Combine this with a government hell-bent on getting its way in regard to territorial expansion and land expropriation and bingo you have more Israeli settlements and more Palestinians without land.

Even as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during her most recent trip to Jerusalem, stated categorically and with unprecedented firmness, that Israel's continued building and enlargement of settlements, at the expense of more land expropriated from Palestinians was unacceptable, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defiantly countered that Israel's policy would continue, irrespective of what the international community says.

And while this was making international headlines, the furious pace of construction of new houses at the settlement of Ofra near Ramallah on the West Bank proceeded with the blessings of an Israeli rabbi, who had conveniently ignored halakha, or Jewish law, which forbids work on the Sabbath as he authorized building to continue seven days a week, including on Shabbat or the Jewish holy day.

The controversial ruling of Ofra's rabbi, Avi Gisser, was aimed at expediting construction of the homes so that they could be occupied before a possible court intervention.

This followed Israeli human rights groups Yesh Din and B'Tselem, and a number of Palestinian residents from the adjacent village of Ein Yabrud, filing a petition with the Israeli High Court on grounds that the homes were being illegally built on private land owned by the Palestinian villagers.

The petitioners demanded that the court activate stop-work orders and demolition orders they maintained had been issued in the past. They also asked the court for a temporary injunction to keep the houses from being hooked up to utilities, pending a decision on the case.

In order to circumvent the court's possible halting of construction, Rabbi Gisser explained that he would override religious prohibition against labor on the Sabbath.

The rabbi argued that his ruling was possible due to the fact that all the construction workers at the site were non-Jews, including Palestinian and foreign laborers.

Halakha prohibits Jews from explicitly instructing non-Jews to perform work for them on the Sabbath.

Gisser said there had been previous cases in which such halakhic sanctions were granted for settlements in the territories.

As for the halakhic reasoning, Gisser cited a Talmudic ruling that says that the commandment to settle the land of Israel overrides the principle of not engaging non-Jews to work on Shabbat.

"Let's be clear about this," Gisser said. "We are talking about work by people who are not Jews, categorically. What violation is there in a non-Jewish laborer working on Shabbat?

"There is no violation, but we have a law that forbids telling a non-Jew to perform a work-related task on Shabbat. Naturally this ban gets overridden – for health reasons, or emergencies, or any other need, and the halakha also states explicitly 'for settling the land,' so that this matter is well-established and clear in the religious law. If this bothers someone, then apparently it bothers him politically more than practically," Gisser told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.

However, Gisser's personal interpretation of the law was condemned by other members of the Jewish orthodox community, with Member of Knesset (MK) Rabbi Avraham Ravitz from the United Torah Judaism party countering that sanctioning construction on Shabbat was "misguided to say the least."

Ravitz explained that any non-Jew was free to work whenever they wanted, provided it was not at the behest of a Jew. He further argued that the long-term situation needed to be taken into consideration saying that setting such a precedent such as this could open the way for more such contraventions of Shabbat.

"We were given the Land of Israel so that we would preserve the Sabbath, and not the other way around. After all, it was not permitted to build the Temple on Shabbat either," Ravitz added.

Nevertheless internal squabbles over religious interpretation, and international pressure and outrage over Israel's continued land-grab and frenzied settlement building aside, it appears nothing will stand in the way of the Jewish State's determination to continue settlement building.