Risk to Bedouin Campsite Reflects Mideast Land-for-Peace Dilemma : Demographics: A scramble for real estate appears under way. Palestinians allege Israelis are expanding settlements. Israelis see Arabs inflating Jerusalem’s population.

Mohamed Ahmad Hairsh and 21 other families in the Jahaleen Bedouin tribe rejoiced on the day that Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their historic peace declaration last September.

Their tin shanties weren’t much--a barrio of scrap metal built into mud and rock in the shadow of the largest Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But the huts are the only home these members of the nomadic Arab tribe have known since settling there, members claim, decades ago.

At the very least, they figured, peace meant land--and their right to remain on it despite the sprawl of the Jewish settlement a few dozen yards above them.

Then the bulldozers came. Then the eviction order.

The reason: To make way for 500 new Jewish homes in a $50-million expansion of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement that is as controversial as it is ambitious. The plan that has turned Hairsh’s campsite into a construction site will increase the Jewish presence on strategic Israeli-occupied land at a time when Israel’s leadership is negotiating the return of Arab land for peace.

“What kind of peace is it that takes away the place where I live?” Hairsh asked as the bulldozers churned around him this week. “This is not peace. We see quite the opposite.”

The plight of the Jahaleen is hardly as clear-cut as it appeared this week, when Palestinian human rights groups in Jerusalem used it to illustrate allegations that Israel has accelerated confiscation of Arab lands in and around Jerusalem in the months since it signed the land-for-peace agreement with the PLO--a charge that Israeli authorities promptly and flatly denied.

But the threatened eviction of the Jahaleen is, in fact, symbolic of a deeper debate that resurfaced this week over the future of the strategic Jewish settlements surrounding Jerusalem--indeed, the future of the city. And the Bedouins’ dilemma is emblematic of how, in the months since the historic Middle East peace ceremony on the White House lawn, Jews and Arabs alike have sought to change what both sides call “the facts on the ground”--the use of the land in question--in advance of negotiations on the land’s future.

As settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim have quietly continued to expand, carving new roads, walls and foundations for villas on Israeli-occupied land a few miles outside Jerusalem’s city limits, Israeli legislators have in turn warned of Arab expansionism inside the city.

Embarking on new, large-scale building programs of their own, Palestinians have been erecting hundreds of illegal structures in recent months, inflating Jerusalem’s Arab population and threatening the delicate demographics of a disputed city that the PLO leadership has vowed to make the capital of a new Palestinian state.

Until this week, the land scramble went largely unnoticed, a sideshow to the Israeli-PLO deadlock over implementation of the September agreement for Israeli withdrawal and limited Palestinian autonomy in the occupied West Bank town of Jericho and in the Gaza Strip.

Under that agreement, the land where the expansion is taking place will not come up for formal debate for several years, at least.

At the heart of the land controversy is what Palestinian negotiator Faisal Husseini this week called “the spirit of the agreement,” and fears of emerging policies he said would amount to “tactical breaches” that could “stand in the way of real peace.”

Husseini’s comments came on Monday, after four Palestinian human rights groups released maps, documents and a formal statement charging that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has embarked on a policy of “land confiscation” and “settlement expansion” on occupied land in and around Jerusalem.

The groups alleged that, in the months since the Israeli-PLO agreement was signed, Israeli authorities confiscated 11,500 acres of Arab land for military use, settlement expansion or nature reserves aimed at blocking Palestinian expansion, mostly in the strategic belt surrounding Jerusalem.

The Israeli civil administration in charge of the territories later denied, and presented evidence disputing, the allegation, explaining that the actions taken were merely “implementations” of land decisions made long before the agreement was signed. The actions, a spokeswoman said, will not affect the future use of most of the land.

But the Palestinian groups’ statement contained another, more general allegation that reports in the Israeli press this week appeared to confirm, at least in part.

Referring specifically to Israel’s policy to continue implementing land decisions in the occupied territories, the Palestinian groups concluded: “These practices are based on unpublished plans which aim at entrenching Israeli presence in the West Bank and containing Palestinian presence.

“Since the signing of the Declaration of Principles (Sept. 13), extensive plans have been geared towards realizing an Israeli ‘Greater Jerusalem.’ ”

The following day, the highly regarded Israeli newspaper Haaretz published what appeared to be an outline for such a plan.

The newspaper report stated that Jerusalem’s conservative, newly elected Mayor Ehud Olmert was “leaning toward accepting recommendations from a committee of experts to ‘thicken’ (Jewish) construction in Greater Jerusalem.”

With the report was a map showing the boundaries of that “Greater Jerusalem,” its lines extended so far beyond current city limits that they include the key West Bank towns of Bethlehem and Ramallah, plus the entire Ma’ale Adumim settlement.

Haaretz reported that the committee’s recommendation was based on a belief that only through such settlement and construction could the government counter Palestinian expansion and ensure a Jewish majority in the area in the future.

And it added: “One of the professionals involved in the planning of greater metropolitan Jerusalem said what is being spoken about here is, in one disguise or another, an effort of de facto annexation of the expanse surrounding the city.”

It remained unclear, however, whether such plans have the sanction of Rabin and his Labor Party government, which announced plans to freeze most settlement activity when it took office in 1992, but deliberately exempted several settlements closest to Jerusalem--settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim.

They are exceptions that continue to be official government policy, despite formal protests from both the Bush and the Clinton Administrations and despite the prime minister’s vow last September to negotiate the future of those lands with the Palestinians at a later date.

Ofrah Preuss, spokeswoman for Israel’s housing ministry, said there is no official plan to expand the settlements around Jerusalem, and she denied assertions that the concept of a Greater Jerusalem reflects official policy.

“It is one of 100 ideas until my minister, the prime minister and the Cabinet approve it,” she said.

But Preuss confirmed that the government did approve the 500-unit construction project now under way on the land that Mohamed Ahmad Hairsh and the 22 Jahaleen families refuse to leave.

In keeping with the government’s stated policy, all funds for the project are from private, non-government sources.

The spokeswoman also confirmed that Minister for Construction and Housing Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a close aide to Rabin, formally transferred to Ma’ale Adumim what the government years earlier had declared “state land” to facilitate the expansion project.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Civil Administration, which runs the occupied territories, similarly confirmed that it is the government’s responsibility to remove all obstacles to that expansion--a role it has played both in court and on the rocky hillside the Bedouins refuse to leave.

For Israeli Army Maj. Elise Shazar, the Civil Administration’s official spokeswoman, the controversy over the Bedouins is, like the other cases the Palestinian human rights groups brought up this week, “nothing new.”

The case dates back at least two years, she said. At that time, authorities approached the Jahaleen tribe and offered them an alternate campsite a mile or so away.

Most of the Jahaleen, who depend upon jobs at the settlement for their livelihood, accepted the offer and moved.

But Hairsh and the 21 other families refused, insisting through a series of lawyers and court actions that the alternate site is uninhabitable.

It is covered with boulders, they insisted, and adjacent to Jerusalem’s main garbage dump.

“The government told them, ‘Take the rocks.’ That’s what they’re being offered,” said Israeli lawyer Lynda Brayer, whose Society of St. Yves, a Roman Catholic human rights group affiliated with the Vatican, has taken on the Bedouins’ case for free. “From a health point of view, it’s ridiculous. You don’t put people on a garbage dump.”

Brayer asserted that most of her clients have lived in the camp since the early 1960s, since the Israeli Army declared their traditional grazing lands in the northern Negev region a military zone and evicted several Bedouin tribes from the region.

Maj. Shazar insisted, however, that authorities have aerial photographs indicating that the Jahaleen have been there only years--”not decades.”

No one, not even Hairsh, claims that his tribe has a legal right to be there. Their rights, Hairsh said, are traditional ones that predate by centuries the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Israel defeated Jordan and occupied the West Bank. But with Israeli law against the tribe, Brayer said she recently dropped a petition she filed with the high court seeking to block the families’ eviction rather than wait for a judgment that would force them to move.

“There is no way they can stay there,” Shazar said. “It is not their land. The alternative site is not their land, either.”

The spokeswoman said she doubts that the army will forcibly evict the remaining tribe members, although she stressed that the families are living in the midst of an active construction site from which the government has the legal right to expel them.

Hairsh remains both defiant and realistic.

“What do you want us to do?” asked the 39-year-old father of eight, who worked as a tractor driver for the settlement’s expansion project before his court case cost him his job. “We don’t have a state. We don’t have guns.

“When you look at us, you think we are living at the bottom of the pit of human society. Still, we are proud of our huts. We are proud of this fight to keep them here. But if they come with military power, what can we do?

“We move.”