Palestinians blast Israel on East Jerusalem settlement plan

“The Israeli settlement policies, particularly in Jerusalem, threaten these negotiations, and we ask that these decisions be revoked,’’ Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, asserted after meeting with Biden. But he spoke of the goal of the talks, not of the need to cancel them.

“And now I would like to address the Israelis by saying the time has come to make peace,’’ Abbas said. “It should be a peace based on a two-state solution: the state of Israel that lives in peace and security alongside the state of Palestine based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.’’

The Israeli Interior Ministry’s announcement of plans to move ahead with the new apartments, made without forewarning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, came as an unpleasant surprise to Biden, who spent Tuesday expressing deep American solidarity with Israel in its quest for security and desire to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Biden condemned the new housing in unusually blunt terms and repeated the condemnation in Ramallah yesterday, saying that Israel’s announcement undermined the confidence needed to move peace forward.

“It’s incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations, and not to complicate them,’’ Biden said.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, meanwhile, called the Israeli move “damaging for sure.’’

“This is a moment of challenge to the efforts led by the United States to get the peace process going again,’’ Fayyad said. “We definitely appreciate the strong statements of condemnation by the administration vis-à-vis this action.’’

Netanyahu joined forces with several right-wing parties to form a governing coalition last year; the interior minister, Eli Yishai, is a member of one of them and a major proponent of Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying that the new housing had been long in the planning, and that it would be built only much later.

Yesterday, however, another Israeli official made it clear that Israel would not be willing to alter its claim to all of Jerusalem, despite the Palestinians’ hope of making East Jerusalem the capital of their own state.

Yuli Edelstein, minister of public affairs for Israel, said in an interview that the timing of the housing announcement was not aimed at harming the visit by Biden.

“But it is also very important to make things clear and not to play make-believe,’’ Edelstein said. “Prime Minister Netanyahu and others have been saying loud and clear that according to Israeli law Jerusalem is sovereign Israeli territory, so no special commissions are needed to build within the municipal borders of Jerusalem. There will not be in the foreseeable future an Israeli government willing to divide Jerusalem. Normally our friends in Washington understand that.’’