Roofless Houses Reveal Predicament for Rabin : Israel: Leader must decide what construction to freeze as he deals with Shamir’s legacy in occupied lands.

The variety of houses in many different stages of completion in this expanding West Bank settlement offer a vista of the difficulties faced by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he decides what construction to freeze in the occupied land.

To the left of the hilltop entryway to the settlement, workers plaster a row of roofless houses. Below, others are putting windows on houses already covered by red-tiled roofs. On an incline above, completed houses stand empty. On another crest, dozens of mobile homes and prefabricated houses await owners.

Down the dusty road, Arab laborers lay the foundation of tiny cottages-to-be. Beyond, a machine pulverizes rock to prepare the lots for more neighborhoods and roads to reach them.

The activity Wednesday is the legacy left by the expansion-minded government of Yitzhak Shamir to Rabin, who has pledged to scale back the building. But the new government is in a predicament: Although it might be relatively easy to halt construction not yet under way, how much of the work like that going on at Eli should be brought to a halt? Just what constitutes a settlement freeze, anyway?

Much is at stake for Israel. The United States is dangling support for development loans as an incentive to stop the building. On the Egyptian leg of his Mideast shuttle mission, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who visited Israel earlier in the week, said Rabin has promised “severe and substantial reduction of settlement activity by Israel.”

Rabin has promised to alter the national priorities in order to fuel economic growth. But it is not yet clear how much savings he can sponge from the settlement program. Every increase in the Israeli population adds pressure against compromise in Middle East peace talks that are expected to resume shortly.

Rabin is offering self-rule to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shamir designed the settlement program to head off Palestinian authority over the area.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are watching Rabin’s moves with skepticism. Peace negotiators have been accused of selling out the chances of Palestinian independence by their willingness to talk peace while the settlement program accelerated. About 1.7 million Palestinians live in the disputed land.

Estimates from both settlers and their opponents say that there are about 10,000 houses under construction in the occupied land, mostly the West Bank. That number would accommodate another 40,000 or so settlers, an increase of more than 35% over the present Israeli population.

If the goal is merely to freeze the settlement program in place, Rabin can probably do it without much effort. He has already indicated that no new contracts will be signed.

If, however, the goal is also to essentially freeze the population as is, that may be more difficult and costly, observers say.

“This is the success of Shamir,” lamented Dedi Zucker, a member of Israel’s Parliament and a committed opponent of settlements. “He was able to build at full speed and has left Rabin big problems.”

Part of the problem is money: Many building contracts specify penalties if the government cancels them in midstream. And part of the problem is political: Stopping settlement in its tracks poses symbolic problems in a country built, after all, on settlement movements during much of the past century.

Rabin’s housing and finance ministers are expected to meet today and announce a freeze on planned houses under contract but on which construction has not yet begun. There are about 8,500 housing starts on the books for which work is not yet under way, Israel Radio said.

However, a decision on the 10,000 houses in progress is not expected soon. It is subject to a Cabinet debate that will undoubtedly be intense, Zucker predicted.

On Wednesday, Peace Now, a leftist movement that opposes settlement, published its housing figures and said that most of the 10,000 starts are near the final stage of construction.

Peace Now urged the government to stop the building anyway and argued that it will cost less to pay off the contractors than to finish the work. It offered no details in support of that argument.

The group also urged the government to cancel incentives for buyers in order to slow demand for West Bank and Gaza housing.

At Eli, settlers seemed to think little would change in the near future. “All the building is continuing, and all the homes have been sold,” said Lior Shtul, who added that 50 new families will move in next month and another 100 in December. “Construction may stop at other places, but not here.”

Eli sits above a main north-south highway in the West Bank, but given its distance from the Israeli border, it would not seem to qualify for Rabin’s still-secret list of “security settlements” that he wants to keep developing.

Shtul thought differently. “We are defending Tel Aviv from here,” he asserted.

Arab workers busily laying the foundations of new cottages favored a freeze even though it might cost them their jobs. “I’ll just go work in Tel Aviv,” said Youssef Hassan, an Arab citizen of Israel.

Hassan predicted that construction would stop for a time but then would resume if Israeli-Arab talks broke down.