‘Yuppies’ in Thick of Revived West Bank Settlements Issue

This settlement, which is the largest of the new Jewish towns on formerly Arab-held land here on the West Bank of the Jordan River, was founded on subterfuge, pioneer Shimon Ansbacher admits.

That was almost 12 years ago, he recalled in a recent interview, when Israeli law prohibited Jewish civilians from staying overnight in the territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War.

To skirt the rules, Ansbacher and his friends brought a Torah to what had been approved only as a daytime work camp on the site. They turned a trailer into a synagogue, and then justified their permanent presence by saying the holy writings required a 24-hour guard.

The more religious among Maale Adumim’s first settlers saw theirs as a return to the biblical Promised Land; the more nationalistic viewed their presence as the surest guarantee that Israel could never return the West Bank to Jordan or see it turned into an independent Palestinian state as part of a peace treaty. But those pioneers also realized their own limitations.

“We knew it is not enough to draw the elite, the ideologically motivated,” said Ansbacher. “You have to attract the common people.”

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So when the government finally approved a permanent town here, the founders distanced themselves from the settlement movement’s ideological leading edge. They promoted Maale Adumim as an alternative, only six miles east of Jerusalem, where residents could enjoy a suburban life style at government-subsidized, bargain prices.

They attracted a whole new breed of settler, what West Bank expert Meron Benvenisti characterized as Israeli “yuppies”--young urban professionals--lured more by practical than by ideological concerns. And in just four years since the opening of the first permanent housing in the summer of 1982, Maale Adumim has mushroomed into a small city of 12,000 residents and helped redefine the entire sensitive issue of West Bank settlement.

Long out of the spotlight, settlements are back on the Israeli agenda because of Yitzhak Shamir’s succession in October to the premiership. The head of the rightist, pro-settlement Likud Bloc took over from the centrist Labor Alignment leader, Shimon Peres, under terms of the country’s unusual agreement setting up a so-called national unity government.

In a recent meeting, Shamir asked leaders of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement for detailed proposals on settlements and promised high-level government discussions on the subject “in the near future.”

Shamir is expected to come under particularly severe pressure to expand West Bank settlement because of what Peres depicted as a virtual freeze during his two years in office.

But the development of Maale Adumim and a dozen other large urban settlements patterned after it, all within easy commuting distance of either Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, has in the meantime quietly outdated some of the old foundations of the settlement debate.

Now 60,000 on West Bank

Despite the Peres “freeze” on new settlements, for example, the number of settlers on the West Bank increased during the last two years by nearly 50%, to about 60,000 individuals.

Seven hundred families moved into Maale Adumim alone in that period, and virtually all of the population gain was in the big urban settlements. Three out of every four West Bank settlers now live in one of those urban communities, which have developed a momentum of their own, independent of politics.

Increasingly, the new young urban professional settlers, whose interest is to expand existing settlements, are in competition for scarce government development funds with the veteran, ideologically motivated settlers anxious to build more outposts. On the other hand, there are signs that the initially pragmatic yuppies become more ideologically attached to the West Bank over time, thus casting doubt on the old notion that they could easily be persuaded to give up their new homes in the interests of peace if compensated by the government for their loss.

While the pace of Jewish settlement on the West Bank might once have been a useful yardstick by which to measure the political possibilities of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, contended Benvenisti, today “that measure is broken. It doesn’t work any more. The whole question of a freeze on settlement is totally irrelevant.”

Peres and Shamir agreed in forming their coalition that the government would build six new settlements during the first year of its stipulated 50-month term. Beyond that, the agreement called for establishment of 21 additional settlements, approved by previous governments but not yet started, with the precise timing to be fixed by Cabinet decision.

In fact, only four settlements were begun under Peres. The rightist Likud Bloc did not press the issue because “money is short for settlement work as it is for many other spheres of government activity,” according to Minister Without Portfolio Moshe Arens.

While Shamir has pledged to act within the coalition’s settlement guidelines, both he and Arens have also said that Israel’s ailing economy will continue to be a constraint.

A settlement leader, Yisrael Harel, wrote an editorial in Nekuda, a settlement journal, entitled “Salvation Won’t Come From Shamir.”

The ideological leadership of the settlement movement believes that Shamir is vulnerable to pressure, and the editorial campaign is one of their tactics. Others are threatening to establish illegal settlements if the prime minister does not move energetically enough to suit them.

“We’re more important now--he needs us more,” commented Geula Cohen, a member of the Knesset (Parliament) from the right-wing Tehiya (Renaissance) Party. She noted in an interview that opinion polls show her party gaining significantly at Likud’s expense if there were to be elections now.

Cohen said Tehiya’s goal is that Shamir “finish his two years in office with at least 100,000 settlers” on the West Bank, up from the current 60,000. There are 800,000 Palestinian Arabs in the area.

Others are pushing for new settlements in two important West Bank cities currently without Jewish residents.

“The fact that in Shechem (Nablus) and Jericho there is no Jewish presence (represents) a danger that these cities will fall outside Israel’s future control,” warned Gush Emunim settlement activist Benny Katzover.

Yuppie Competition

And the Jerusalem Post reported in mid-October that settlement officials within Shamir’s own dominant Herut faction of the Likud Bloc have prepared plans for what the newspaper called a “massive new settlement drive” in the next two years.

These more ideologically motivated settlement leaders are likely to find themselves in intense competition for government money with the yuppie settlers that they spawned a few years ago, however.

It was the completion of homes and apartments begun under the previous government that kept the population of urban settlements like Maale Adumim growing during Peres’ term, said the town’s council head, Amos Tartman. Beneath the surface, however, a housing shortage has been developing. It is a shortage, Tartman added, which not only discourages new residents but which could soon begin to drive out existing ones.

Most residents are in their 20s and 30s, he explained, and babies are being born here at a brisk rate of 30 to 40 a month. Young couples who came four years ago now have families.

“So in order to get a bigger apartment, they are talking about moving back to Jerusalem,” Tartman said.

Tartman plans to fight for a major expansion of his town to be financed out of the next central government budget.

Meanwhile, there is evidence that West Bank settlement has changed the yuppies just as they have changed the parameters of the settlement debate.

“No more than 10% of the people in Maale Adumim were motivated by nationalist reasons” to come here, said pioneer Ansbacher. But “when they get here, they get some kind of ideology, some kind of local patriotism,” he said. “Something is coming by osmosis.”

About three-quarters of Maale Adumim’s adults vote for the Likud or parties to its political right.

Antony and Suri Ordman, religiously observant immigrants from England who are among the 700 families that moved to Maale Adumim within the last two years, conceded that they have been changed by the experience.

“We came here--nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with religion or anything,” Suri Ordman, a mother of three, said. “I liked the scenery, and we had the opportunity to buy a house for the same price as we could get a three-bedroom flat in Jerusalem.”

But now, she adds, “I realize the importance of living here. Jews are entitled to live in the biblical land (of Israel). And I now do feel that I’m prepared to fight for this bit of land.”

Combined with the increasing integration of the urban settlements into the Israeli mainstream, such attitudes suggest that those trying to stop additional settlements are like the man struggling to close the barn door after the horse has bolted, says Benvenisti, head of the West Bank Data Project.

“Maale Adumim, in everything from firefighting to sewers, is just like Jerusalem,” he said.

Benvenisti has a map of the West Bank in his office with an arc drawn to encompass the big urban settlements around Tel Aviv and another including those near Jerusalem. Along the Jordan River, another shaded area covers the Jordan Valley settlements that even the centrist Labor Alignment says it is not willing to sacrifice for peace. And another shaded section, extending south in the shape of a thumb along the Dead Sea shore, marks an area used by the Israeli military as a firing range.

“What remains is like the filling in a sandwich,” the West Bank expert said. “If this is something that somebody thinks is an offer the Arabs cannot refuse, then I think they underestimate the Arabs.”