ALFE MENASHE SETTLEMENT, West Bank, 30 May 2003 — Israel’s Jewish settlers are gearing up for war against the internationally backed peace road map which aims to end 32 months of bloodshed with the Palestinians. The settlers are also reeling from conciliatory comments toward the Palestinians from one of their staunch allies, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and his support for the plan, which calls for a Palestinian state.
“It broke my heart,” said Eliezer Hisdai, referring to Sharon’s criticism of the Israeli Army’s prolonged reoccupation of the West Bank. Hisdai, the mayor of the northern West Bank settlement of Alfe Menashe, said panic swept his community when Sharon, considered the architect of Israel’s settlement policy, became the first Israeli premier to recognize the Palestinian right to statehood.
As a member of Council of Settlement in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), Hisdai knows that if the international road map is fully implemented, some of the 160 settlements dotting the territory will have to be dismantled.
The fact he is a member of Sharon’s extreme right-wing Likud party added to his dismay. He said he was not disappointed by his leader’s apparent shift, only “confused”.
Hisdai’s settlement is large community of 5,000 people just two kilometers east of the Green Line, near the Palestinian city of Qalqilya.
The settlers consider the road map even “worse” than the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords on Palestinian autonomy, because it calls for an independent Palestinian state by 2005 and a provisional one by the end of this year.
The blueprint also urges Israel to dismantle all the settlement outposts created since Sharon’s accession to power in March 2001 as part of the first of the document’s three phases.
Hisdai said there were between 15 and 20 of these so-called rogue settlements in the West Bank and claimed only four are considered illegal.
Two wildcat settlements have been set up since Wednesday in the southern West Bank region of Hebron, Israeli radio reported, in a show of force by the settlers ahead of Sharon’s meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.
But the Israeli anti-settlement organization Peace Now has counted up to 63 outposts since March 2001, inhabited or not.
Hisdai predicted Sharon could reach an agreement with the settlers for dismantling a few outposts and also vowed they would not resort to violence to oppose the road map but only “passive resistance”. However, this is only the council’s official position and hardliners may use different methods. Hisdai said he wanted to believe the road map had no chance of succeeding because the Palestinians will not succeed in putting an end to the violence and that Sharon’s backing of the blueprint is only tactical.
But he was not planning to take any chances. The Council of Settlements is launching a campaign to contribute to the road map’s collapse.
He was banking on support from the two nationalist pro-settler parties which joined Sharon’s coalition last January and hold two cabinet portfolios.
“I forbid them to resign, because they can slow the train down and hopefully derail it,” he explained.
The council was also planning to organize mass demonstrations such as those that took place during the Oslo process. But the government at the time was led by the left-leaning Labour Party, and the settlers would now have to mobilize against their natural political allies in the right wing.
A first protest, scheduled for next week in Jerusalem will be a test for their determination to oppose Sharon’s government.
The Jerusalem Municipality has, meanwhile, submitted a plan to the Israeli Interior Ministry for a new Jewish settlement near the village of Abu Dis in annexed east Jerusalem. The new neighborhood would be called Kidmat Tziyon, include 230 housing units and two synagogues and cover 100 dunams (25 acres) on a hill overlooking the Palestinian Parliament, the municipality spokesman’s office told AFP.
The new neighborhood would be built on land seized by Israel from Jordan and annexed in the 1967 Middle East War.
The land is partly owned by Jewish American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who acquired large swathes of land in east Jerusalem in the 1980s and recently contributed to the controversial development of a Jewish enclave in the Arab neighborhood of Ras Al-Amud.
Yariv Oppenheimer, spokesman for the Peace Now movement, condemned the project which he said was “another attempt at preventing any solution on the Jerusalem issue by making a return of land to the Palestinians impossible”.
“Moreover, this is a provocation because Abu Dis is where the Palestinians have their parliament and has been discussed as a possible capital for a future Palestinian state,” he told AFP.
