Israeli settlers unsettled

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jun 1, 2003 | by James Bennet New York Times News Service

ITAMAR SETTLEMENT, West Bank -- It was, for Israel's settlers, a most unsettling week. First the Israeli government endorsed the idea of creating a Palestinian state, giving qualified backing to a U.S.- backed peace plan.

Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon criticized what he called Israel's "occupation" in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured during the 1967 war.

This is a right-wing Israeli government, and Sharon is an engineer of the settlement movement, which since the war has moved more than 200,000 Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza. Yet in a conflict in which every word is inspected for political freight, Sharon has adopted a term central to the lexicon of Israeli doves and Palestinians.

"They are talking about giving up the land," said Rabbi Avichai Ronzki, a founder of this Israeli redoubt in the West Bank. "The damage is huge."

Sharon has yet to act to restrain settlement, but Ronzki, 51, worried that the prime minister had shaken an ideological foundation of his dominant Likud Party. "The flag of the Likud was always ownership of the land of Israel -- both sides of the Jordan River," Ronzki said, referring to settlers' motivating dream of holding all of the Jewish biblical domain.

A debate is raging over whether Sharon is preparing his old allies to surrender their homes or using words rather than substantive concessions to ease U.S. pressure on the peace plan.

"The intentions are less important here than the dynamic that is being unleashed," said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew University.

Settlers and others who favor a "greater Israel" prefer to speak of the land as having been "liberated" in the 1967 war. But on Monday, Sharon told legislators from Likud: "You may not like the word, but what's happening is occupation. Holding 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy."

The lawmakers accused Sharon of undermining his own government's effort to label the territories as "disputed," rather than "occupied." The next day, he said he had meant the Palestinians were occupied, not the territory -- a formula that appeared to satisfy no one.

"Whether he wanted to or not, Sharon broke a huge taboo, and no murky clarification can get him out of it," the columnist Amnon Dankner wrote Friday in the Israeli daily Maariv.