Rejecting Obama, U.S. Jews push West Bank settlement

By Tom Perry

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - President Barack Obama may be telling Israelis that building settlements round Jerusalem risks dangerously fuelling Palestinian anger, but some of his fellow Democrats brought the opposite message to the city on Wednesday.

Dov Hikind, a member of New York state's assembly, looked out over Jerusalem's Old City and dismissed the "extreme" view on the matter taken by his party's president.

He urged fellow American Jews to buy homes on occupied land rather than in traditional U.S. vacation spots.

"I'm trying to get a whole bunch of my friends to actually buy," said Hikind during a tour of settlement housing projects for several dozen potential U.S. investors.

"Rather than buying second homes in Florida, we want people to buy in Israel," he said, having watched a foundation stone laid for an extension to the Nof Zion, or Zion View, settlement.

Palestinians, whose leaders declared this week's Israeli government approval for more settlement building near Jerusalem a killer blow to peace, reject Hikind's description of Nof Zion as "Israel," as it lies on occupied land they want for a state.

But his views, shared by significant numbers of American Jews, many of them Democrat voters, are an indication of Obama's difficulties in holding to his demands that Israel halt its expansion of settlements in the interests of a peace agreement.

Hikind's active participation in the settlement policy that has seen Israel move close to a tenth of its Jewish population onto land captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war is not very common among Jews in the United States. But financial support from Americans, some benefiting from U.S. tax relief on charity, is a significant source of funding for West Bank settlements.