Israeli Wall to Take in Some Settlements

The Israeli government decided Wednesday to extend its controversial security partition to include parts of several Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank but left gaps in the route to stave off a confrontation with the United States.

The compromise was an effort by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to balance domestic demands to keep all Jewish settlements on the Israeli side of the barrier with foreign warnings -- especially from the Bush administration -- not to cut too deeply into Palestinian territory.

Under the new plan, the partition will stop short of the sprawling settlement of Ariel, between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Nablus. Instead, Ariel and a handful of other nearby settlements would be protected by separate, semicircular barriers. The government later would decide whether to connect those barriers with the main partition.

For weeks, the White House has warned Israel not to loop the main fence around Ariel, for fear that the line would harden into a de facto political boundary that would render the forming of a contiguous Palestinian state difficult. Sharon’s government has denied that the partition is anything other than a security measure designed to prevent attackers from penetrating Israel.

The issue grew contentious enough that Washington threatened to reduce loan guarantees to Israel by the same amount the Jewish state spends on erecting the barrier. However, the State Department told Congress this week that it had no immediate plans to cut the guarantees, although some reductions in the future were likely.

The compromise plan approved Wednesday immediately drew criticism from Israelis who favor putting all Jewish settlements inside the fence and others who believe that such communities are the problem in the first place.

“It is now so obvious that dotting the entire Palestinian territories with so many settlements is a security obstacle so severe that the government is contorting itself to resolve it,” said Ran Cohen, a left-leaning member of the Israeli parliament.

Cohen said the extension of the barrier would cost Israel an extra $227 million when the government, struggling amid a sinking economy, is initiating painful cuts in welfare payments and social services.

“This is a completely unnecessary additional cost,” Cohen said. “We have extended the fence by 100 kilometers [62 miles] on account of the whims of the extreme right and added a year onto its construction.”

However, Yuli Edelstein, a member of parliament with Sharon’s Likud Party, blasted the plan as a “surrender to terrorism” that put Israel in danger of having to retreat to its pre-1967 borders, before it captured the West Bank from Jordan in the Middle East War.

Vice Premier Ehud Olmert defended the decision as a workable compromise and denied that Israel had caved in to U.S. pressure.

“Sometimes we hear things we don’t like; sometimes they hear things they don’t like,” Olmert said. “On the whole, I’d say this is a reasonable and fair compromise that provides an answer to security needs.”

Palestinian officials have blasted the barrier as an “apartheid wall” and a thinly veiled effort by Israel to carve out for itself more chunks of land in the West Bank. The northern section of the partition -- a combination of electric fencing, trenches and huge concrete pylons -- swings into Palestinian territory at several points and, in some cases, isolates entire Palestinian villages.

“All these are procedures and actions that destroy all possibilities for peace and bringing about calm, be it settlements, the wall or what is happening around Jerusalem,” Ahmed Korei, the prime minister-designate of the Palestinian Authority, told reporters. Korei himself lives in a village on the edge of Jerusalem that would be bisected by the partition.

The prime minister-designate also announced Wednesday that he had finished forming a Cabinet with the blessing of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

He declined to discuss who was on his list or their positions. Over the weekend, Korei drafted a list of nearly two dozen ministers. But criticism over the group’s size and makeup has apparently pressured him into reducing it by half.

Korei is expected to present the slate to the Palestinian parliament for approval early next week.