Israel Ejects More Settlers From Hilltop : Mideast: Two protest leaders charged after confrontation. Jewish activists seek to erode support for pact with PLO.

Israeli soldiers pulled more than 100 Jewish settlers off a hilltop near the West Bank town of Efrat on Wednesday during a third day of protests designed to impede Israeli troop withdrawal and expansion of Palestinian self-rule.

Although hundreds of activists have been detained since the demonstrations began, police for the first time pressed charges against two prominent leaders of the Efrat settlement, including its rabbi, Steve (Shlomo) Riskin.

They were charged with entering a closed military zone, as the hills around Efrat have been declared, and the other protesters refused to leave the detention center without them.

“You should know this is just the beginning,” Eve Harow, an Efrat town council member, said in an interview on a mobile telephone, as she was briefly detained at army headquarters in nearby Bethlehem.

The weeks-long battle for control of West Bank hilltops is part of a hearts-and-minds campaign by more than 120,000 settlers to erode fragile public support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Efrat, often called the “yuppie settlement” for its population of American doctors and other professionals who commute to work in Jerusalem, is considered one of the more politically moderate settlements. It, therefore, is key to the settlers’ efforts to win broad support among the majority of moderate and secular Israelis.

The government is negotiating a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank under the second stage of the 1993 peace accord that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin approved with Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. Palestinian police are to take over security in West Bank towns and, possibly, in Arab villages that are not far from settlements. Israeli soldiers will be in charge of protecting settlements and major highways.

Last week, the settlers were enraged by leaks from the negotiations that the government may turn over state-owned lands in the West Bank to Palestinians. There are state lands within many of the settlements’ municipal boundaries.

The long-term fate of the more than 140 Jewish settlements in the West Bank is to be decided in final status negotiations beginning in May.

The settlers’ “campaign of desperation,” as some observers call it, includes blocking West Bank roads, building fences to expand their settlements and occupying surrounding hills that the government has declared off limits.

Expansion of settlements is prohibited during the negotiations over control of the West Bank. But the settlers are trying to present the government with “facts on the ground”--a term they have borrowed from Zionists who founded the state of Israel. They are gambling that nightly television images of Jews being dragged off hills by Jewish soldiers will turn the country against the government and promote their view that Rabin is leading Israel to eventual destruction by exposing its soft belly to Palestinian terrorists.

But in a sign that they may have gone too far, the opposition Likud Party, which officially opposes the peace accord, has not joined their protest. Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu has said he understands the settlers’ concerns but does not condone their law-breaking. He urged them to quit bringing their children to protests--another tactic to soften their image as a radical fringe and win sympathy. Few Israelis have gone out to the West Bank to join the settler protests.

Political commentators and pollsters say that Israelis identify with the settlers’ security concerns but not with their breaking the law or potentially confronting the army, one of the country’s most revered institutions.

“If the Israeli public is forced to choose between the Israeli Defense Forces and the settlers, it will choose the IDF,” the daily newspaper Maariv wrote in an editorial this week.

The daily newspaper Haaretz reported that some soldiers, more accustomed to confronting Palestinian rock-throwers, found it stressful to have to evacuate and arrest Jewish settlers.

The government had been trying to ignore the settlers’ campaign, but this week officials clearly decided to confront them. Besides making the arrests, the government shut the settlers’ underground radio station, Channel 7.

Rabin accused the settlers of distracting police and army from real security missions, saying: “Violating law and order isn’t legitimate, and absurd provocations will be dealt with. . . . It is their right to demonstrate in accordance with the laws of the state. When there are elections, everyone will be able to vote in accordance with his conscience.”

Most commentators say the settlers do not have the political strength to rally public opinion on the issue of settlements. But they can be expected to step up their campaign as the government moves closer to West Bank redeployment, then to elections.