"Beit El will be expanded. The 30 families will remain in Beit El, and 300 new families will join them," Netanyahu said in remarks broadcast on public radio.

Israel differentiates between "legal" settlements and "illegal" outposts, but the international community views all settlements on occupied territory as a violation of international law.

Netanyahu’s announcement was condemned by a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who said the decision to Beit El would hinder peace efforts.

"We strongly condemn Netanyahu's announcement of the settlement decision on Palestinian land, which is an obstacle to efforts to push the peace process forward," said Nabil Abu Rudeina, the spokesman.

US condemnation

The US State Department said that continued Israeli settlement activity "undermines peace efforts and contradicts Israeli commitments and obligations".

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/06/20126711518558607.html

From what I heard on TV as well, Netanyahu accused the paestinians of breaching the peace process by going to the UN and as such he was entitled to "punish" them...

How very Nazi of him...

Australia summoned the Israeli ambassador on Tuesday to protest against Israel's decision to expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and withhold tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority.

Australia's move followed similar actions in Europe including Spain, France, Britain, Sweden and Denmark in the wake of the Palestinians winning de facto U.N. recognition of statehood.

"Australia has long opposed all settlement activity," Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in a statement after Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem's meeting with senior Australian officials. "Such activity threatens the viability of a two-state solution without which there will never be security in Israel."

Carr, whose country takes up a rotating U.N. Security Council seat next year, said Israel's actions had complicated the chances of fresh negotiations between the two sides.

"I am extremely disappointed with these reported Israeli decisions," he said.

The U.N. victory for the Palestinians was a diplomatic setback for the United States and Israel, which were joined by only a handful of countries in voting against the move to upgrade the Palestinian Authority's observer status at the United Nations to "non-member state" from "entity," like the Vatican.

There were 138 votes in favor, nine against and 41 abstentions, including Australia.

Australia Calls in Israeli Ambassador to Protest Settlements Plan

meanwhile ….

The UN general assembly has overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling on Israel to open its nuclear program for inspection.

The resolution, approved by a vote of 174-6 with six abstentions, calls on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) "without further delay" and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those voting no were Israel, the US, Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.

Resolutions adopted by the 193-member General Assembly are not legally binding but they do reflect world opinion and carry moral and political weight. Israel refuses to confirm or deny possessing nuclear bombs though it is widely believed to have them. It has refused to join the nonproliferation treaty along with three nuclear weapon states: India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Israel insists there must first be a Middle East peace agreement before the establishment of a proposed regional zone free of weapons of mass destruction. Its rivals in the region argue that Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal presents the greatest threat to peace in the region.

While the US voted against the resolution, it voted in favour of two paragraphs in it that were put to separate votes. Both support universal adherence to the NPT and call on those countries that aren't parties to ratify it "at the earliest date". The only no votes on those paragraphs were Israel and India.

The vote came as a sequel to the cancellation of a high-level conference aimed at banning nuclear weapons from the Middle East. All the Arab nations and Iran had planned to attend the summit in mid-December in Helsinki, Finland, but the US announced on 23 November that it would not take place, citing political turmoil in the region and Iran's defiant stance on nonproliferation. Iran and some Arab nations countered that the real reason for the cancellation was Israel's refusal to attend.

Just before Monday's vote the Iranian diplomat Khodadad Seifi told the assembly "the truth is that the Israeli regime is the only party which rejected to conditions for a conference." He called for "strong pressure on that regime to participate in the conference without any preconditions."

Israeli diplomat Isi Yanouka told the general assembly his country had continuously pointed to the danger of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, singling out Iran and Syria by name. "All these cases challenge Israel's security and cast a dark shadow at the prospect of embarking on a meaningful regional security process," he said.

"The fact that the sponsors include in this anti-Israeli resolution language referring to the 2012 conference proves above all the ill intent of the Arab states with regard to this conference."

The Syrian diplomat Abdullah Hallak told the assembly his government was angry that the conference wasn't going to take place because of "the whim of just one party, a party with nuclear warheads."

"We call on the international community to put pressure on Israel to accept the NPT, get rid of its arsenal and delivery systems, in order to allow for peace and stability in our region," he said.

The conference's main sponsors are the US, Russia and Britain. The British foreign office minister Alistair Burt has said it is being postponed, not cancelled

UN Tells Israel To Let In Nuclear Inspectors

A senior Australian rabbi who failed to stop an alleged paedophile from sexually abusing boys at a Sydney Jewish school said some of the victims may have consented to sexual relations and has warned that involving police now would ''open a can of worms''.
Former senior Sydney Rabbi Boruch Dov Lesches made the extraordinary remarks in a recent conversation with a person familiar with a series of alleged child rapes and molestation by a man associated with Sydney's Yeshiva community in the 1980s.

We are speaking about very young boys. 

On June 24th the "Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev" passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute "the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s", expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.

The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognised’ by the Israeli government must be moved. The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems.

Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government as mere "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201372134516963392.html

Nazareth, Israel - Israel's right-wing government and its supporters stand accused of stoking an atmosphere of increasing intimidation and intolerance in schools and among groups working for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The latest efforts by the right to stifle dissent have included censoring schoolbooks and seeking to silence organisations that raise troubling questions about Israel and its past - in what appears to be an escalating war for the minds of Israelis.

Groups allied to the government tried to prevent the recent staging of an international conference in Tel Aviv that examined events surrounding Israel's creation in 1948 - known as the "War of Independence" to Israelis and the "Nakba", or catastrophe, to Palestinians.

At the same time, it emerged that one of the far-right groups involved, Im Tirtzu, had initiated a campaign to shut down the organisation behind the conference, Zochrot, accusing it of violating Israeli law by "rejecting Israel's existence".

Zochrot challenges Israel's greatest taboo: the right of millions of Palestinians to return the homes from which they and their ancestors were expelled in 1948. Many Israelis vehemently oppose such a move because they see it as entailing the end of their state's Jewishness.

Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot's founder, said the two-day conference had been particularly threatening to the right. "For the first time we considered more than just the theoretical right of return," he said. 

"This time the emphasis was very much on considering how we can implement the return. Refugees even offered us computer-simulated models of how it could be affected on the ground."

The timing is embarrassing for Israel as long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians were recently revived under pressure from the United States. One of the key issues to resolve is whether the refugees should be allowed to return to more than 500 villages Israel subsequently destroyed.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/10/israel-right-targets-textbooks-20131039491684745.html

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The nazi and Israel have a common past and now a common ideology...