MORE FRENCH JEWS TO SETTLE IN PALESTINIAN LANDS

Tel Aviv, 26 Shafar 1435/29 December 2013 (MINA) – The Israeli government intends to announce a three-year plan aimed at attracting more French Jews to settle in the 1948 occupied Palestinian lands.

According to Israeli newspapers. They said the plan would be funded by the governments of Israel and France. ALQASSAM quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

Maariv newspaper said the government would start to carry out its plan during the first four months of the next year in order to increase the number of Jewish immigrants after scores of Israeli settlers emigrated from Israel to the US, Britain and Canada during 2013.

It added that the relevant ministries formed a few months ago a team of specialists to determine the reasons that prompt a large segment of Jews from around the world to choose to live in countries other than the 1948 occupied Palestinian lands.

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In order to divert the migration of those Jews into the 1948 occupied lands, the team suggested that the government should provide them with jobs and homes and accept them in educational institutions.

More than 3,000 French Jews will have moved to Israel by year’s end, an annual tally reached only four times in the past, most recently in 2005. The causes for the surge are said to be the community’s deep attachment to Israel, rising anti-Semitism and the financial crisis gripping French economy.

Currently, Israel does not recognize a host of French diplomas, including those of optometrists, opticians, physiotherapists and tax consultants. “This is a stumbling block to aliyah,” Ariel Kandel, the Jewish Agency for Israel’s chief of operations in France, told earlier this month. “As it stands now, I need to advise people in those professions not to come.”

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In addition to recognizing more diplomas from France, the ministry plans to offer special assistance for French Jews with job placement, housing and education needs for children, Ma’ariv reported.

Many French Jews who want to emigrate choose Britain, Canada or the United States over Israel, according to the ministry, which estimates that Israel has the potential of attracting 42,000 French Jewish immigrants by 2017.

The tenders for over 1,000 homes in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem were proof that Israel “was not serious in the negotiations,” Palestinian negotiator Mohammed Shtayeh said in a statement.

He charged that Israel “aims through this condensed settlement activity to destroy the basis of the solution called for by the international community, which aims to establish a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.”

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Shtayeh said the new tenders were “conditions and new facts on the ground” that Israel was setting in order “to determine the negotiations in whichever way suits it best.”

The Palestinian negotiator called for Washington, sponsoring the talks, to take “a firm and clear position to rein in this Israeli attack on the West Bank and especially Jerusalem.”

Israel’s housing ministry said earlier it would be publishing tenders for 793 units in east Jerusalem and 394 elsewhere in the West Bank.(T/P012/P04).

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)