Israelis Keep Building in the West Bank

On the ragged edge of this hillside Palestinian village, shopkeeper Akram abu Shamsieh gazed in the direction of Maale Adumim, the West Bank’s largest Jewish settlement, a lushly landscaped enclave where the din of construction rarely falls silent.

“It never stops: the building, the expansion,” Abu Shamsieh said bleakly. “Sometimes I think it will never end.”

With the last Jewish settlers evacuated from the Gaza Strip on Monday, Palestinians are celebrating the imminent hand-over of the strip of land beside the Mediterranean. But they fear that even as they gain Gaza, they could be poised to lose large tracts of the West Bank, the heartland of their hoped-for state.

The sun-baked hills just east of Jerusalem, where the Palestinians of Azariya and Jews of Maale Adumim bump up against one another, are a case in point.

Home to more than 30,000 people, Maale Adumim has more the look of a prosperous, and permanent, small city than the frontier foothold the word “settlement” might suggest. Altogether, nearly a quarter-million Israeli Jews live in more than 100 settlements in the West Bank, scattered from north to south in communities large and small.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said publicly on many occasions, with tacit U.S. blessing, that he intends to keep the biggest of the settlements built by his nation on land seized in the 1967 Middle East War.

“There will be building in the settlement blocks,” he told the Jerusalem Post newspaper in an interview published Monday. “I will build.”

The prime minister has left open the possibility of relinquishing some West Bank settlements, particularly those that are remote and difficult to defend, but only in the context of cementing Israel’s grip on enclaves he considers to be of strategic value. In conjunction with the Gaza initiative, Israel today is to evacuate the last two of four small settlements in the northern reaches of the West Bank.

During the nearly five years of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, talks between Israel and the Palestinians languished. Meanwhile, construction in Jewish settlements burgeoned, despite U.S. and other nations’ opposition to the expansion.

In April, Israel drew an unusually strong rebuke from President Bush over plans to add 3,600 new housing units in Maale Adumim. Sharon brushed off the criticism. Weeks before the Gaza pullout began, Israeli authorities also issued tenders for six dozen new homes in the West Bank settlement of Betar Ilit and announced plans for a new Jewish neighborhood in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

The settlement expansion sets the stage for what could be a dangerous clash of expectations in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal: Israel hoping to preclude Palestinian territorial claims by bulking up existing settlement blocks, and Palestinians continuing to insist that nothing should be done that would prejudice the outcome of eventual negotiations on terms of statehood.

Last week, as the Gaza pullout began, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called settlement construction in the West Bank a “significant obstacle to peace.”

“It must be stopped immediately,” he told a crowd at a rally celebrating the withdrawal.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, the biggest rival of Abbas’ Fatah movement, took a far more fiery and crowd-pleasing approach.

“We’ll liberate Jerusalem and the West Bank too -- not with talk, with armed struggle,” a masked member of Hamas’ military wing told reporters in Gaza City.

With the spotlight focused for months on the Gaza Strip, little attention has been paid to the proliferation of illegal hilltop outposts in the West Bank. There were more than 100 of them at last count, according to Israeli peace groups.

Built by some of the same ultranationalist Jewish youths who flocked to Gaza in recent weeks to try to prevent the withdrawal, these offshoots of existing settlements, usually consisting of little more than a few battered trailers and a makeshift synagogue, are meant to lay claim to far larger tracts of land.

Israel is obliged under the first stages of the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan to dismantle the outposts, but Israeli authorities’ attempts to do so have been abortive.

Even some members of Sharon’s government fear that Israel is squandering goodwill generated by the Gaza pullout by letting the outposts multiply unchecked.

“Israel must implement its promise to evacuate the illegal outposts,” Housing Minister Yitzhak Herzog of the Labor Party said at a Cabinet meeting on Sunday. “The [Gaza pullout] represents extraordinary momentum for progress in the entire region; we should make use of this time to embark on peace moves.”

But many political observers believe Sharon is unlikely to make even the smallest concession to the Palestinians in coming months as he girds for battle with his Likud Party’s right wing. Rivals such as former Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who led the anti-pullout camp, are seeking to depose him as party leader.

The prime minister has been verbally pummeled for months over his decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza without any reciprocal gesture from the Palestinians, criticism whose volume has only grown louder as the emptying of settlements neared completion.

“It’s going to be necessary to make sure there will never again be a unilateral evacuation, or an evacuation of settlements without a referendum in advance,” Yisrael Katz, Sharon’s agriculture minister, said before settlers were evacuated from the last Gaza settlement, Netzarim, on Monday.

To the Palestinians’ dismay, the 500 residents of Netzarim have said they plan to move en masse to the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

“So, we get rid of them in one place, and they reappear in another,” grumbled 36-year-old Palestinian laborer Mohammed Takatka, who lives near Ariel, about 13 miles north of Ramallah. “Is that progress?”

In Azariya -- the biblical Bethany, which tradition says was the home of Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus -- villagers fear that even if Israel eventually were to agree to hold negotiations over the boundaries of a future Palestinian state, it would be too late to reclaim land swallowed up by Maale Adumim.

Last week, village leaders were informed by Israel’s civil administration in the West Bank that they were prohibited from building on the last swath of open land that lies between Azariya and the settlement.

“They are strangling us, and little by little we are dying,” said the village’s mayor, Issam Faroun.

Hamas, running for the first time, won a town council seat in municipal elections held late last year in Azariya, and Maale Adumim’s continued growth will probably increase the group’s popularity, said Faroun, who is affiliated with Abbas’ Fatah.

“People get angry, and that is how they are going to express themselves,” he said. “It doesn’t help us. It doesn’t help the Israelis. It doesn’t help anyone.”

Expansion of Maale Adumim is a particularly sensitive subject because Palestinians believe Israel wants to extend the settlement to block access to Jerusalem and its Muslim holy sites by West Bank Palestinians.

They also contend that Israel’s building plan for Maale Adumim is meant to form a barrier between the northern and southern West Bank, splitting their intended state into disconnected islets of territory.

Israeli Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who often speaks for Sharon, insisted this month that the prime minister did not conceive of the Gaza pullout as a means of whittling down the amount of land the Palestinians could hope to secure in the West Bank. It was “in no way” an attempted trade-off, he told reporters.

Palestinians, however, tend to put more stock in comments by Sharon’s senior aide, Dov Weisglass, who last year told an Israeli newspaper that relinquishing Gaza would in effect freeze peace moves by putting the process in “formaldehyde.”

The Bush administration has gone out of its way to praise and support Sharon during the “disengagement,” as the Gaza pullout is known in Israel.

But Palestinians hope that once it is safely over, some pressure might be brought to bear on Israel. A senior U.S. envoy, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, suggested Sunday that as soon as the dust settled, the two sides needed to look to long-term peace efforts.

“The United States views the Israeli disengagement from Gaza as an important opportunity to re-energize the ‘road map,’ to take further steps toward a better future for Israelis and Palestinians,” Welch said after meeting with senior Palestinian officials in Gaza.

Palestinians hope that statement will translate into more forceful U.S. efforts to contain settlement expansion, leaving more West Bank territory subject to a negotiated outcome.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said: “Gaza will not be first and last.”

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Times staff writer Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem and special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Gaza City contributed to this report.