Ayelet Shaked: Application of sovereignty must not be delayed

Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked (Yamina) on Thursday evening called for sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley to be applied as soon as next week.

“We must not delay the application of sovereignty, this is an opportunity that comes once in 52 years. If we delay it now, who knows when there will be another opportunity? We will do everything we can to make sure the decision is brought for government approval next week,” Shaked said.

Earlier on Thursday, a senior Israeli official and confidant of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu played down the apparent split between the US and Israel regarding the timetable for the application of Israeli sovereignty over large swaths of Judea and Samaria.

The official said that the disagreement centered around technical issues only, while both sides had fundamentally agreed that Israel will extend its sovereignty over about 30% of Judea and Samaria, including all Israeli towns in the area.

“We’ve been working on this for three years,” the official said. “That’s not three meetings – but hundreds of hours to try to advance this – a deal which is good for the State of Israel.”

“What has been agreed upon is a huge thing, recognition by an American president of the Israeli right to sovereignty in the Jordan Valley, northern Dead Sea, and the Jewish towns” in Judea and Samaria. “That’s been achieved, there’s no argument about it, and it’s going to happen.”

The comments followed an interview given by Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, who said that the administration believes that Israel should wait until after the March 2 election to apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

“The hope is that they’ll wait till after the election, and we’ll work with them to try to come up with something,” Kushner told GZERO Media in an interview that will air in full on public television starting January 31.

“We’ve agreed with them on forming a technical team to start studying taking the conceptual map. The Jordan Valley can mean a lot of different things,” he continued. “I want to make sure that we have all of the parameters defined and that we have also a situation where we know what the freeze is.”

“We’ll start working on the technical stuff now, but I think we’d need an Israeli government in place in order to move forward,” said Kushner.