Israel Maps Out Major Plan for New Settlements

While leaders here and in Washington debate who is to blame for the failed effort to get Middle East peace talks started, the Israeli government is wasting little time in sketching out its plans for developing the contested West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Housing Ministry, headed by hawkish Ariel Sharon, a former army general, has employed a team of architects and town planners to work out an ambitious settlement scheme to populate the occupied land with hundreds of thousands of Israelis--not in small enclaves like the present settlement effort but in towns and cities along new and yet unbuilt highways.

“We were told to think big. They don’t want any dots on the map. They want urban centers,” said an architect working for the ministry.

“The Housing Ministry people said to think in terms of 4 million Jews on the West Bank and Gaza. They say that’s how many Soviet immigrants are coming. I don’t know where they got the figure,” said a town planner. Both he and the architect requested anonymity.

The feasibility studies appear to foreshadow a major shift in Israel’s evolving strategy of settling the land, which is currently home to 1.7 million Palestinians and about 100,000 Israelis.

After Israel took over the land during the 1967 Middle East War, successive governments have embraced a series of plans for settlements, all of which left at least some large areas that would be wholly Palestinian. The new concept would put Israeli towns and settlements cheek-by-jowl with Palestinian towns and villages in a tangle that would make separation of the Israelis and Palestinians unfeasible.

The Bush Administration considers Israel’s surrender of at least some of the West Bank and Gaza territory necessary for this country to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors as well as with the Palestinians. The new approach gives weight to frequent utterances by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Israel intends to hold onto all of the land.

“I don’t know if these plans will be politically possible. But there is enough land for new settlements,” an architect said as he studied a large map of a West Bank quadrant.

Big blue splotches on the map marked land confiscated by or controlled by the Israeli government. Land designated as likely targets for seizure were marked in yellow. Military bases were red. The architects’ goal was to fill in the blanks between the colors--as if by doing so, they could form the basis for a viable settlement.

“For instance, here is the planned intersection of a major highway,” the architect said, pointing to a spot on the West Bank. “There is some state-owned land nearby. It can be enlarged and form the basis for a major town.”

The planners were asked to provide details of such services as sewerage and jails to be constructed on the occupied terrain.

A Housing Ministry spokesman did not return telephone calls to discuss the subject.

The Shamir government has stepped up land seizures and construction on existing settlements as fulfillment of its platform, which pledged to expand Israeli colonization of the West Bank and Gaza.

This spring, four trips to the Middle East by U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III were cues for quiet arrivals of mobile homes or notices to Palestinians of land seizures that will be the seeds of new government-backed settlements. Proponents said this activity was meant to tell Baker that Israel has rejected President Bush’s land-for-peace formula.

Although altering the population mix of land occupied during war violates the Geneva Conventions, the United States has limited itself to verbal criticism of the program.

Evidently bewildered by the brash settlement activity and the parallel fading of prospects for peace talks, Baker has begun to point to scapegoats within the Shamir government.

Several weeks ago, State Department officials in Washington put out word that Sharon was trying to sabotage the peace process. Then last week, according to reports reaching Jerusalem, Baker told a group of American Jewish leaders that an assistant of Shamir’s was undermining the U.S. effort.

Newspapers here surmised that he meant Yosef Ben-Aharon, who is Shamir’s top aide. They said that when Ben-Aharon visited Washington in early June, he reneged on a written agreement between Baker and Shamir over who could represent Palestinians at a proposed peace conference.

In any event, the notion that the tough-minded Shamir is a pawn for any of his aides would come as a surprise to most Israelis. Shamir himself went out of his way Sunday to scotch the presumption.

“I make the decisions, not my aides,” Shamir told his Cabinet, according to state radio.

Shamir has blamed the Arab world for the stalemate in getting peace talks under way. It is up to the Arabs to sit and talk with Israel without preconditions, he said.

Settlements have nothing to do with it, Shamir contended, insisting that Arab hostility to Israel is the main source of friction in the Middle East.