An Israeli cabinet minister on Sunday said the government approved plans to build a new settlement in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights named after President Donald Trump.
Settlements Minister Tzipi Hotovely wrote on Facebook that her ministry will start preparations for Ramat Trump — Hebrew for “Trump Heights” — to house 300 families.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to establish this settlement as an appreciation to Trump's recognition of the law by which this region was annexed to Israel.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed it in 1981. Most of the international community considers the move, and Israeli settlements in the territory, illegal under international law.
But Trump signed an executive order recognizing the strategic mountainous plateau as Israeli territory in March 2019. The move came during a visit to Washington by Netanyahu just weeks before Israeli elections. The decision, just one of several diplomatic moves benefiting Israel, was widely applauded there.
Observers see that this plan has been introduced to serve elections purposes and that Netanyahu would withdraw the matter once the electoral battle is over. They say that this settlement isn’t new, but it hasn't attracted Jewish settlers to live in it.
A source in Tel Aviv revealed that Trump himself mocked the idea of naming a settlement after him and not completing it either.
The Israeli Ministry of Finance allocated 8 million shekels (USD2.2 million) in the current budget to proceed with the required procedures to accelerate the plans to develop the hill where the settlement would be established. A total of USD3 million will be dedicated to the Ministry of Construction and Housing of Israel and USD5 million to the Ministry for Settlement Affairs.
The Ministry of Finance affirmed earlier that marketing the settlement would cost 28.5 million shekels and that only 8 million were dispersed which means that seeing steps on the ground was still out of reach.
