New Israeli Settlements Cause Furor

This small community, with its ramshackle trailer homes overlooking the rocky hills of the southern West Bank, seems an unlikely focus for a deepening controversy between Israel and the United States.

But Bat Ayin is one of about a dozen Jewish settlements in the occupied territories that have established outposts since last fall’s Wye peace agreement with the Palestinians, according to U.S. officials, Israeli peace activists and the settlers themselves. Six other “satellite settlements” were set up on or near Oct. 23, when the accord was signed.

Alarmed by the rapid pace of the settlement-building, the Clinton administration is turning up the heat on the Israeli government to stop the construction. In a series of unusually pointed rebukes, U.S. officials recently called the expansion “very destructive” to the peace negotiations and accused Israel of reneging on a promise to contain it.

“Both sides have an obligation to do their part to create an environment for the pursuit of peace and the achievement of peace,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said in Washington this week. “The issue is whether the government of Israel is serious about doing its part to create the proper environment for peace.”

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who needs the settlers’ support in a tough battle for reelection next month, is forging ahead, rejecting U.S. criticism and openly encouraging the construction.

“With all due respect for the friendship between the two countries, the prime minister is committed to ensure, first and foremost, the interests of the state of Israel,” Netanyahu’s spokesman, Aviv Bushinsky, said a day after Rubin’s rebuke.

The new encampments are part of an accelerated push to expand the Jewish presence in the disputed areas before two critical dates: May 4, when the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords are due to expire, and May 17, when Israel is scheduled to hold elections for prime minister and Parliament.

The aim: to keep the land from being turned over to the Palestinians in any permanent peace agreement.

“We’re pushing in order to establish a reality,” said Rabbi Natan Greenberg, the director of a small Jewish seminary at Bat Ayin and a former member of its town council. “We want to make sure we keep as much land as we can under Israeli control.”

The leftist group Peace Now, which monitors settlements, says the speed at which new sites are being established is without precedent in recent years. Throughout the West Bank, new trailer communities sit atop strategic hills, and the settlers are hard at work carving out roads, laying power lines and planting trees.

As Israel sees it, one government official explained, the settlers have simply jumped the gun by trying to expand in areas of the West Bank where they have yet to receive building permits.

In a visit to a West Bank settlement earlier this week, Netanyahu vowed to continue expanding the communities, saying, “We have done a lot, and we will do a lot more.”

The settlers, one of Netanyahu’s key constituencies, had angrily abandoned the prime minister after he signed the land-for-security agreement last fall. They formed part of the vote in December that forced next month’s early elections. And their support is crucial if he is to win.

Brokered by President Clinton at Maryland’s Wye Plantation, the October agreement prohibits unilateral actions by either side that would predetermine the outcome of a final peace accord. The United States views both Israeli settlement expansion and any move by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to declare statehood May 4, as he has vowed to do, as one-sided acts that threaten the peace process.

The Palestinians hope to establish an independent state in the West Bank at the end of the peace process, and they have watched the settlement expansion with anger.

Israel “is killing our hope,” Palestinian legislator Salah Tamari said on a recent visit to an outpost near Bethlehem, where settlers had seized a hilltop and chased away Palestinian farmers.

Since taking office in 1996, Netanyahu’s policy has been to allow expansion of the settlements through “natural growth.” U.S. officials say the Israeli leader agreed at Wye, however, not to allow construction of new settlements or establishment of new sites beyond each community’s boundary.

Netanyahu insists that he made no such agreement and notes that the United States and Israel have always differed on the subject of Jewish settlements. But according to one U.S. official in Israel, Netanyahu also has explained the many new outposts--some several miles from the original settlement--as “exceptions” to his policy.

The State Department, from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to U.S. Ambassador Edward Walker, continues to express its concern.

“We are in the process of making efforts to discourage the Palestinians from unilateral actions on May 4, and this is not helpful,” the U.S. official said.

Here at Bat Ayin, southwest of the West Bank town of Bethlehem, there appear to be no such worries. The 10-year-old religious community of about 500 is a diverse mix, including academics, artists, blue-collar workers and many newly returned to Judaism. Dogs snooze on the side of the road, and children stop strangers driving through the settlement to beg for rides.

A few hundred yards down a winding dirt road from Bat Ayin’s last home, the new outpost of nine trailers--and a canvas tepee--has been set up on a slope overlooking a series of hills. More mobile homes will arrive soon, and there’s a long waiting list of people eager to move in, Greenberg said.

“The way we see it,” he said, “it’s a lot harder to give away a hill with houses on it than an empty, barren hillside.”