Shamir OKs Plan to Integrate Israel and West Bank

The Israeli government took the offensive Tuesday against President Bush’s calls for a halt to settlement construction with a public blessing of a plan designed to integrate Israel proper with the occupied West Bank.

“We have to arise and disperse ourselves in all the area, to settle all the territory . . . to the edge of the horizon,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said.

He spoke to supporters at a ceremony to inaugurate construction of a new community on the border that separated Israel from the West Bank before the 1967 Middle East War.

Although the construction is supposed to be contained within the old border, the project is part of a plan by Housing Minister Ariel Sharon to erase the 1967 frontier, link up communities in Israel with West Bank settlements and preempt talk of land compromise at any proposed peace talks.

“The geographic place is not important. What’s important is that it is set inside the Land of Israel,” Shamir declared. Land of Israel denotes a greater Israel, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and including the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In a later televised interview, Shamir said, “The Green Line does not exist,” referring to the name commonly used for the 1967 border.

The statement is bound to cause further friction with Washington; Israel still refers to the Green Line when it promises not to spend U.S. aid in the occupied land. Until now, Israel had declared the Green Line erased only in Jerusalem. Israel has annexed the city’s Arab districts, which before the 1967 war were on the other side of the fortified border.

The Bush Administration expects that in peace talks, Israel will cede much of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in return for peace with Arab states and the Palestinians. About 1.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza; just over 100,000 Israelis have settled there.

Administration officials have warned that Bush will block approval of guarantees for new loans for Israel if the settlement program goes ahead. Recent massive spending on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip brought on the threat and set off a crisis in relations between the United States and Israel, normally staunch allies. Israel wants the loans to provide jobs and shelter for new Soviet immigrants over the next five years.

Defense Minister Moshe Arens defiantly rejected Bush’s call on Monday evening, saying: “We won’t freeze the settlements at any price. Not even at the cost of the American loan guarantees. . . . The cost of not getting the guarantees is simply higher interest rates. We can put up with that.”

At the Tzur Yigal ceremony, Shamir was joined by Sharon and other Cabinet officials who favor settlements. Flags, speeches and bouncy music gave the event the air of an election rally.

But the campaign was directed against Bush’s position. Taking the rostrum, Sharon compared Bush to British officials in the 1930s, who, in a government white paper, proposed dividing the land west of the Jordan between Jews and Arabs living there: “Every Jew who wishes to build Israel knows who wants to give us a new ‘white paper,’ write it again and dictate it to us.”

Health Minister Ehud Olmert, a confidant of Shamir, declared the 1967 borders obliterated and said that talk of land compromise is irrelevant. “We believe our boundaries are at the Jordan River,” he said.

Sharon has devised a “seven star” program to enhance the viability of West Bank settlements by building towns in Israel that will eventually serve as urban hubs for outlying enclaves.

Critics charge that, beside the evident effort to obliterate the Green Line, psychologically the new communities will undoubtedly spill into the West Bank.

New settlements and expanded old ones also are planned for the Bethlehem area. They will hem in the city, making it difficult for Palestinians to develop land beyond the town’s current boundaries.