Jewish Enclaves Are a Focus of Rage and Belief

The pop, pop, pop of gunfire in the neighboring Arab town of Al Birah was clearly audible Tuesday in the spacious living room of Azriel and Chemda Pinsky’s hilltop townhouse.

As the shooting began, the Pinskys checked their watches. “The same as yesterday,” Azriel said. “It starts after the funerals.” In the past six days, he said, Palestinians burying those killed in bloody clashes with Israeli soldiers have taken potshots at this Jewish settlement from a nearby cemetery.

It is just one of several isolated Jewish enclaves that have come under siege during the worst wave of violence to grip the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, against Israeli military rule erupted in the late 1980s. Forced to deploy hundreds of troops to defend the sites, the Israeli army has lost two soldiers in the effort. One was killed at Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish holy site in the West Bank town of Nablus. The other was killed near the Netzarim settlement in Gaza.

Joseph’s Tomb, where there is also a Jewish yeshiva, or religious school, has become such a target of Palestinians that even Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said Monday that Israel should “rethink” its decision to control the site. Six Israeli border police died in fighting there in September 1996. On Sunday, a border officer bled to death there after he was wounded and Palestinians refused to let the army evacuate him.

It was a mistake, said Amram Mitzna, who commanded Israel’s troops in the West Bank during the intifada, for Israel to keep isolated enclaves in areas it handed over to the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

“We shouldn’t have left behind places which are isolated and easily attacked without a way to give military support from the outside,” he said in an interview Tuesday. Whenever violence erupts, Mitzna said, “these places are attacked, and the way to back them militarily costs lives and a very huge effort. We shouldn’t be there.”

But even as some Israelis are beginning to question whether the enclaves are worth defending, settlers are demanding a larger, stronger army presence and vowing they will stay on.

Settlers at some sites “have been locked up and couldn’t leave or enter their communities for the past four days,” said Yehudit Tayar, spokeswoman for the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the 200,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

Tayar said settlers presented the army with an ultimatum Monday, telling commanders in the West Bank and Gaza that if the army doesn’t open roads blocked by Palestinian demonstrators, the settlers will.

“The terrorists have, unfortunately, taken control of the country,” Tayar said. “We told the army that we will not be put into ghettos. In the worst days of the intifada, our children never missed a day of school. We will not be held hostage in our homes.”

In Psagot, where he keeps his bulletproof vest by the front door, Azriel Pinsky said he is determined to stay put.

“If we had said in 1948 that there were Jewish settlements too small to defend, we wouldn’t be here today,” Pinsky said. “If we had said that in 1967 [during the Middle East War], we would have been thrown into the sea.”

The spread of rioting to Arab towns and villages inside Israel since Sunday, Pinsky said, shows that “the Palestinians want everything. If you give up Psagot today, then they will conquer the next place tomorrow, until they reach Jerusalem.”

Pinsky is angered by how life has changed in Psagot, a bedroom community of 270 families that is just a 30-minute drive north of downtown Jerusalem.

“Yesterday, we had to take the children out of nursery school and put them in bomb shelters,” he said. “The shooting continued until 1 a.m. This is not an intifada. It has become a war. Rocks have been replaced with bullets.”

Bullet holes pock the door frames and stone tiles of some of the settlement’s well-tended houses. The municipal building came under fire Monday when Sneh was meeting there with settlers, forcing them to move from room to room, depending on the line of fire.

Psagot residents have abandoned the main entrance to the settlement because it faces Al Birah and has come under fire. Now, only soldiers in bunkers fortified with sandbags are positioned there. Dozens of soldiers have beefed up a small force that was already stationed at the settlement, and they have moved in armored personnel carriers.

The settlers come and go on a newly opened dirt road on the hilltop community’s eastern flank, driving to jobs in Jerusalem on a bypass road that skirts Palestinian villages.

But the solution, Pinsky and others insisted, is not to evacuate small Jewish communities in the territories or to abandon Jewish holy sites there.

“[Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak is proud that we’re restraining our army, but because we are doing that, people are getting killed,” Pinsky said. “Either you decide that you are defending your nation or not.”

Shlomit Ziv shares that conviction. For seven years, she and her husband have been rearing their six children in Netzarim, a tiny, isolated settlement southwest of Gaza City that is accessible by a single Israeli-controlled road running more than three miles through territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The road to Netzarim became a focal point for Israeli-Palestinian violence after Israeli troops pulled out of most of the Gaza Strip in 1994. For several years, settlers have traveled to and from the settlement in armored military trucks, escorted by soldiers. Their children ride in such convoys to and from school in the Gaza settlement block of Gush Katif--more than an hour’s drive each way.

But the past few days, Ziv said, have been unlike any others.

Her guests for the Rosh Hashana holiday that ended Sunday night had to be evacuated by military helicopter because the Netzarim road was deemed too dangerous even for military convoys. Her children had missed school for two days and been confined to their home for hours at a time as Molotov cocktails, bullets and stones rained down on the settlement. Monday night, basic groceries--milk, bread, fruit and vegetables--had to be delivered by military helicopter.

Ziv, who lives in Netzarim with her husband and six children, said her conviction that she is doing the right thing by living in the settlement is unshaken.

“There are things that are more important than comfort,” she said. “The way of life that I live is by the Torah and part of this is living in Eretz Israel. Abraham lived here and God told him here: I will give you this country.”

Her children have been frightened by the events of recent days, when the army has gone so far as to use attack helicopters and fire rockets into Palestinian apartments nearby.

“But we explain to the children that the Arabs are shooting our soldiers--we say the truth, we keep everything calm. I tell my children it is natural to be afraid.

“But we also know that what we are doing is important,” she said, “and we know that the army is doing its best, taking care of us.”