Settlers Look to Expand on Sharon’s Big Win

Jewish settlers staked out intersections Monday along the highway they use to travel south from Jerusalem and paid homage to the funeral cortege of a man shot by Palestinian snipers as he drove home the night before.

“Another father dead,” said Anitra Lehman, rocking her baby and shaking her head about the death of Tzahi Sasson. “These lands are all ours,” continued the Maryland native. “We should send the Arabs out. Send them to their own countries and to their own places.”

All of her friends, added 15-year-old Elisheva Milstein, have been pelted with rocks as they’ve navigated the roads connecting West Bank settlements. “Hopefully, the new government will change what the old government was trying to do.”

As Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon on Monday removed the last hurdles in forming a unity government, these are schizophrenic times for Jewish settlers. They are terrified by the attacks on members of their community. But they are also feeling empowered by last week’s election of Sharon, a champion of spreading settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Just a few weeks ago, many settlers were bracing for their possible removal under a peace deal floated by outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Now, settlement leaders have grand plans of major expansion and construction. At the nearby Karmei Tsur settlement, five trailers placed within the last 10 days sit on a western slope with a magnificent view of the West Bank’s rolling hills. A bulldozer on Monday was grading the access road, workers were hooking up electricity and utilities, and an armed guard made it clear that reporters were not welcome.

This will be one of the most complicated tests facing Sharon. He craves recognition from a world community that considers most settlements illegal, but his power base depends on the approximately 200,000 settlers.

What to do about settlements was a final sticking point in negotiations between Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party and Barak’s center-left Labor Party to form a coalition government. Late Monday, amid another surge in violence, the two agreed to broad guidelines that would allow settlements’ “natural growth” but would prohibit new ones. Evacuation of settlements, which Barak has advocated as essential for peace, was not mentioned.

The agreement must still be approved by both parties’ central committees, but it clears the way for the formation of a unity government, considered crucial to Sharon’s political stability.

The issue of settlements is especially emotional for many Jews, who feel entitled to the West Bank, regarded as part of the biblical Land of Israel. But for Palestinians, the West Bank is the core of their future independent state, and Jewish settlers are one of the most hated elements of Israeli occupation. Even many Israelis agree that at least the most isolated settlements should be evacuated, as Barak proposed.

Palestinian militias consider settlers a fair target. A militant element of the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat issued a proclamation Monday promising to turn settlers’ lives into a nightmare.

“The settlements that Sharon spent his life building at the expense of Palestinian land will be turned into hell and fire,” Fatah’s branch in the West Bank city of Bethlehem said. “The downfall of Sharon and his settlements is our goal and the goal of our bullets and our resistance.”

Violence has escalated steadily since Sharon’s landslide election a week ago. Sasson, 35, was shot Sunday night as he drove to the Gush Etzion settlement block on a West Bank road that Israel built specifically to allow settlers to bypass Palestinian villages.

On Monday, Israeli troops shot and killed two Palestinians in separate incidents, and battles raged late into the night between Palestinian gunmen in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and Israeli troops guarding the Jewish settlement block of Gush Katif. Dozens of Palestinians were injured, many from inhaling the fumes of smoke bombs.

A 20-year-old Palestinian, Ziad abu Sway, was killed when soldiers fired on a minibus transporting Palestinian laborers to Al Hader village near Bethlehem. The bus was driving on a back road to evade a military checkpoint--a common practice since Israel imposed tight closures on Palestinian towns--when the soldiers opened fire, witnesses said. The army said it was investigating the circumstances.

In a separate incident, an Israeli Arab, Atef Nabulsi of Jerusalem, was killed when soldiers opened fire on his van at a roadblock near the West Bank city of Ramallah. The army said he ignored warning shots and refused to stop; Palestinians said he was trying to back away.

Late Monday, Palestinians opened fire on a bus traveling south from Jerusalem, the army said.

Israeli officials say they believe that Arafat, or militants around him, is stirring the violence to challenge Sharon, exploiting the transition period as the prime minister-elect negotiated the coalition government.

In addition to agreeing on settlements, the two parties agreed that the new government would forgo reaching a comprehensive peace treaty with the Palestinians. And Sharon’s associates say he is prepared to retaliate against Palestinian attacks in greater force.

“Mr. Arafat believes he can continue on the same course he followed during the time Barak was prime minister--that he can use violence and carry on negotiations and expect the violence will reinforce his position at the bargaining table,” former Defense Minister Moshe Arens, a key advisor to Sharon, told Israeli radio. “He will be disappointed.

Although Sharon in the early 1980s oversaw the evacuation of settlements in the Sinai desert, settlers remember that as foreign minister in 1998 he negotiated an agreement to cede land to the Palestinians--and then immediately turned around and urged settlers to “seize the hilltops” to prevent the agreement from having its full effect. Dozens of outposts were erected in response.

“Sharon accompanied and encouraged settlement of the heartland of Judea and Samaria,” Yudit Tayar, a spokeswoman for the settlers’ Yesha Council, said, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “I hope that Sharon will do what he is supposed to do to protect the Jewish settlement enterprise.”

She said she expected Sharon to ease restrictions on Jewish building in the West Bank and Gaza, which was slightly slowed, but not stopped, during Barak’s administration.

“We expect a government that doesn’t give up on the Zionist ideal that we came to this country for,” she said.

Or, as Lehman in Neve Daniel put it: “First they should get rid of all the journalists. Then they should do what’s right for the citizens. Get back the guns from the Arabs. Then turn off their electricity. Then their water. If it’s so hard on them, let them leave. . . . This is what happens when you try to attack Israel. They’ll learn.”

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Times staff writer Davan Maharaj in Ramallah contributed to this report.