Land Issue Has Israel, Palestinians at Loggerheads : Mideast: Troops disperse anti-settlement protest led by Arab officials. Military pullback put in further jeopardy.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority moved into full confrontation Tuesday over the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, further jeopardizing Israel’s promised troop pullback in the region.

Led by four ministers from the Palestinian Authority, more than 500 Palestinians broke through Israeli army roadblocks to march on the Jewish settlement of Psagot, outside the town of Al Birah north of Jerusalem, before troops dispersed them with stun grenades, tear gas and gunfire.

Israeli soldiers briefly detained Azmi Shuaibi, the authority’s youth and sports minister; Dr. Ahmed Tibi, one of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s chief advisers, and Marwan Barghouthi, secretary general of Fatah, the principal PLO faction. Two Palestinians were wounded by gunfire in the confrontation.

Chanting “God is great!” in Arabic and carrying placards declaring “No Peace With Settlements,” the demonstrators had marched from an Al Birah mosque to Psagot, a hilltop settlement of about 800 Israelis, until soldiers finally halted the protest by firing over the Palestinians’ heads.

The demonstration, one of three in the West Bank on Tuesday, marked the start of a week of protests planned by Palestinians against what they charge is continued Israeli seizure of their farmlands for expansion of settlements.

Fatah plans today to block roads leading to a number of West Bank settlements and on Thursday and Friday to “confront” settlers and soldiers in the region. Rallies are scheduled for most West Bank towns over the weekend.

“The issue is basic for us--we and the Israelis have agreed to partition the land, yet they are continuing to take what is ours by force of arms,” Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the Palestinian information minister, said after the Al Birah demonstration.

“When we agreed to discuss the future of the Israeli settlements in a later stage of negotiations, we did not agree to their expansion or their proliferation. On the contrary, the Israelis pledged they would not extend the settlements. Their expansion thus endangers the whole agreement.”

Barghouthi said after his release that the protests were part of “a new intifada against the settlements” across the West Bank. He said the marches were meant to be peaceful, unlike the violent clashes of the 7-year-old intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, “but we do intend to stop the settlements.”

Palestinians began protesting the expansion of the settlements last month after Israeli bulldozers began clearing a hilltop above the West Bank village of Al Khader to build 500 apartments to extend the settlement of Efrat. Under pressure from the PLO and left-wing Israelis, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin halted the work but authorized building on another hill.

Israelis acknowledge the critical importance of the land issue in their relations with the Palestinians and in their own domestic politics. What is at stake, they say, is the territory that Israel wants to keep in the West Bank after a full settlement with the Palestinians in four years.

The current urgency has come as Israel formulates plans to withdraw its troops, probably this spring, from Palestinian towns in the West Bank and as settlers are pushing to maximize their land holdings.

Arafat, who has been under growing popular pressure to confront Israel over the settlements, will take up the settlements’ expansion directly with Rabin when they meet Thursday to discuss Palestinian elections and the promised Israeli troop pullback.

Rabin himself has scheduled a Cabinet debate on settlement construction, formally frozen when his government took office in July, 1992, and government sources said that Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer will propose spending about $32 million this year on development outside Jerusalem.

“Things were done that are in clear contradiction to government decisions, and this will damage the peace process,” said Communications Minister Shulamit Aloni, registering the dissent of her leftist Meretz Party from the government’s activities.

Meretz charged Tuesday that 2,000 apartments are being built in a settlement outside Jerusalem in violation of government pledges, that hundreds more are being built up and down the West Bank with funds raised overseas and that others, officially left unfinished, are being quietly inhabited.

Dedi Zucker, a Meretz member of Parliament, said the continued building in the West Bank shows bad faith by Israel. “If we go on with the construction, it will be proof to the Palestinians and to the world . . . that we don’t really mean it when we say we want to end occupation,” he said.

Ben-Eliezer replied: “I don’t know what they are talking about. I really don’t.”

He said the military has taken land for “security roads” for settler use, and the only expansion is within settlements. “This government did not build any new settlements, not a single one,” he said.