Israelis Drive Palestinians Off Disputed Land

Using their fists and rifle butts, Israeli soldiers drove hundreds of Palestinian villagers from a disputed hilltop Tuesday as bulldozers began clearing the land for a Jewish settlement.

Saeb Erekat, minister of municipalities in the Palestinian Authority and one of its chief negotiators with Israel, was one of several people injured in the fracas. More than 50 people were arrested, including several Israeli peace activists.

The Palestinians had prepared themselves for a confrontation for days, planting olive trees on the rocky hilltop and sleeping on the land to guard it from settlers and soldiers. When bulldozers arrived to start clearing the site Tuesday morning, the villagers threw themselves in front of the earthmovers and hurled insults at the soldiers sent to ensure that the work proceeded. When they were ordered to leave the site, villagers pummeled the soldiers with their fists.

“This is the graveyard of the peace process,” Erekat said after he was knocked to the ground by a border police officer. Eyewitnesses said that Erekat was assaulted after he tried to step between villagers and soldiers.

Israel Television reported Tuesday night that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres had decided to review the proposed construction. The two met Tuesday, and Peres reportedly expressed concern that peace talks with the Palestinians might be jeopardized if the building was allowed. Three government ministers publicly expressed opposition to the building plan.

Erekat said that the Palestinians will appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court today to halt the project. The clash between soldiers and El Khader villagers came as Palestinians accuse Israel of strengthening its hold on Jerusalem by expanding Jewish settlements that lie to the northeast, east and south of the city.

The government recently announced plans to build several hundred more homes in Maaleh Adumim, an eastern settlement satellite of Jerusalem. A Bedouin tribe claims that the land slated to be developed belongs to it.

The government also announced that it will confiscate land from the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina northeast of Jerusalem to make room for a Jewish neighborhood.

El Khader, home to 7,000 Palestinians, lies just south of Bethlehem, near the Gush Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements. The settlement of Efrat, where about 6,000 Israelis live, has laid claim to a hilltop on the outskirts of El Khader that the villagers say they own. The Israelis say the villagers cannot prove ownership. Efrat plans to build 500 homes on 75 acres of the disputed land.

The hilltop lies about a mile north of the nearest neighborhood of Efrat, separated from that cluster of homes by a valley farmed by El Khader villagers. But a spokesman for the settlement said the distance between Efrat and the planned neighborhood is irrelevant.

“This land is government land,” said Menachem Spitz, a member of the Efrat municipal council. “The land is not theirs (the villagers). There is no Arab that can come and show proof of ownership.”

Spitz said that 500 families “from all around the country” have applied to live in the apartments, villas and townhomes that will be built on the hilltop. “I don’t want to get into politics, but this is the beginning of the battle over Jerusalem,” Spitz said. “Efrat and the Gush Etzion area is the southern entrance to Jerusalem.”

Spitz said he is not worried about the security risks of building a new neighborhood adjacent to a Palestinian village.

“We have another Arab village that today butts up to Efrat,” he said, “and we have excellent relations with those Arabs. They shop in our stores and eat in our restaurants, and some of our residents give them hand-me-down clothes. We hope to have the same sort of relationship with El Khader.”

The Palestinian Authority said Saturday that Israel’s continued construction of homes in the West Bank violates the September, 1993, peace accord that Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization. A spokesman said that the authority will ask the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israel’s actions.

“The actions of the settlers this morning in El Khader . . . protected by the Israeli army, is a clear violation of the Declaration of Principles,” said Nabil abu Rudaineh, a spokesman for PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. “The policy of the Israeli government, confiscating the land from its owners, cannot serve the peace process.”

Abu Rudaineh said that the Palestinian Authority “holds the Israeli government totally responsible” for what happened at El Khader.

But he also said that he hopes the expansion of settlements will not derail Israeli-PLO negotiations. The two sides are negotiating a redeployment of Israeli troops out of West Bank towns and villages, the expansion of the Palestinian Authority throughout the West Bank and the holding of Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“I hope that nothing would stop the negotiations,” Abu Rudaineh said. “But this sort of thing makes the negotiations look meaningless. These actions strengthen the fundamentalists and all those who are against the peace process.”

Under the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, both the status of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and the status of Jerusalem are to be determined only in the final phase of negotiations, which is scheduled to begin in 1996. Israel maintains that it can legally continue to “thicken” existing settlements in the meantime.

Erekat said that the Palestinian Authority’s credibility will be damaged if settlement construction continues. “I tried to stop residents from beating the soldiers and I found myself being beaten,” Erekat said. “I’m here to save the peace process, and they’re trying to destroy it.”

Maj. Gen. Elik Ron, commander of the Judaea and Samaria police district, said that Erekat will be charged with assaulting a police officer because he allegedly kicked an officer in the leg during the scuffle.

Several other people were injured, and one Israeli peace activist fainted during the confrontation. Two left-wing members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, tried to block the bulldozers but were led away by soldiers.

“It was a very distressing sight,” said Tzaley Reshef, a spokesman for Peace Now, a leftist Israeli organization. “Here we have a Labor-Meretz (left-wing) government, and that’s what it is doing. It is inconceivable that such a thing will happen in a peace process.”

After days of telling reporters who visited them on the wind-swept hilltop that they would rather die than see a Jewish settlement built there, the El Khader villagers seemed stunned by the turn of events Tuesday.

“You are all liars; this is not peace!” one elderly man shouted at Erekat. “They are coming here and taking our land, and there is nothing that we can do about it. This is not peace--it is surrender.”