Israel Plans New West Bank Settlement : Development: The project is the first in 2 years. It underlines Shamir’s policies.

Israel punctuated remarks by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who said that settlements have nothing to do with a new U.S.-led peace plan, by revealing Thursday the start of construction of its first new settlement on the occupied West Bank in two years.

The announcement, made on Israeli television and by a right-wing member of Shamir’s ruling coalition, came just a day after Secretary of State James A. Baker III left Israel with an agreement in principle for Israeli participation in a regional peace conference.

During the visit, Baker voiced Washington’s opposition to further settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where 1.7 million Palestinians live under military occupation. The Bush Administration, basing its plans for peace on an Israeli surrender of at least some of the land captured in the 1967 Middle East War, considers the settlements a prime obstacle.

The new community is being funded by Gush Emunim, a militant nationalist group that has developed several settlements, according to reports in Israeli newspapers. Settlement construction required Defense Ministry approval. Land has been cleared near an Arab village called Haris, an area where the government has recently confiscated land.

A government spokesman, in confirming the new settlement, said that it was approved in 1984 and therefore has nothing to do with the present government’s policy. In 1989, a new settlement was hastily put up shortly before Shamir visited Washington and broached a peace plan based on holding elections for Palestinians. Shamir aborted the plan when it came time to meet a Palestinian delegation in order to arrange the vote.

Shortly after Baker left Israel, Shamir dismissed American complaints that settlements block peace. “There is no relation between the settlements and negotiations between us and the Arabs,” he told Israeli television. “It’s an internal Israeli matter.”

His chief aide, Yosef Ben-Aharon, insisted that Baker and Shamir “agreed to disagree” on continued expansion of Israeli colonies in the West Bank and Gaza, where 90,000 Israelis now live. “Israel will continue settlement,” he said, “and the United States will continue to express its dissatisfaction.”

Israel rejected a suggestion by Baker that Arab states might lift an economic boycott of Israel in return for a freeze on settlements, Israeli officials said. Housing Minister Ariel Sharon has promised to build 13,000 new houses on the disputed land and is preparing mobile homes on occupied land for new Soviet immigrants.

Sharon is also building communities along the border that marked Israel’s frontier before the 1967 war. Analysts are concluding that Sharon plans to link each Israeli community with a West Bank settlement in order to make the settlements suburbs of Israeli towns and not isolated enclaves, as many current settlements are.

Baker’s visit has already produced a wave of conflicting reports and interpretations within the fractious Israeli government. Foreign Minister David Levy listed nine points he said the United States and Israel now agree upon. Among them, according to Levy, was a commitment that Palestinians from Arab neighborhoods annexed by Israel would not be part of the negotiating team in order to head off Arab claims to Israeli-annexed parts of Jerusalem. Officials in Baker’s entourage have denied such a commitment.