Israel to Remove 24 Illegal Outposts

Israel pledged Sunday to uproot 24 illegal Jewish settlement outposts in the West Bank. But it didn’t say when, and did not specify what would happen to scores of other unauthorized outposts.

The decision at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s weekly Cabinet meeting came days after a government-commissioned report accused various Israeli ministries of funneling millions of dollars to the outposts, which usually lie within a mile of older Jewish settlements.

The Cabinet formally adopted the findings of the report, prepared by former state prosecutor Talia Sasson, which described how successive Israeli governments had allowed 105 unauthorized outposts, some of them encampments consisting of a few rusting trailers, some thriving communities that are home to dozens of families, to be built on West Bank hilltops during the last 10 years.

The outposts are intended to stake a claim to additional tracts of the West Bank, regarded by settlers as their biblical birthright but seen by Palestinians as the heartland of their future state. Messianic young Jewish settlers who set up the outposts have resisted past efforts by the Israeli army to evict them.

More than 18 months ago, with the inauguration of the U.S.-supported peace plan known as the “road map,” Israel promised to remove the outposts. However, it has made only a few abortive attempts to do so.

Sunday’s Cabinet decision set no timetable for dismantling the 24 outposts set up during Sharon’s term in office. Nor did it address the fate of 81 others built before the prime minister took office in spring of 2001.

Sasson, the report’s author, deemed all of them illegal.

Sharon, who was once the chief patron of the settlers, said in a terse statement that “the dismantling of unauthorized outposts is part of the Israeli commitment within the road map.” The Cabinet, by an 18-1 vote, ordered that a panel be set up to decide within 90 days how to implement the report’s recommendations.

Ministers and other politicians were sharply divided in their reaction to the Cabinet decision, some saying it had gone too far, others not far enough.

“These outposts are blatantly illegal,” Dalia Itzik, the communications minister and a member of the leftist Labor Party, told Israel Radio. “Israel has to evacuate them, for its own sake, not for that of the Americans.”

Other ministers urged caution, however, saying a move to dismantle outposts now could cloud prospects for a successful Israeli pullout this summer from the Gaza Strip. The evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza is scheduled to begin at the end of July and take about a month.

Opponents of the Gaza pullout have all but exhausted their options in Parliament and the Cabinet. However, they plan to make a last-ditch effort at the end of this month to defeat Sharon’s annual budget and thus topple his government.

“Considering the magnitude of all this, I believe we should first focus on the ‘disengagement’ [from Gaza] and wait concerning the unauthorized outposts,” said Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim.

The Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, which has spent years documenting the spread of outposts with aerial surveillance of the West Bank, called the Cabinet decision a delaying tactic. “The appointment of a committee is nothing more than a funeral ceremony before burying this report,” said secretary-general Yaariv Oppenheimer.

Settler leaders, however, welcomed the Cabinet decision to hold off on any immediate move against the outposts, claiming that Sasson had refused to listen to their version of events while preparing her report.

“Our feeling is that there’s a degree of sanity in this decision,” said Pinchas Wallerstein, a regional settler leader.