← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Centinel
Thread ID: 6082 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-04-10
2003-04-10 09:05 | User Profile
From United Press International, available online at: [url=http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030409-085857-3896r]http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=200304...09-085857-3896r[/url]
**Feature: For Israeli settlers, no retreat **
By Joshua Brilliant From the International Desk Published 4/9/2003 6:40 PM
HARASHA, West Bank, April 9 (UPI) -- The two-lane highway to Harasha, an Israeli settlement atop a hill in the West Bank, is being upgraded these days. Wires stick out of gray blocks along isolated sections of the road where settlers have been attacked before. Soon will come poles, atop them electric lamps, to light up pockets where travelers fear Palestinian gunmen may hide.
Farther along the road forks. One route leads to Arab villages and the town of Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority's seat of power in the West Bank. On the settlers' maps it is marked as a "red road," off-limits to Israelis.
The other fork is a dead end for Palestinians. It leads to a gate, heavy steel and painted yellow, beyond which are several Jewish settlements. It rolls slowly aside its electrically operated track to let through an armor-plated bus on its way to Harasha.
After four years of existence, the site is little more than a cluster of white mobile homes, two mounted water tanks, a crowded cellular phone antenna, and a kindergarten whose swings are planted in a bed of imported grass. Thirty Israeli families live there.
It is one of many sites settlers established in recent years. The Israeli government formally stopped authorizing new settlements in 1991, but winked or looked the other way as some 100 new sites sprouted on controlling hills and beside highways.
Ariel Sharon, who is now prime minister, had a hand in it. During the Israeli-Palestinian talks at Wye Plantation, in 1998, he feared the then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was about to cede land to the Palestinians. Sharon, who was a member of Netanyahu's Cabinet, urged supporters to run and grab hilltops -- and ran they did.
The dovish Peace Now movement, which tracks settlement activity and supports a Palestinian state as a pragmatic solution to hostilities, discovered Harasha in October 1998, about a mile from an existing settlement Talmon.
While he was still foreign minister, Shimon Peres moved to shut down several of the illegal settlements in the weeks before he and his Labor Party quit Sharon's government in October 2001.
Now Harasha and other settlements are facing a renewed challenge: publication of a step-by-step plan, the so-called roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace, which the United States has drawn up with the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.
Washington waited for Israel to elect its new Knesset and form a new government. That is done. Now it is waiting for Palestinian Prime Minister-designate Mahmoud Abbas to form his Cabinet. That is due shortly. Then, as U.S. and British leaders have promised and President George W. Bush affirmed again Monday in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the roadmap will be rolled out.
One of its elements provides for a settlement freeze. "As progress is made toward peace, settlement activity in the occupied territories must end," Bush has declared. That, however, is not what the settlers have in mind.
"The roadmap is worse than the Oslo accords," declared Adiel Mintz, secretary-general of the Yesha Council, which represents the West Bank and Gaza Strip settlers. Mintz alleged that Abbas has "called to continue murdering settlers. Imagine, that's the administrative reform (the Palestinians are planning). He is going to head the system!" Abbas, more commonly known as Abu Mazen, is the Palestinian architect of the 1993 Oslo accords that, for Palestinians, exchanged recognizing Israel for greater autonomy.
Mintz based his comments on an interview Abu Mazen gave a London-based Arab daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat, on March 3. In the interview the future prime minister reportedly said that if the Israelis come to establish a settlement in one's own land, one has a right to use all means for defense, including the use of arms.
So far the settlements have been growing, despite the intifada, or uprising -- some through defiance by Israeli activists or the families of victims of militant attacks, others with their draw of their typically cheaper housing. About 185 settlers have been killed since the uprising began in September 2000, at the same time as the number of settlers rose by 11 percent to 226,000, according to Mintz.
Peace Now settlement monitor, Dror Etkes, estimated the number of settlers at 205,000 to 215,000, not including residents of East Jerusalem. "Thousands have left," Etkes said.
At the edge of Harasha, settlers pointed to the gray skeletons of Palestinian houses on an opposite hill. The site was the very edge of the Palestinian semi-autonomous territory, areas where Arabs may build without Israeli permission. Their project reportedly stopped for lack of funds.
Dvir Cohen, responsible for the settlers' development projects in and around Harasha, brushed aside talk of a government freeze.
"Throughout the years there was another edict, and another, another threat and another, and we're continuing forward," he told United Press International. If the government will freeze allocations, "we'll get (money) from other sources. If they won't build for us ... we'll (continue) living in caravans, many families. We'll continue populating (this site)," he stressed.
Two ultra-orthodox communities marked the most dramatic population growth. It is partly because of a particularly high birth rate among ultra-orthodox Jews, but also because homes in the West Bank are cheaper than in Israel proper.
Modiin Ilit's houses are built of Jerusalem stone. The streets seem clean. The town appears to be several notches above Israeli working class neighborhoods, even though seven out of every 10 ultra-orthodox males study religious texts rather than work. Families require government aid.
"You see this hill? In a year or two it will be full," Mintz said.
"Twenty five thousand families will live here by 2020," a municipal report predicted. Five thousand families live there now.
The anticipated roadmap did not perturb Jacob Guterman, mayor of Modiin Ilit. The town is 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) east of an old no-man's land that separated Israel from the West Bank and Guterman was sure that eventually Modiin Ilit will be incorporated into Israel proper. The old boundary line "is unclear. Everybody understands there will be corrections," he insisted.
Benzi Liberman, who heads the Samaria Regional Council where some 60,000 settlers live, noted that all government funding was frozen a decade ago when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. Nevertheless, "There was construction under Rabin. It's not that we didn't suffer, groan. We suffered. We groaned, and -- we built," Liberman told UPI.
Sharon these days is trying to defer any moves to curb settlement activity. He is careful not to anger the Bush administration by flatly saying no to shutting such projects down. He just says: Not now.
The settlement issue came up at a Cabinet meeting Sunday. A participant who consulted his notes quoted Sharon as having told the ministers: "This is an issue that as far as Israel is concerned should be discussed only at the stage of (negotiating) the permanent settlement with the Palestinians. ... Under no circumstances do we see this subject as one that should be discussed today."
When asked point-blank about illegal settlements in the West Bank, he replied: "Let's not go into what is legal, what is not."
Liberman, the Samaria Regional Council head, told UPI Sharon could accept a slowdown in settlement activity, but not a freeze. Asked whether Sharon had said as much, Liberman countered obliquely that "there are conversations which one may talk about."
The intifada seems to have sapped settlers' energies, however. Every night the Shabak, Israel's Security Agency, puts at least one settlement or group of settlements on alert for a possible terror attack, Liberman said. Residents are ordered to get indoors, lock up and turn off their lights.
It's particularly hard on the northern West Bank settlements. Women at Homesh, along the Jenin-Nablus road, have not left the site in a year and a half. Only the men go to work, and only to work. Their children who are older students do not want to come home because it is too dangerous, Liberman noted.
"Believe me, driving from Shavei Shomron 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) to Homseh is frightening. There are no bulletproof vehicles there. People don't come, don't go," he said.
And some Israelis, those who are not settlers, complain about the resources in soldiers and equipment that settlements consume in the midst of the country's battered economy and security situation.
Every settlement that loses members in attacks by Palestinian guerillas requires intense support by Israeli authorities as well as settlement families for some six months. Repeated attacks compound the strain. In Ittamar, for example -- southeast of Nablus and the target of several recent attacks -- the regional council is installing steel doors and putting bars on the windows. It is also building a fence around the settlement.
A recent solution, reached with the government, calls for erecting touch-sensitive fencing some quarter mile from the settlements' houses. The distance should give residents time to take up positions. But settlers do not have enough money to complete the project and many settlements are still surrounded by standard structures -- what the army calls "stupid fences" -- that can be quietly breached.
2003-04-10 11:23 | User Profile
Russian television is theorizing that Bush will now pressure Sharon into dismantling the settlements and declaring a Palestinian State in exchange for war on Syria and building a pipeline from Iraq's northern oil fields through Syria to northern Israel.
It sounds like wishful thinking to me.
Walter
2003-04-11 03:21 | User Profile
Two ultra-orthodox communities marked the most dramatic population growth. It is partly because of a particularly high birth rate among ultra-orthodox Jews,** but also because homes in the West Bank are cheaper than in Israel proper.
Modiin Ilit's houses are built of Jerusalem stone. The streets seem clean. The town appears to be several notches above Israeli working class neighborhoods, even though seven out of every 10 ultra-orthodox males study religious texts rather than work. Families require government aid.**
Thatââ¬â¢s U.S. government aid. Our taxes support these useless high birth-rate land-grubbing layabouts.
Enough! Someone file a theft of services class action suit on our behalf.
2003-04-11 15:07 | User Profile
These settlements are lush fortresses paid for by americans
[img]http://home.att.net/~suefat/skunk/Settxxle1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://home.att.net/~kimmel_a/Settlers/Settle2.jpg[/img]
2003-04-11 15:26 | User Profile
How many Palestinian wells did they have to drain to fill that pool?