West Bank Settlement Continues Unabated : Israel: But Rabin’s plan to curb rise in construction causes some settlers to predict violence.

No more than a day after the election of Yitzhak Rabin as the next Israeli prime minister, cranes eased two dozen mobile homes into place on a distant ridge of this West Bank settlement outside Jerusalem.

The settlers at the site assured visitors that the placement was purely coincidental and had been planned for months. All over the West Bank, construction on houses continued, roads were being paved and fences put up at the same rapid pace of the past few months.

A confrontation is brewing over the settlement issue and Middle East peace talks in the wake of Israel’s impending change of government.

Rabin is still several weeks away from forming a Cabinet and putting into effect his pledge to curb expansion of settlements in the disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also plans to speed up talks leading to self-rule for Palestinians. Both policies are expected to greatly ease relations with the United States, which opposes the construction and, in reaction, withheld support for development loans to Israel.

But Rabin’s plans have upset settlers. Some of them foresee violence, while others contend that with excess construction already in place, settlement will continue uninterrupted. Still others say that the present size of the Israeli population already precludes Palestinian self-rule as envisioned by Rabin.

“Our presence in the field is enough to stop autonomy,” settler leader Aharon Domb said. “I very much hope that Rabin understands that you can say the word autonomy in general, but it has very little content from a practical point of view.”

“We have to discuss the implications of putting guns in the hands of the Palestinians,” said settler spokesman David Bedein, referring to proposals to give Palestinians a police force.

With this challenge on the horizon, Rabin has been vague. He says he will reduce spending on what he calls political settlements, those deep among Palestinian towns and villages, but continue spending on so-called security settlements near Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley and along the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria.

But he doesn’t define precisely where the lines will be drawn.

“I will not spell out basically what I think security settlements are,” he told a Friday press conference in Tel Aviv.

“I’m going to freeze new settlements and change the proportion of Israeli government money (spent) . . . without the tremendous incentives (the settlers) get that other people don’t.”

A day earlier, he told local reporters, “I don’t mean to dry them out but (rather) not to invest in expanding them, not to throw billions of shekels into construction.”

Construction is far from the only issue at hand. The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir created a wide-ranging program to attract Israelis to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Low-interest mortgages and grants made it much cheaper to buy a home in the backwater of Elon Moreh than in metropolitan Tel Aviv. The West Bank and Gaza are also designated special industrial areas, which offer tax breaks for investors.

Settlers themselves are confident that the communities can continue to grow even if Rabin freezes building. “We have 10,000 empty houses out here, enough to keep filling until Rabin is gone,” said settler leader Yisrael Harel.

Many of the empty units are mobile homes, with some not yet hooked up to utilities, and Rabin will have to decide whether to allow those final steps. Rabin said the number of units in the occupied territories has been exaggerated, but he did not offer figures of his own.

Settlers in general were stunned by Rabin’s victory, bringing as it did the likelihood of a government composed of many strong opponents of the colonization program.

“We are concerned,” admitted Moshe Hersh, a Jerusalem resident who plans to move with his family to the West Bank settlement of Shilo in three weeks. “We wonder what this autonomy talk means. Will we have to drive through areas controlled by Arabs?”

Hersh said he expects housing construction to virtually halt, but not all forms of development. “We will need roads bypassing the Arab villages, especially if they’re going to have autonomy,” Hersh said.

Settlers’ groups have been quick to deny that they would turn to violence to block autonomy. “I don’t think any sane group . . . would give a hand to something like that,” Pinchas Wallerstein, a settler leader, told reporters Thursday.

Another settler leader, however, told the Haaretz newspaper: “A large part of the public will be willing to carry out an adventurous struggle against Rabin. If the struggle fails and autonomy is implemented, there is already talk of using weapons against Arabs.”

Among the militant settler groups living in the West Bank are followers of the late anti-Arab Rabbi Meir Kahane as well as loyalists of Rabbi Moshe Levinger.

Settler spokesman Bedein said that any effort to halt the construction of schools or other services will be met with lawsuits.

The frequent eviction of Arab renters from East Jerusalem houses and their replacement by Israelis is another sticky problem for Rabin. Like Shamir, he pledges that no part of Jerusalem will be surrendered in any peace negotiation, and Labor has traditionally been active in ringing Palestinian districts with Israeli housing projects.