Both Sides Disdain Israel’s New Policy on Settlements : Mideast: Two families--one Palestinian, one Jewish--agree construction limits are divisive.

Two hilltops apart and 15 years ago, the families of Helen Barer and Abu Khawaldeh separately staked their hopes and claims to the same heart of an occupied land--one as pioneers among the occupiers, the other as refugees among the occupied.

The Barers, Jewish immigrants from New York City, were at the cutting edge of the Israeli dream to resettle the biblical homeland of the Jews. They were one of 17 families who founded Bet El in 1977 as the first of dozens of now-controversial Jewish settlements that have mushroomed throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights--Arab territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War.

True, plans for the Jewish settlement were well known to Khawaldeh, a Palestinian who had fled to the West Bank after his village was taken over by Israel in 1948. Yet he too built his first family home on a hillside several miles away from Bet El in 1977, the year his first son, Nidal, was born.

But Nidal, now 15, says today that never in the years he was growing up in the shadow of Bet El could he have imagined that the far-off Jewish settlement would all but swallow them.

Bet El is a dramatic illustration of the effect of a massive, government-sponsored construction campaign that has swelled the settlement until it now embraces 600 families, 10 kindergartens, seven synagogues, two high schools, a college, three hilltops and dozens of new homes still under construction. Bet El has grown to within yards of Khawaldeh’s property line--to the south, the east and the north.

And yet, as the opposing sides in the Mideast conflict prepare for this week’s scheduled new round of peace talks in Washington, the Khawaldehs and Barers--who have never met, who worship different gods, eat different food, speak different languages and hold opposite beliefs on the fate of this embattled land--shared a common enemy: Both are angry with the new Israeli government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and its policy of curtailing construction of Jewish settlements like Bet El, a policy most analysts say was instrumental in President Bush’s decision to release $10 billion in frozen U.S.-Israeli loan guarantees earlier this month.

Although one family believes Rabin has gone too far and the other thinks he will never go far enough, Helen Barer and Nidal Khawaldeh both agree that the government’s new approach to settlements--a key to any future Middle East peace--is more likely to drive their communities further apart through betrayal than closer together through peace.

“He’s playing with fire,” Helen Barer, mother of eight and grandmother of 10, said of Rabin’s pledge to freeze all new construction at “political” settlements such as Bet El.

As she stood among the newest settlement homes, she added: “There’s a waiting list as long as your arm to get in here. . . . There’s a lot of places to build. And that’s what we came here for. This is our country. This is our land. This is our home.”

At the Khawaldeh home--nearby but beyond tall barbed-wire fencing and miles away by road--Nidal’s opinion, echoing that of his parents and his 11 brothers and sisters, was also bitter.

“Rabin said what he said just to get the loan guarantees from Bush. He got them. Now, that’s that,” he said. “Now, the settlements will not stop as Rabin says. They will just keep on building and building and expanding.

“We will stay here,” he added. “What can they do? Many times they tried to buy this house. They threw stones at us, tried to scare us and frighten us away. But we are still here, and, God willing, we will remain here.”

The grass roots of the settlements--which brought more than 100,000 Jews to the West Bank and Gaza under the aggressive policy of Israel’s ultra-rightist former Housing Minister Ariel Sharon--are not the only places where the issue has assumed paramount importance.

Bush and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who forged the historic peace talks among Israel, the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, cited the hectic pace of settlement building when they denied the loan guarantees to the government of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

The settlements also were mentioned when the Administration gave the guarantees to Rabin, Shamir’s more moderate Labor Party successor.

Rabin has pledged to work toward Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories and to use proceeds of the guaranteed loans to curb Israel’s rising unemployment and create new jobs for as many as 1 million Russian Jews who hope to immigrate to Israel in the coming years.

For their part, Palestinian leaders cited what they called Rabin’s “equivocation” on future settlement policy in an angry reaction to the loan approvals.

Accusing Bush of violating America’s role as an impartial peace broker, largely for domestic, election-year considerations, Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi said in an interview that Rabin’s fuzzy settlement policy may have placated the U.S. Administration.

But that policy is responsible for what she said is a list of Israeli repressions in the territories that could torpedo the talks: escalating death-squad murders, demolitions of Palestinian homes, deportation of Palestinian radicals and detention of more than 12,000 political prisoners.

“Right now, they’re playing a very dangerous game of straddling the fence,” Ashrawi said of the Rabin government. “And to me, it’s very dangerous because, while this is the most crucial time for the peace process, it’s also the time when the process stands a better chance of collapsing.

“There is tremendous hostility and anger among the Palestinians,” she said. “They’ve been let down. Many people feel betrayed. The basis for the peace talks is ‘land for peace.’ And if you allow Israel to predetermine the future and the fate of the land by allowing it to confiscate our land and build settlements, then you have negated the very foundations of the peace process. . . .

“And the fact is that the Israelis have not carried out a single concrete step or move to demonstrate good faith.”

Rabin’s distinction between “political” and “security” settlements--he said he would freeze political settlements but allow those deemed necessary for Israel’s security--is a compromise that has infuriated Palestinians and Israelis at both extremes of the issue.

“It’s a very convenient distinction for the Israelis to allow a majority of settlement activities to continue and, at the same time, get the appearance of being firm and decisive and against settlements,” Ashrawi said.

Meantime, Yossi Kofman, Bet El’s leader, voicing the view of many settlement administrators, asserted: “The question is not political or security. This is a fact. Bet El is a fact. All the settlements are a fact. No one can move it. No one can touch it. The government itself decided on Bet El. This was official government policy. And now the government can’t come and say, ‘You don’t exist.’

“The money isn’t the problem. The problem is that today the government has put us out of the consensus.”

The new policy, defining “security” settlements roughly as those in the Jordan Valley on the West Bank’s eastern boundary and those inside Jerusalem’s city limits, will have little effect on settlements like Bet El.

Rabin is permitting completion of more than 10,000 “political” housing units now under construction in the West Bank and Gaza. That alone will add at least 50,000 new Jewish residents to the territories’ estimated population of 1.8 million Palestinians.

The new government has been vague on whether it will permit private funding of future political settlements. Several top officials indicated last week that the ban covers only government-financed construction--a distinction that could add thousands more “political” settlers in the occupied territories.

Activists like Bob Lang, the U.S.-born spokesman for the settlements’ International Relations Task Force, believe that the new policy will have a major impact; the new government distinctions, he asserts, are motivated by political rather than security concerns. To underscore his point, his group printed bumper stickers declaring, “I live in Israel, a Zionist Political Settlement.”

“There just isn’t a difference between security and political settlements,” he said, drawing dots on a map to show that every settlement is a potential launching point for an attack on Israeli cities and towns.

Disagreeing with the Palestinian delegation’s view, Lang insisted that the new government has “done an awful lot of stopping” of new construction.

But, to temper the tone of the ultra-rightist settlers, most of them staunch supporters of Shamir’s opposition Likud Party, Lang added that the settlers will not stand in the way of the peace process.

“If this government or any other government of Israel, through the peace process, decides we’re leaving these places--to create military zones, Jew-free zones, whatever you want to call it--we have no choice but to abide by it. We’re not going to abide by it happily. We’re not going to abide by it quietly. But we’re not going to defy the Israeli army. After all, we are the Israeli army.”

Most settlers look the part. Many are armed with Uzi submachine guns, pistols on their hips. They carry walkie-talkies as they travel through the West Bank between their settlements and nearby Jerusalem. The settlements are surrounded by heavy barbed wire and guard posts. And most settlers insist that the word fear is not in their vocabulary.

“Look, we’ve withstood five years of terror here,” Barer said of the Palestinian uprising known as the intifada.

“Someone here at Bet El was one of the first victims of the intifada , terribly burned from a Molotov cocktail. There are 35 or 40 orphans just from this past winter. On the eve of Madrid--the first round of peace talks--two people were killed near here coming from the Shilo settlement.

“We don’t espouse terror. We don’t condone it. But no one here is afraid. Arms and weapons are just a fact of Israeli life.”

So are the fences like the one encircling the Khawaldeh family’s two-story concrete home. The fences stand as symbols of the vast suspicion and distance that remain between the occupiers and the occupied on the West Bank.

“We can be neighbors,” Barer said as she stood a few yards uphill from the fence behind the Khawaldeh home. “We don’t need fences. The fences are no good. With or without them, we live totally without fear.”

And what of the fears of the Khawaldehs and their other Palestinian neighbors? Barer was asked.

“That’s a phobia,” she said. “Before the intifada , relations were so good we would shop and bank in their villages. I don’t believe they’re afraid. . . . I don’t think they want anything different than we want. They want to be left alone and raise their children.

“They’re here, and we’re here, and both of us really just want to be left alone.”

Young Nidal, who has been stoned by his Jewish neighbors and has seen some classmates captured and imprisoned by Israeli security police and others shot and killed by Israeli death squads, scratched his head and laughed when a visitor asked whether he had ever talked to or played with those neighbors.

“How can I play with my enemies?” he asked, looking over the fence at the modern new settlement homes from his muddy yard filled with the 300 chickens the family depends upon for food.

“I spoke to them only once. They came to the fence one day and asked if they could buy a chicken. I gave them two for free. And then I told them never to come back here again.”