, “the caretaker government jeopardizes the historic exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel.”
Tutwiler said the United States has not asked Israel yet for any assurances on how the U.S.-guaranteed funds are used, particularly because the caretaker government is currently in charge in Israel.
On April 3, the House of Representatives approved the $400 million as part of a $2.4 billion supplemental appropriations bill for this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.
But the administration has yet to formally request the $400 million in housing loan guarantees.
In the Senate, the bill is tied up in the Appropriations Committee. A committee session had been scheduled for Monday exclusively to consider the bill, but the hearing was delayed indefinitely.
A source on the committee said the delay had nothing to do with Israel’s admission to helping the settlers, but rather to accommodate senators who took a long weekend.
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