Israel Lawmakers Hold Sit-in Over Settlements

A run-down apartment in a narrow alley of this city’s bustling casbah Sunday became the focus of a right-wing Israeli effort to revive the stalled Jewish settlement drive in the occupied territories and to undermine the latest U.S. effort to broker a Mideast peace agreement.

Dozens of Israeli army troops in battle gear patrolled the busy alley and stood guard on rooftops around the second-floor apartment where four rightist members of the Knesset (Parliament), already in the fourth day of a protest sit-in, vowed to remain until the divided national-unity government endorses expanded Jewish settlement in this predominantly Arab city of 70,000.

“We’ve come to give expression to the basic, natural right for Jews to live everywhere in the Land of Israel,” said Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a Knesset member from the pro-settlement Tehiya (Revival) Party, which favors annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip lands captured by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967.

“I’ll not move until the issue will move,” added Geula Cohen, another Tehiya member of Parliament.

‘We Can’t Do Anything’

Frustrated Arab shopkeepers, angry at what they saw as a Jewish provocation, stood outside their shops and stalls watching the troops and a stream of Jewish well-wishers. “There is nothing to do--we can’t do anything,” shopkeeper Farid Shawer said with a shrug.

Meanwhile, the government’s so-called inner Cabinet of 10 senior government ministers split 5-5 in a rancorous two-hour debate on the Hebron settlement question Sunday afternoon. The vote puts the immediate problem of the sit-in here back in the hands of the army and leaves unresolved the broader issues.

In a television interview Sunday night, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said that he was shocked by what he termed the misuse of parliamentary immunity by the Knesset members, and he vowed to “continue to act to prevent settlement in the heart of the casbah in the middle of Hebron.”

Rabin added, however, that he does not want to order the army to evict the Knesset members and said that he will instead appeal to the legislators’ consciences to leave voluntarily.

The four members of Parliament moved into the apartment after the army evicted a dozen civilian settlers who occupied the building last week. Even though the settlers claimed to have bought the apartment legally, Rabin ordered them removed on grounds that the government must approve any new settlement in this volatile Arab city.

The Labor alignment, of which Rabin is a member, opposes additional Jewish settlement in densely populated Arab areas of the West Bank, while the rightist Likud bloc, with which Labor shares power in the national unity government, wants expanded settlement activity. Although not a part of the national unity coalition, Tehiya is considered a natural ally of Likud.

Under their coalition pact, Labor and Likud agreed to sidestep the thorny settlement issue. But now, militant settlers represented by Tehiya seek to force the issue.

“Maybe we will push the Likud party to dismantle the government,” said Otniel Schneller, head of the Council of Jewish Settlements for Judea and Samaria (the Biblical names Israelis use in reference to the West Bank).

Schneller was one of a number of settlement leaders from throughout the West Bank who gathered here in support of the the squatters Sunday. They plotted strategy from beige travel trailers in Hebron’s nearby Jewish quarter--one of four Jewish enclaves in this ancient city, which has been in the forefront of the nearly two-decade-long settlement battle.

What caused the settlers to move here now, after nearly a year of a virtual settlement freeze, was ostensibly the knife attack by Arab assailants on a Jewish settler who was walking in the casbah nine days ago. The incident was one several serious attacks on West Bank Jews in recent weeks.

“We feel there is a connection between the very high profile of terrorist activity and the decision to freeze the settlements,” Cohen said. She said that she and her Knesset colleagues occupied the apartment in an effort to break the freeze.

To Israel’s political right, any move, such as the settlement freeze--which suggests that Israel might be ready to exchange occupied land for peace with its Arab neighbors--is only a sign of weakness inviting even stronger Arab pressure.

Cohen cited recent U.S. efforts to broker peace negotiations between a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and Israel--talks that Israel’s political right violently opposes as a step toward loosening Israeli control over some, if not all, of the occupied West Bank. She said the Hebron action is intended to “lift up the flag” of those determined never to relinquish any of the lands captured in 1967.

‘Compromise Is Impossible’

“For us it’s not so important to build new settlements as to show the whole world--(President) Reagan, (Secretary of State George P.) Shultz, the Arabs--that to go into negotiations about peace is fine . . . (but) territorial compromise is impossible,” Schneller declared.

Referring to Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy’s latest attempts at Mideast shuttle diplomacy, Schneller added: “We think the real answer to this is to build more places and to expand the places (where) we’re living today.”

Political backing for the settlers extends well beyond the four Tehiya members of Parliament engaged in the sit-in here. Former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who serves as industry minister in the national-unity Cabinet, visited the protesters Sunday in a show of support. In all, Schneller said, 28 Knesset members have either visited the site during the weekend or promised to do so in the next couple of days.

Likud bloc leader Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s foreign minister, protested last week’s eviction of civilian settlers from the casbah apartment, which is one of several that the settlers claim to own.

“They paid for these houses in full,” Shamir said. “They entered these homes and suddenly the army comes and takes them out of the houses. Why? Doesn’t a Jew have the right to live in Hebron?”

There are 28 Jewish families living in one of the four Hebron enclaves now, and Schneller said that the goal is to have 100 families here within two years. In addition to them, 5,000 more live in neighboring Kiryat Arba, one of the West Bank’s largest and most militant Jewish settlements, which sits on a hill overlooking Hebron.

“We are very disappointed that they are changing the city to a place for demonstrations to show their fanatical points of view,” said Hebron’s ousted Arab mayor, Mustafa Natshe, about what he called the “extremists in the Knesset.”

“They wish to pressure the government to prevent any negotiations and to block the peace process,” Natshe asserted.

Arab merchants in the casbah complained about the impact of the affair on their business.

“We have 60 persons eating from this market,” said Shawer, referring to the extended family which relies on his shop for its livelihood. But “customers won’t come here when they see Jewish soldiers. They prefer to buy outside.” As long as Jews live in the casbah, however, there will be soldiers there to protect them, the merchants said.