Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit:David Isaac
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds up the umbrella agreement at a signing ceremony at the Ma’ale Adumim Cultural Center, flanked from left by the Construction and Housing Ministry’s Director-General Yehuda Morgenstern and Minister Haim Katz, former Ma’ale Adumim Mayor Benny Kashriel, current Ma’ale Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrach and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Sept, 11, 2025
(JNS) — “We said there will be no Palestinian state — indeed there will be no Palestinian state. This place is ours,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rousing applause at the festive signing of an “umbrella agreement” between the government and Ma’ale Adumim at the Judean city’s Cultural Center on Thursday evening.
The umbrella agreement commits the government to finance the construction of two new neighborhoods and the expansion of a third in a city that hasn’t seen a new neighborhood built in 20 years.
In repudiating a Palestinian state, Netanyahu referred to the most strategically important part of the agreement — the building of a new neighborhood in E1 (“East 1”) — an area, once built, both Israel and the Palestinians agree threatens Arab geographic contiguity, making it far more difficult to establish a viable Palestinian state.
Various obstacles, chief among them international pressure, have left E1, a 12-square-kilometer (4.6 sq. mile) area in Judea, virtually untouched for decades, despite support for construction by every Israeli government starting from Yitzhak Rabin’s in 1994, which first proposed the idea.
It is little wonder then that Ma’ale Adumim, which this year celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding, turned the signing of the umbrella agreement into a celebratory event with music and dancing.
About 500 people, mostly locals, attended, waving Israeli flags and cheering on the prime minister, the city mayor, Guy Yifrach, Minister of Construction and Housing Haim Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, all of whom signed the agreement.
The umbrella agreement provides for 7,000 new housing units, enough to house 30,000 residents. Ma’ale Adumim is currently home to 40,000.
“[T]his is about to realize the doubling of the city of Ma’ale Adumim. There will be 70,000 people here in five years. That will be a huge change,” Netanyahu told the audience.
The funding will be provided via the Ministry of Construction and Housing.
Netanyahu said he was genuinely happy to attend the event, in part because it called up memories of when he first visited the hills of Ma’ale Adumim in 1967 as a young army officer to learn to navigate. “The best place to learn to navigate — it’s here, because the hills were completely naked, and you could see the topography, the mountains, the wadis,” he recollected.
The mayor, Guy Yifrach, had insisted that the umbrella agreement include preferences for reservists to purchase homes at subsidized prices. “It’s our obligation to the young generation, the generation of victory,” he said.
Yifrach said the umbrella agreement, the first for a city in Judea and Samaria, was “historic.” “It is an enormous honor for Ma’ale Adumim.”
International pressure remains strongly against Israeli construction at E1, with 25 foreign ministers from Europe and other countries condemning Israel in a joint statement on Aug. 22 in which they called for the “immediate reversal” of the decision.
However, Israel has held firm.
The Foreign Ministry rejected the joint statement as an attempt to “impose foreign dictates.” It described as racist the demand by the foreign ministers that Jews stop building while placing no similar restrictions on Arabs.
“The historic right of Jews to live anywhere in the Land of Israel — the birthplace of the Jewish people — is indisputable. There is no other nation in the world that has a stronger, longer-standing and better-documented connection to its land than the Jewish people has to the Land of Israel, and this connection and right do not require the affirmation of foreign governments,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Yifrach expressed his view to JNS on Aug. 27 that international pressure would be canceled out by the friendly administration that occupies the White House.
