Humpty-Dumpty visits the Middle East

Last year, when negotiations re-opened between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel pledged it would neither establish new settlements in the West Bank nor expand existing ones, in apparent recognition of what a sore spot they are for Palestinians and that they represent a real roadblock to a settlement.

However, "apparent" means not only "readily seen" but also "ostensible rather than actual." The latter definition now is more applicable. From ABC News for Thursday:

A key committee has approved construction of the first new Jewish settlement in the West Bank in a decade, an Israeli official said Thursday. ...

The only hurdle that remains is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who plans to approve the Maskiot settlement within weeks, the official said. Barak had signaled to the national planning committee that it should authorize the plan, the official said.

The announcement comes just days after Gordon Brown, on his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories as Prime Minister, demanded that Israel cease construction of settlements.

"I think the whole European Union is very clear on this matter: We want to see a freeze on settlements."

"Settlement expansion has made peace harder to achieve. It erodes trust, it heightens Palestinian suffering, it makes the compromises Israel needs to make for peace more difficult," Brown said at a news conference....

The Jersusalem Post (Israel) says that the new approval is for a 20-home building project at the settlement, which lies in the Jordan Rift Valley. That number is in addition to the

six modular homes illegally placed there in November 2007 by families evacuated from the former Gaza settlement of Shirat Hayam.

Jordan Valley Regional Council head Dubi Tal said the modular homes were still unauthorized but that he would work now on getting them permits,

permits which would essentially give retroactive approval to the illegal settlement. Settlers there now - radical Orthodox Jews who believe God gave all of Biblical Israel, Judea, and Samaria (the latter two encompassing the West Bank) to the Jewish people - claim there are two dozen families waiting for the houses to be built in order to move there.

Despite the official go-ahead, pending only the final paperwork, Israeli officials such as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's mouthpiece Mark Regev are claiming with straight faces and day-glo smiles that "Israel will abide by all our commitments and there will be no new settlements and no outward expansion of existing ones." Because, y'see, Maskiot had been established a while back as a military base and there was a school there - so even though there were no residents before the recent admittedly illegal ones, they say that Maskiot therefore is not a new settlement. And expansion? Well, that doesn't apply to building new facilities, oh no, no way, only to physical expansion of a settlement's boundaries.

In fact, when the Israeli group Peace Now said that Maskiot's claimed prior existence as a settlement was based on a technicality and the construction amounted to creating a new settlement, government officials replied that

it had been a settlement with buildings since the 1980s and the only thing that was happening was that more buildings were being added.

So there's nothing to see here, move along, go back to your homes. Because when they use a word (such as "settlement," "new," or "expand"), it means just what they choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

Footnote: The Jordan Rift Valley runs along the Jordan River from Lake Hula, through the Sea of Galilee, to the Dead Sea. It's a section of the Great Rift Valley, which runs from Lebanon to Mozambique. Why Maskiot is particularly important is that

[a] number of Israeli politicians ... have said Israel needs to retain control of the Jordan Valley as a buffer between a future Palestinian state and Jordan.

In fact, a settlers' group calls the area "the eastern border of Israel." Which means that the intention of these politicians and settlers is at minimum to have any Palestinian state in the West Bank be quite literally surrounded by Israeli territory - which also means, as a practical matter, surrounded by Israeli guns.