Shamir Says Soviet Jews Can Settle Anywhere, Including Territories

A defiant Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir today defended the right of Soviet Jews to live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, saying Israel as a democracy could not keep new immigrants from the occupied territories.

Shamir’s reply came after Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev threatened to limit the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel if they continue to settle on land seized from the Arabs in the 1967 Middle East War.

Speaking in Washington after the summit with President Bush, Gorbachev said some Soviets have urged the government to “postpone issuing permits for exit” unless Israel stops Soviet Jews from moving to the territories.

Israeli officials said, however, that international and internal pressures probably would keep Gorbachev from carrying out the threat.

The occupied lands--where Palestinians have been in revolt against Israeli rule for 29 months--are home to 1.7 million Palestinians and 70,000 Jewish settlers. Arab nations don’t want large-scale settlement of Soviet Jews there.

Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union is at an all-time high. About 35,000 Soviet Jews have arrived in Israel so far this year and the figure is expected to reach as high as 150,000. About 1 million Soviets are seeking permission to emigrate.

Shamir told Israeli manufacturers in Tel Aviv that his government’s policy is to allow Jews to live anywhere in “the land of Israel,” including the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank.

“If the U.S.S.R. of President Gorbachev does not think she can today tell her citizens where to live . . . it is as clear as the sun that we, as followers of freedom and democracy, cannot limit this category or another of settlers.”

Benjamin Begin, a leading member of Shamir’s right-wing Likud bloc, told Israel radio that Israelis must fight for the right of Jews to live in the occupied territories.

Unless they do, he said, Jews would have to defend their right to live in Jerusalem’s Jewish suburbs, land annexed by Israel. Most Western countries have not recognized that annexation.

“We must persuade the international community not to place in doubt the right of any Jew to settle anywhere in his homeland,” Begin said.

Although Israeli officials have defended the right of Soviet Jews to settle in the territories, they have also said few have chosen to do so. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said only about 200 of the Soviet Jews who have arrived this year moved to the West Bank and Gaza.

Simha Dinitz, head of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, which handles immigration, said that since April, 1989, 285 Soviet Jews have moved to the territories.

But the Hebrew daily Haaretz today quoted a Jewish Agency document as saying that in the 12 months ending March 31, 1,300 new immigrants, most of them Soviets, had moved to the Jerusalem suburbs.