Israelis Open Settlement on Golan Heights

Just hours after the Mideast peace talks adjourned in Madrid, Israeli hard-line leaders ignored Western sentiment and opened a Jewish settlement Monday on the Golan Heights, land that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War.

Present at the ceremony for the Kela settlement, overlooking Upper Galilee, were Housing Minister Ariel Sharon, Agriculture Minister Rafael Eitan and Science Minister Yuval Neeman.

Sharon and Eitan, former generals, and Neeman, a leader in Israel’s nuclear program, all opposed Israel’s participation in the Madrid talks. They insist that Israel must increase Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, despite opposition from the United States, the United Nations and the European Community, which contend that Israel’s actions complicate negotiations with its Arab neighbors.

Under Israel’s controversial policy of building in onetime Arab lands, more than 100,000 settlers have moved into the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. The settlements are seen by their promoters as a way of forcing any Israeli government to hang onto the occupied territories, rather than returning all or part in a peace accord.

In dedicating the Kela community, once a paramilitary base that now is to house 40 emigre families from the Soviet Union, Sharon denied that the timing was provocative, declaring: “The real provocation comes from Syria. They are a gang of murderers, worse than the Nazis.”

He also attacked the Syrians for their action in Madrid of brandishing a wanted photo of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir from the days when he was sought by British authorities. Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh waved the poster to implicate Shamir, then 32, in what Shareh asserted was Israel’s history of terrorism, specifically citing the 1948 murder of Sweden’s Count Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator in what was then Palestine.

During the attack on Shamir in Madrid, “our people sat in their places like fossils,” said Sharon.

Shamir, 76, himself declared on Monday that he has nothing to answer for during his days as a leader of the Stern Gang, which attacked the British and Arabs. “I have always said--I will always say--I am proud of everything I have done in my past,” he told reporters. “I do not disown a single step.”

But he did not reply to specific questions about Bernadotte and the 1944 assassination of British negotiator Lord Moyne. “I did not tell you anything other than this--that I am proud of what I have done, and I do not owe an accounting to anyone, and certainly not Mr. Shareh,” Shamir said.

The Stern Gang, headed by Abraham Stern, was a breakaway militant faction of the Irgun, a Jewish underground group that conducted bombings and killings against the British, who governed what was then Palestine.