Squatters Spark West Bank Controversy : Harsh Words Traded After Expansion of Jewish Settlement Is Barred

Israeli Minister of Police Chaim Bar-Lev has accused the squatters of “the utmost gall” and said that if it were up to him they would be removed.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres said he agrees with the substance of his police minister’s sentiments, if not necessarily with his choice of words.

But to the 25 men, women, and children living in eight travel trailers on a rocky hillside in this ancient and contested city’s southwest section, such comments are “ridiculous.”

Bar-Lev’s comment “was a political ploy,” said Shelli Karzen, a 24-year-old Chicago native who, together with her husband and 2-year-old son, was among the original squatters almost seven months ago on the site known as Tel Rumeida.

U.S. Dependence

Speaking to reporters Friday, she said that Peres’ government is “not interested in making any waves” with the Reagan Administration, which opposes additional Jewish settlement on West Bank lands captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. “I think if Israel were at this point financially independent, we’d be hearing different things,” she added, referring to the country’s dependence on U.S. aid.

But even if Peres means what he says, Karzen predicted, any attempt to tear down what she and the others have built here will mean the end of Israel’s national unity government.

As her comments suggest, Tel Rumeida has emerged in recent days as one of Israel’s most explosive political issues.

At least twice in the last three weeks, Jewish settlers in this predominantly Arab city have tried unsuccessfully to expand the Tel Rumeida site. The last attempt took place early Wednesday, when the Israeli army forcibly prevented them from erecting a concrete-block structure on a nearby plot of land.

Abraham’s Grave

Bar-Lev’s remarks came a few days earlier during a visit to Hebron, which, as the burial place of the patriarch Abraham, is considered sacred to both Arabs and Jews. Peres stepped into the fray two nights later when asked in a television interview about his police minister’s remarks.

On top of a basic controversy over the Tel Rumeida squatter community’s legal status, West Bank settlers have turned Hebron’s newest Jewish enclave into the focus of an effort to block any Middle East peace formula that depends on trading occupied land for peace with the region’s Arabs.

The Labor alignment prime minister is on record as favoring a freeze in West Bank settlements in order to facilitate the peace process, but the settlers are counting on the Likud bloc, his coalition partner in the national unity government, to prevent him from slowing the momentum of their movement. Likud remains publicly committed to increased Jewish settlement among the 1.25 million Arabs who live in the occupied territories.

Pressure on Likud

“We want to force the Likud to take a stand, either to push for expanding Jewish settlement or to pull out of the government,” said Otniel Shneller, head of the West Bank and Gaza Strip settlers’ organization.

The specific dispute over Tel Rumeida has its origins in the final days of the Likud government that was voted out of office last July but did not give way to the national unity government until two months later.

Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir, now foreign minister, contends that Tel Rumeida was approved by the previous government, which he headed, in a decision that is binding on Peres as well. But Peres and his Labor alignment colleagues argue that Tel Rumeida is the result not of a Cabinet action, but of a non-binding ministerial committee decision.

While the politicians argue, Tel Rumeida’s determined new residents are sinking ever deeper roots.

A reporter who visited the site two days after the first trailers were hauled here under cover of darkness one night last August was struck by the changes since then.

Tower Watchers

A three-man, 24-hour army guard keeps watch over the settlers from new towers at either end of the plot, which is about 50 yards square and is nestled among Arabs’ stone houses on the hillside.

There are now eight trailers on the site instead of the six there almost seven months ago. Two on the lot’s upper level are separated from the six below by a decorative iron fence.

Power poles and telephone lines are testimony to the fact that the residents now have all the basic conveniences. There are rudimentary water and waste disposal systems, and Karzen’s trailer is warmed by a gas heater.

The latest addition is a wooden swing set for the children and two benches, which were installed Wednesday in the small yard formed by the semi-circle of trailers.

“We consider ourselves to be the suburbia of Hebron,” Karzen said with a smile.

One day, she hopes, Tel Rumeida will be a real neighborhood, with “little houses, a synagogue--whatever any other normal neighborhood has.”

Tranquil Surface

Karzen said relations with Tel Rumeida’s Arab neighbors are “not overly friendly, but neighborly. . . . I don’t know what they’re saying behind our backs or what their deepest concerns and apprehensions are, but on the surface things are OK.”

Karzen’s husband Uri, also from Chicago, is a rabbi, and on the wall of their trailer is a photograph of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who is something of a hero to the settlers of Hebron.

An immigrant to Palestine early in this century, Kook was the first prominent religious leader to say that a Jew could be both religious and a Zionist. Until then, the Jewish national movement was dominated by secular Jews, and even today some Orthodox Jews refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state that they see as a betrayal of the covenant between God and his Biblical chosen people.

But here, religious Jews like the Karzens form the backbone of the settlement movement.

Shelli Karzen insisted that despite their differences with the politics of Peres, Tel Rumeidans and their supporters in three other Jewish enclaves in Hebron and the nearby Jewish suburb of Kiryat Arba do not want to bring down his unity government.

‘Let Things Ride’

That government is important as proof that Israelis can “get it all together” when they have to, she said, and “people are willing to let things ride a little more in the interests of keeping the government together.”

It may take time, Karzen added, but she believes that Peres and his Labor alignment defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, eventually will “be convinced Jews won’t be leaving Hebron, and it’s in (their) interest to help.”

She does not expect any miracles, she said, but “we do have a lot of patience. If within the next six months nothing happens we’re not going to pack up our bags and leave.”

On the other hand, she said with a laugh, “I hope I’m not going to be living (in a trailer) when I’m a grandmother.”