Buyers Still Lining Up for West Bank Housing : Israel: Unmindful of controversy, prospective settlers look over brochures on settlements in occupied areas.

In its easy domesticity, there could hardly have been a more vivid example of how Israel’s settlement program on the disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip marches on nonstop even while U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and his peace proposals come and go.

On Monday afternoon at the Moriah Hotel, prospective buyers of homes to be built in the occupied West Bank gathered in a banquet hall to leaf through floor plans and calculate savings from subsidized mortgages. They snacked on cream cakes, sipped coffee and squinted at aerial maps of the budding community of Efrat.

It was a housing fair sponsored by developers at Efrat, a settlement just south of Bethlehem. Efrat, with its population of 3,000 Israelis, is planning to expand and house 30,000 over the next few years and spill onto land that was recently seized by the government from Palestinian owners.

At the Moriah, politics seemed far from the browsers’ minds, even though the hotel is but a stone’s throw the King David Hotel, where Baker spent the night in between efforts to persuade Israel to join peace talks as well as stop settlement activity. Baker, on his sixth shuttle visit since the spring, had left Jerusalem five hours before the housing fair began.

Only once did controversy intrude into the fair. A member of a peace group was discovered collecting information, and a sales person tried to rip the papers from his hand. Another man slapped at the camera being held by a female companion of the peace activist.

“They shouldn’t come here to cause trouble,” a woman said of the peace pair. “We are just here to look and buy.”

After the brief diversion, potential buyers went back to reading an enticing brochure promising that Efrat would be “a great place to live.”

Baker had tried to interest Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a tit-for-tat deal with Arab governments that could have crippled Efrat. Under a plan endorsed by Washington and six other industrialized democracies, the Arabs would lift their worldwide ban on trade with companies that do business with Israel. In return, Israel would freeze the development of settlements, which Washington views as an obstacle to peace.

On Monday, when asked for Shamir’s reaction, Baker told reporters: “He’s not enthusiastic about that approach. That may be an understatement.” Earlier in the week, Shamir flatly rejected the proposal.

The prime minister is also fighting efforts to link increases in U.S. aid to a curb on settlements.

Shamir has been putting more and more money from his cash-strapped government into settlement housing. At the fair, mortgage bank representatives eagerly told clients how, with a combination of government grants and subsidized low-interest loans that cover part of the mortgage, monthly payments on a new home can be brought well below the norm in Israel proper.

New, paved public roads are unwinding across the landscape of both the West Bank and Gaza, many meant to bypass Palestinian residential areas and offer Arab-free transit to Israelis. The Peace Now movement estimates that up to 60 miles of new roads are about to be paved in the West Bank and Gaza, home to about 100,000 Israeli residents plus 1.7 million Palestinians. Last year, Israel paved about 100 miles of new road in Israel proper to serve 4.5 million citizens.

On Monday, press reports said that Israel’s Finance Ministry had released new funds to step up development of the Golan Heights, which Israel won from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War. Unlike the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has officially annexed the Golan, a sparsely settled area in the country’s far northeast corner.

Syria is expected to try to regain the Golan if it gets to peace talks with Israel. Behind settlement of the Golan, as well as the West Bank and Gaza, is a drive to preclude any compromise that would impel Israel to return land to Arabs in return for peace treaties.

In a burst of ambition, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon has begun work on proposals to settle hundreds of thousands of Israelis, and especially new immigrants from the Soviet Union, in the West Bank and Gaza. He also wants to double the Israeli population on the Golan Heights from about 12,000 to 25,000 in three years.

Such eagerness is in full flower at Efrat. Bulldozers have begun carving terraces to hold expected housing on hillsides. New neighborhoods are planned along the ridges and hills leading from already developed Efrat northward to the Palestinian village of Artas, from which the government seized rocky hilltops a few months ago.

More than 40 mobile homes to accommodate Soviet newcomers have been set up. Efrat resident David Beddein, a frequent spokesman on settler issues, says that a bureaucratic snag is keeping the Soviets out of the still-empty trailers. However, it appears that sewer lines and waterworks were not in place when the mobile homes were delivered a few months ago, so it is not clear that they are yet habitable.

In any event, the Efrat brochure boasted that the settlement has “opened its gates for the absorption of new immigrants,” despite an Israeli promise to Washington last year not to “direct” newcomers to the West Bank and Gaza. The Shamir government made the pledge in order to wrest guarantees for housing loans from a reluctant Bush Administration.

In the long run, however, financial enticements may make the housing attractive to all Israelis, promises or no. Besides mortgage breaks, settlers enjoy a 7% reduction in income taxes, experts on settlements say. Plots of land expropriated from Arabs are sold for 5% of assessed value.

The Arab uprising in Gaza and the West Bank slowed development for a while, but about 14,000 Israelis moved onto the land last year, and about the same number are expected to move there this year.

Supporters of the settlement program point out that the first communities in the occupied lands were set up by the Labor Party, which in recent years has been a proponent of peace talks based on land compromise.

The Likud Party, which has ruled Israel or been a partner in government since 1977, speeded up settlement by involving private enterprise. The flavor of the marketplace is visible in recent advertising campaigns.

Glossy color pamphlets promise day-care centers, “clean mountain air,” “activities for all ages” and a “high quality of life.”

In the arid climate and terrain of much of the West Bank and Gaza, swimming pools are popular draws. Efrat boasts a tennis court and a playing field with grass, a contrast to the Palestinians’ dirt sports fields.

Beddein thinks that regardless of government peace moves, the construction at places such as Efrat will go on. “The contracts are signed. The government can’t go back on them,” he said.