Some West Bank Settlers Dig In Their Heels as Pullout Looms

Tile by tile, a new synagogue is rapidly taking form just steps from an outdoor basketball court where five families have moved into a makeshift neighborhood of military tents.

On a recent afternoon, there was plenty of room nearby for more arrivals beneath huge canopies that shade a rectangular dirt lot, lending it the appearance of an American fairground. If this Jewish settlement is soon to be evacuated, and the Israeli government insists it is, there is little sign its residents plan to go easily. Rather than packing up, Sanur’s 31 families are busily fortifying their hold on the West Bank hilltop in anticipation of a last stand.

Volunteers from Jewish religious academies have rushed to join in building the synagogue, which awaits a roof and the rest of the tile floor. Backers have come from other strongholds of Jewish nationalist ideology in the West Bank.

Sanur is one of four settlements in the northern West Bank scheduled to be abandoned by Israel this summer, along with all 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip. So far, most of the attention has focused on the withdrawal from Gaza, home to the vast majority of the estimated 8,000 settlers who are to be uprooted from both areas. The pullout is set to begin in mid-August.

Sanur and the three other isolated West Bank settlements, Homesh, Ganim and Kadim, have been largely overlooked in the turbulent national drama over the planned withdrawal, but military officials say settler resistance may prove especially tough in Sanur and Homesh.

Ganim and Kadim, secular communities about 10 miles to the north with 60 families between them, aren’t expected to present much of a problem because many residents have said they are willing to leave and have started hunting for new homes.

“Ninety-five percent of the people here will leave before August 15th,” said Ganim resident Aharon Yarden, 40, who planned to move with his family to the Golan Heights.

Around Sanur and Homesh, a web of back roads, trails and canyons could make it difficult for the army to block the arrival of religious militants from other settlements in the northern West Bank, historically referred to by its biblical name, Samaria.

Settlers in Sanur say they expect 10,000 or more supporters to sweep in to help thwart the evacuation. Employing images of a dire military-style standoff, one right-wing Israeli lawmaker has compared Sanur to Stalingrad.

The evacuation “will be impossible,” said Miriam Adler, a Sanur resident and spokeswoman for the community. “They just won’t succeed.”

Adler, 28, moved to Sanur with her husband 2 1/2 years ago from Kiryat Arba, a Jewish enclave near the West Bank city of Hebron known for its hard-line ideology.

At the time, Sanur had been all but deserted. Once a military post under Ottoman and British rule, Sanur was settled by Jews in 1978 and served as an artists’ colony. But most of the secular residents fled after violence erupted between Israel and the Palestinians in September 2000.

Taking their place in rows of low, bunker-like stucco houses were young families ardent about religion and unflinching in their belief that Jews are the rightful heirs of all the biblical land of Israel. Some attend colleges and universities in the West Bank or in Israel. All wear the skullcaps and head scarves of the religiously observant.

To these residents, the battle against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his pullout plan hinges on passion and faith. Although Gaza has many settlers who are devout, it is the West Bank that has greater biblical significance and the lion’s share of the 230,000 Jewish settlers, who draw extra fervor from being able to gesture across a valley to one site or another mentioned in the Old Testament.

“Sharon is temporary, and the land of Israel is eternal,” Adler said, standing at the edge of the little tent village. “Whoever fights for ideology -- and not interest -- will win.”

It is possible from here to gaze past a plain of Palestinian hay fields to Homesh, perched on a peak immediately above the Palestinian village of Burqa. From the backyard of a Jewish home in Homesh, one can hear a Palestinian vendor below touting his wares: tomatoes, oranges, apricots.

Homesh, with 55 families, is a collection of modest stucco houses hemmed by a wire security fence. Its residents are less uniformly religious than those in Sanur and more ambivalent about what to do next. Although all prefer to stay, a split has emerged between religious residents, who are determined to fight, and their secular neighbors, who say they will obey the government’s edict.

A core of activists has organized protest events, including bringing in thousands of supporters during the springtime Passover holiday, and sought to make sure that backers will show up to thwart the withdrawal. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz was heckled there during a recent meeting at which some residents had hoped to learn more about where they might move.

Menora Hazani, a devout, 28-year-old teacher and filmmaker in Homesh, said Sharon had deliberately focused attention on Gaza because pulling out of a slice of the West Bank, with scores of remaining settlements and relative proximity to large Israeli cities, was more problematic.

“Leaving the region here is much more catastrophic in security terms than leaving Gush Katif,” Hazani said, referring to the main settlement block in Gaza.

Hazani, whose father, Benny Katsover, was a well-known settler leader, said she and her husband still hoped that the withdrawal would not take place. Hazani said, though, that if the police came to the door, officers would have to carry the family out. She said any resistance must be nonviolent.

Other Homesh residents say they are waiting for the government to tell them where to go and have no plans to put up a fight.

“I’m a law-abiding person,” said Nina Korover, 58, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1992 and moved with her husband into a $30,000 house a year later.

She recalls how thirsty and drab the stony landscape appeared then. Now, Korover said, “there is nothing more beautiful than Homesh.”

In one direction, the West Bank city of Nablus covers a hillside; in the other, Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers punctuate the hazy glare of the Mediterranean.

Homesh has only three businesses, including a car parts factory. Most residents commute to work in Tel Aviv or coastal Netanya, about 30 miles away, or settlements in the West Bank.

Korover said about 30 Homesh families, about half of them from the former Soviet Union, had concluded that it was time to prepare to leave. The government said last week that the families had signed an agreement to move as a group to a community in Israel, but residents said the matter was still being negotiated.

Korover’s husband, Boris, died four years ago when a Palestinian driver steered a car into his. Leaving the home where the couple crafted a life after emigrating somehow feels like a betrayal, she said.

But Korover worries that religious hard-liners might be more interested in a confrontation with the government than in negotiation. “I don’t want to leave my house, but if I have no choice -- if they say I have to leave -- I won’t make a war,” she said.

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Times staff writer Shlomi Simhi in Ganim contributed to this report.