Jewish Settlers Express Relief Over Deadlock

When the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks began two weeks ago, Yael Ami-El, a diminutive Jewish settler and mother of three, was finishing a course to prepare her and other women here for the outcome.

The five-week course, run by the Israeli army, included lessons on how to maneuver a car around a roadblock, dodge a rock-throwing mob, fend off a knife-wielding assailant and fire a pistol. It was offered on the dark premise that any result--peace deal or no deal--was going to bring trouble to the West Bank.

As the talks at Camp David, Md., broke off Tuesday, Ami-El and other Jews across the territory voiced relief at the collapse of a U.S.-brokered proposal that many had vowed to resist--one that would put 90% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including this and other Jewish settlements, under Palestinian control.

At the same time, the settlers braced for what they fear will be renewed bloody conflict with the West Bank’s restive Palestinian majority, whose leader, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, has vowed to proclaim an independent state by year’s end, come what may.

In fact, hundreds of Palestinians marched Tuesday through Gaza City, calling for a violent uprising. “Yes to a new intifada!” they chanted.

“Sooner or later, there’s going to be more fighting,” predicted Ami-El, a 48-year-old book editor who moved to Tekoah after Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East War. “We never really settled what that war was about--whose land is this?”

From their high perch at the edge of the Judean Desert, the 200 families of Tekoah enjoy a dun-colored view of what’s at stake. On other arid hilltops to the north, south and west lie a scattering of other fortress-like Jewish villages of white concrete houses with red tile roofs, shimmering in the heat.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government, going into the Camp David talks, was reportedly willing to give up about 50 such West Bank and Gaza villages for the sake of a definitive settlement of Israel’s half-century-old conflict with the Palestinians.

While the talks broke down over who will control Arab East Jerusalem, the difficulty of uprooting about 40,000 reluctant Jews loomed almost as large.

A tour of the West Bank on Tuesday offered a glimpse of the settlers’ world--one marked by a siege mentality and stubborn staying power. At three stops, settlers condemned the idea of even trying to negotiate peace with the Palestinians over West Bank land the Jews call Judea and Samaria and cherish as their biblical heritage.

“Jewish land is more important than the Ten Commandments,” said Yaacov Shenhav, a 32-year-old Hebrew scholar in Kiryat Arba, a settlement outside the contested city of Hebron. “You can disobey the commandments and not much will happen, but if you give away Jewish land, you destroy part of what we are.”

Considering that Kiryat Arba sits on land that would fall under Palestinian control under the Camp David peace plan, what Shenhav did this month took enormous chutzpah. As the talks were underway, he closed a deal on a house in the settlement and packed up to move there from Israel’s northern Galilee region with his wife and five children.

“It was not a private decision but a guiding hand that brought me here,” explained the bearded Orthodox Jew. “With my determination, maybe I can do my part to save this settlement and Israel itself.”

Many Jews view such compatriots as religious fanatics, an extremist minority bent on thwarting any compromise that would secure Israel’s future. They note that the peace proposal would have kept about 80% of the settlers, the 160,000 or so concentrated in West Bank communities on Jerusalem’s outskirts, under Israeli rule.

For their part, religious settlers portray themselves as standard-bearers of Judaism and Zionism against a secular Israel that has lost its way. They prayed, demonstrated and lobbied fiercely against Barak’s peace proposals, helping to undermine his ruling coalition and its parliamentary majority on the eve of the peace talks.

“Finally Barak understands that Arafat does not want peace, that we have no one to make peace with,” Shlomo Filber, director general of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, crowed after the talks broke down.

In recent days, settlement leaders had met with Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz to vent their fears over possible consequences of a peace accord: losing army protection and having to turn in their weapons to Palestinians.

The breakdown of the talks brought a different kind of uncertainty: whether the Palestinians, who are training hundreds of children at summer combat camps, would turn on their West Bank neighbors in frustration.

Hebron, a mainly Arab municipality whose 600 Jewish families are scattered in four barbed-wire settlements within the city limits, has been especially tense since a young Palestinian man’s alleged sexual assault on a 16-year-old Jewish settler girl led to a rock-throwing melee between the two communities.

Baruch Merzel, an army veteran and Hebron activist of the outlawed right-wing Jewish group Kach, claimed that his group is trying to arm every settler in the city and so far had distributed about 300 guns. Members of the group are under police investigation for allegedly threatening to assassinate Barak if settlers were forced from their homes.

Some settlers in Hebron, such as 45-year-old Eli Moshe, said they were willing to leave if the Israeli government would give them housing elsewhere.

Moshe came to Hebron from Jerusalem 15 years ago for cheaper housing--but also in the belief that the Jewish entrepreneurs who preceded him would hire only Jews. But he had trouble getting a job; he now sells bagels, sandwiches, watermelons and ice cream to settlers at the Beit Hadassah Center and to the Israeli soldiers who guard their urban compound.

“They talk religious solidarity, but it’s really all about business,” he complained, sitting under an umbrella at the lone table at his tiny food stand. “The Jews want to fight the Arabs, but they give all the jobs to Arabs.”

In every settlement, however, there’s a committed core of religious Jews determined to hang on.

Ami-El, a Canadian immigrant, was drawn to Tekoah with her husband 16 years ago by the settlement’s clean air, proximity to Jerusalem and mix of religious and secular inhabitants. The community is safe, but she said the couple have had to fire weapons into the air to ward off Palestinian attacks on nearby roads.

Most Jews live too far from such danger, she said, to appreciate the folly of giving land and other concessions to the Palestinians. “They don’t understand that whatever we give up, it’s not going to bring peace,” she said. “Out here, the feeling is that we’re centuries away from any peace with the Arab world.”