Israeli Peace Group Says Settlers Should Come Home : Mideast: Report offers a phased plan. It would leave no Jews in occupied lands after five years.

Israel’s leading peace group urged Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Monday to bring home 30,000 Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to avert widespread bloodshed during the Palestinian self-government there and to remove all settlers in five years.

Arguing that Israel’s 144 West Bank and Gaza settlements are both a target for Palestinian radicals and a source of Jewish extremists, Peace Now said their continued presence, “fostering violence and bloodshed between settlers and Palestinians,” endangers peace prospects.

As Israel turns over control of Gaza, the West Bank district of Jericho and eventually all the West Bank to a Palestinian administration, there will be more clashes, the group said, asserting that “there is no possibility for coexistence between the two populations, especially not under Palestinian rule.”

Peace Now leader Tzaly Reshef warned: “Real agreement with the Palestinians cannot be achieved without removal of the settlers. If the government wants this agreement to work, it has to be courageous and evacuate the settlers.”

With a phase-by-phase plan for the settlers’ removal from the most volatile areas first, Peace Now is seeking to prove to Rabin, who opposes any immediate evacuation, that the problem can be solved and that he stands to lose more by delaying than by acting soon.

“The Hebron massacre showed that the government cannot put off the question of settlements until the final negotiations with the Palestinians--it must deal with this issue now or see everything collapse,” said Galia Golan of Peace Now.

The group called for the immediate removal of 450 Israelis who have settled in four neighborhoods of Hebron, where a settler massacred about 30 Palestinians as they prayed last month. Fearing revenge attacks on Israelis, the army has imposed a curfew on the city of 70,000 for more than two weeks, allowing Palestinians out for only two hours every three days to buy food.

“The army cannot keep tens of thousands of people locked in their homes indefinitely to protect these settlers,” said Amiram Goldblum, an author of the Peace Now report. “This is not sustainable; it’s not viable. . . . The only solution is evacuating those settlers--for their own safety.”

A majority of ministers already favor this, Israeli political sources say. But Rabin continues to resist, believing it would reopen the agreement signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization on self-government that left all settlements in place for five years.

But Foreign Minister Shimon Peres hinted at new flexibility Monday. “If communities have to be moved, it is an Israeli decision, not part of the negotiations with the Palestinians,” Peres said.

More controversial, however, would be the next phase in Peace Now’s plan--closure of 52 settlements close to Palestinian villages and reachable only on roads through Palestinian towns. Most of their 26,000 residents are religiously and ideologically motivated in their desire to settle the entire biblical Land of Israel; they will resist moving.

Peace Now, which has opposed the settler movement since the group was founded in 1978, advocates either the settlers’ immediate evacuation or a shortening of the time in which an agreement will be reached with the Palestinians on these settlements’ future.

Peace Now also proposed the immediate evacuation of the 4,500 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, although the agreement with the PLO allows them to remain for the five-year interim period of autonomy.

Another category of settlements, not near Palestinian towns and reachable on well-guarded roads, could be left until later, Peace Now said, but the 50,000 residents, who moved there largely for a better lifestyle, should be encouraged to return to Israel.

In the government crackdown on Jewish extremist groups, police arrested two more ultranationalist leaders Monday with the intent of detaining them for three months. They also searched the Jerusalem and West Bank homes of other activists for weapons.

But police said they were waiting for precise instructions from the attorney general on how to proceed with the Cabinet decision outlawing two groups, Kach and Kahane Chai, as “terrorist organizations.”

In the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, the government survived three no-confidence votes Monday after members of the opposition Likud Party condemned the decision to ban the groups rather than charge their leaders with crimes and bring them to trial.