MIDEAST : Some Settlers Prepare to Leave as Palestinian Autonomy Nears : Israelis who came for a better life say they won’t fight.

Even as their neighbors vow their determination to remain in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to fight if necessary to defend those communities, some of the 130,000 Israeli settlers are starting to pack, at least mentally, and are preparing to leave their homes of a decade and more.

“We came here for a better quality of life, not for ideology, and when that quality goes so will we,” said Tzvika Levy, 33, a civil servant who lives with his wife and their three children in Karnei Shomrom, a Jewish settlement of 4,970 about 20 miles northeast of Tel Aviv in the West Bank.

“There are thousands of families living across the ‘green line’ (the old demarcation between Israel and Jordan) for ideological reasons, but there is a not insignificant nucleus who moved to the occupied territories simply for the quality of life,” Levy added. “Most would rather leave now than wait five years.”

Opinion surveys conducted among settlers show 30% of the 30,000 families are willing to leave for adequate compensation. Levy said his informal canvass of residents in his own and nearby settlements suggests the proportion may actually be half. Political scientist Ehud Sprinczak at Hebrew University has put the ultimate total at perhaps 70%.

Ron Nachman, mayor of Ariel, one of the largest West Bank settlements with a population of 12,900, acknowledged that the number of families planning to move is increasing because of the uncertainty over the future.

“It’s completely natural,” said Nachman, who is also a Parliament member from the opposition Likud Party. “People feel that the government has left them without any security, has abandoned them and is endangering their very lives. It’s natural some people think that before the ship sinks they should jump off.”

Declaring it “inconceivable that Jews would live under an Arab government,” Nachman advocates a series of Israeli and Palestinian sectors in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, so that each group could live in autonomy and the Jewish settlements could be linked together amid the 2 million Palestinian residents.

Without such a resolution, Nachman predicted all 144 Jewish settlements--even those founded in a religious and Zionist reclaiming of the biblical Land of Israel--will go.

But leaders of the settler movement, determined not to yield territory they view as Israeli, consider such talk defeatist. They are pushing plans to double the number of settlements and recruit more families for them.

“The movement to the territories is much greater than the movement out despite the 18-month-old freeze on new housing and construction,” said Moshe Feiglin, head of This Is Our Land, a new group based in Karnei Shomrom, where Levy lives.

Yet many settlers are discussing the amount of compensation they would need to resettle within Israel--perhaps $50,000 a person. The government is beginning to make its own confidential estimates, which reportedly run from $5 billion to $10 billion, of what it might cost to move the settlers and rehouse them.

Yossi Katz, a Parliament member from the ruling Labor Party, has drafted legislation calling for compensation for any Jewish resident of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who wants to leave. He says he gets scores of telephone calls and letters each day inquiring when the plan will take effect.

“People want to leave the territories now and not wait five years until there is a final resolution of their future,” Katz said.

The Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, rejected a Likud bill this week on compensation based on similar legislation for Israeli settlers evacuated from the Sinai Peninsula when it was returned to Egypt in 1982. It acted at government insistence the bill was premature and would upset negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.