Israeli Leader's Defiance of U.S. on Settlement Issue Wins Support at Home

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

JERUSALEM, Aug. 18 -- For five months, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been fending off U.S. pressure to halt the expansion of West Bank settlements. Now he is reaping dividends for his defiance.

Although Israeli leaders have historically been reluctant to publicly break with the United States for fear of paying a price in domestic support, polls show that Netanyahu's strategy is working. And that means that after months of diplomacy, the quick breakthrough that President Obama had hoped would restart peace talks has instead turned into a familiar stalemate.

Arab states largely have rebuffed Obama's request for an overture to Israel until the settlement issue is resolved -- a stand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak emphasized in a meeting with Obama on Tuesday -- and the Palestinians have said a settlement freeze is a precondition for resuming negotiations. Meanwhile, the Israeli public seems to have rallied around Netanyahu's refusal to halt all settlement construction, a backlash that intensified when the Obama administration made clear that it wanted Israel to stop building Jewish homes in some parts of Jerusalem as well as in the occupied West Bank.

In Israel, the dynamic seems to have shifted further from any dramatic concessions. Netanyahu "scored points" for standing up to Obama, said Yoel Hasson, a member of parliament from the opposition Kadima party. In contrast to the United States' public demands for a settlement freeze, signaled early in the relationship between the two new governments, "I think the U.S. understands that it is better for them to do everything with Netanyahu more quietly," Hasson said.

Noting that the Palestinians had negotiated with Israel until late last year despite ongoing construction in the West Bank, Dan Meridor, Israel's intelligence minister, said he found it "strange" that the issue became a precondition for talks after the White House made public demands on Israel.

"I don't think it was intentional, but the result is that this became an obstacle for restarting negotiations," Meridor said in an interview.

The most recent War and Peace Index poll, conducted monthly by Tel Aviv University, showed overwhelming support for Netanyahu's decision to oppose the White House on settlement construction and particularly on building in East Jerusalem. In recent weeks, organizations that favor building houses for Jews in all parts of Jerusalem and the West Bank have steadily become more vocal.

Four members of Netanyahu's cabinet visited unauthorized Jewish outposts in the West Bank on Monday as a show of support, with Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon, considered part of the prime minister's inner circle, saying that a reduction of Israel's presence in the West Bank would "bolster terror."

Ateret Cohanim, an organization active in promoting Jewish construction in Jerusalem's contested neighborhoods, this week hosted former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on a tour of projects -- including a cocktail party at the site of a proposed Jerusalem apartment complex that the Obama administration has singled out for criticism. Huckabee said the trip was arranged in recent weeks as part of a developing response to Obama's demands on Israel.

Members of Congress praised Netanyahu's first months in office on a recent tour of Israel, and even Obama allies such as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) suggested that the onus was on the Palestinians to open talks with or without a settlement freeze.

"There have been some very positive things that have happened under Netanyahu, and I think that [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas ought to take the opportunity to engage," Hoyer said in an interview last week with the Jerusalem Post while on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group. Despite the administration's concern that construction of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem neighborhoods could prejudge the future boundaries of a city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital, Hoyer said Jerusalem "is a whole," adding: "My view is that it will remain whole."

"From the point of view of Israeli public opinion, so far Netanyahu has maneuvered quite successfully," said Tel Aviv University professor Ephraim Yaar. His surveys have showed support for Netanyahu in his clash with Obama and distrust of the U.S. president. In his July poll of 512 Israelis, 60 percent said they did not trust Obama "to safeguard Israel's interests," and 46 percent said he favors the Palestinians, compared with 7 percent who think he favors Israel. The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

In a June speech, Netanyahu endorsed for the first time the idea of a limited Palestinian state, a position crafted as a response to Obama's call in Cairo for renewed peace efforts in the region.

But so far he has largely pursued the path spelled out when he took office in March -- gradual steps to ease the Israeli military presence in the West Bank, a lifting of some roadblocks and a focus on improving the West Bank economy. He has said he is prepared to resume peace talks with the Palestinians "without preconditions," but he has made clear that he is hesitant to make major concessions while the Gaza Strip remains in the hands of the Islamist Hamas group and while uncertainty persists over Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Israel agreed to a freeze on settlement construction as part of the "road map" agreement signed in 2003. Since then the Jewish population in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, has increased from about 224,000 to about 290,000. The Palestinians and Arab states in the region regard a settlement freeze as a critical step -- an acknowledgment that the Palestinian Authority has improved security in the West Bank, as required under the agreement, and a sign that Israel is serious about allowing the area to become part of a Palestinian state.

On Tuesday, Israeli government officials and anti-settlement activists confirmed that no new bids for government construction had been issued for the West Bank since November -- predating Netanyahu's election by several months. But anti-settlement group Peace Now said government-backed construction accounts for less than half the Jewish building in the West Bank. About 1,000 houses and apartments remain under construction, and there is a backlog of approved projects, the group said.

Opposing Obama's demand for a settlement freeze carried some risk. Israelis generally expect their leaders to maintain good relations with the United States and have punished prime ministers who do not do so -- including Netanyahu during his first term, in the late 1990s, when he clashed with President Bill Clinton.

The two sides are still expected to reach some kind of compromise on the issue, though short of the initial demands made by the White House. Netanyahu is meeting U.S. special envoy George J. Mitchell in London this month, and he expects to meet with Obama when he visits the United States for a U.N. General Assembly meeting in September. Discussion has centered on freezing settlement activity for six months to a year.

Whose Religion Is This, Anyway?

Gershom Gorenberg | August 13, 2009 | web only

The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- one state or two -- and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a beret. His wife and producer wore a maxi skirt; a scarf covered her hair. Their attire showed they were Orthodox Jews. Hers, in particular, fit the stereotyped look of the Israeli religious right, of settlers and their supporters, including some Jews abroad. I was surprised. Maybe, I thought, I was the token leftist interviewee in a project by settlement backers aimed at showing that there is no exit from the conflict and that Israel must hold the West Bank forever.

I was also painfully aware of an irony: My own skullcap identifies me, correctly, as an Orthodox Jew. Countless times, my appearance has also caused people to assume, incorrectly, that I belong to the religious right. One look has been enough for them to assign me to the camp that regards Israel's establishment and its conquests in 1967 as part of a divine plan for final redemption and has made settlement and Israeli control of the West Bank into principles of faith. I'm weary of being prejudged and could feel the reflex was to prejudge my visitor. I gently asked him about the purpose of his project. His concern, he said, was to "see a just and equitable solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Once the cameras were running, he asked if I thought the theological right was distorting Judaism. Yes, I said, realizing he'd come to record me saying what he felt himself. Afterward, I told him of my initial concern, and we laughed.

It was another reminder that being an Orthodox dove in Israel is a complicated business. The tension, I should stress, is not between my religious and political commitments. I have no doubt that the pursuit of peace is the most basic of Jewish obligations, that the first lessons of Judaism's sacred texts is that all human beings are created in the divine image and deserve freedom. The first religious figure who inspired me was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the European-born American theologian who returned from marching at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. and declared, "Our legs were praying." That is, seeking social justice was not only a religious requirement, it was an act of worship. Heschel protested the war in Vietnam though it meant challenging the polices of the country that gave him refuge during the Holocaust. His kind of faith did not allow him to stay silent. I can’t know for sure what Heschel would be doing were he alive today, but I believe strongly that he would be working for peace in Israel.

The tension of being an Orthodox dove is partly sociological. Most Israeli Jews with whom I could pray don't share my political views. Most Israelis who share my politics do not understand why I enter a synagogue. More basically, the presumption of the society in which I live is that one cannot be an Orthodox critic of the occupation. That matching up of the political divide and the secular-religious one is a mistake. For a religious dove, however, there is an additional dimension to the argument about territories, settlements, and peace: The stakes are not only the future of one's country but also of one's religion.

One of the most accepted historical narratives in Israeli society is that since the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights in 1967, the driving force for keeping the "Whole Land of Israel" has come from the country's religious minority, while opposition has come from secularists. That's part of the real story, but not all of it. The victory of '67 did create a wave of messianic excitement among those known as religious Zionists -- the segment of the Orthodox community that is integrated into general society, unlike the ultra-Orthodox. The victory was seen as part of a divine plan to bring final redemption.

Since the mid-1970s, the most vocal proponents of settlement in occupied territory have been Orthodox. Religious Zionists dominated the protests against the Oslo process and the Gaza withdrawal. The most shocking event in Israeli political history was the assassination of secular Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious extremist. Today the settlements deepest in the West Bank -- the ones most certain to be evacuated in any two-state solution -- are almost all small religious communities.
On the other hand, settlements wouldn't exist without the support of every Israeli government since 1967. Nor would the two-tier legal system of the West Bank, in which settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens and Palestinians do not. Ariel Sharon, architect of settlement under successive Likud governments was not Orthodox. Nor were Likud prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, nor is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Going further back, the original decisions to settle Israelis in the West Bank after 1967 came under Labor governments, which followed the secular Zionist left's gradualist strategy from pre-independence days: settling land to establish a Jewish claim to it. In reality, the religious right has created a dangerous synthesis: It has adopted Labor's settlement ethos and the secular right's intransigence and transformed them into theological principles.

Part of what obscures the secular role is that the secular-Orthodox fissure dates back to the beginning of the Zionist movement and still runs deep among Israeli Jews. It shapes debate not only on social issues but on the meaning of Jewish identity, as an ethnic or a religious category. It's convenient to adopt a unified field theory of politics, to map all other divisions onto this one.
Besides that, the range of views among secular Israelis is easier to ignore because opinion appears one-sided among religious ones. "It is completely and unequivocally obvious that the majority of religious Zionists position themselves on the right," Bar-Ilan University political scientist Asher Cohen has written – though he stressed that many are "pragmatic hawks" rather than radical rightists.

And yet, there has always been a dovish religious minority. One of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the occupation was Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scientist and theologian who began warning almost immediately after the 1967 conquest that ruling over the Palestinians would lead to the "corruption characteristic of every colonial regime" and eventually erode the ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews. The religious right's view of the Land of Israel and the state of Israel as inherently sacred was a form of idolatry, Leibowitz argued. Holiness, he said, could not be imputed to soil or to human institutions. Members of the dovish religious minority today include – just as one example – the leader of Breaking the Silence, the organization that recently published soldiers' testimony challenging the official version of last winter's war in Gaza.

Leibowitz, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, is remembered as a strident, raging man -- a rationalist philosopher with the impatient fury of a prophet. Going back to his early writing against the occupation, it seems clear that he feared not only the corruption of the state but also the corruption of Judaism.

Today it's clear that his fear was well-founded. In the public sphere in Israel, Judaism is identified with the worship of land, not with the pursuit of peace. For those of us in a half-visible minority of a minority, that's one more pressing reason to end the occupation.

Israeli Ministers Pay Solidarity Visit to Settlements

By Robert Berger Jerusalem 17 August 2009

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Israel's leader is coming under growing pressure from hardliners in his coalition to reject American demands for a halt to settlement expansion.

Jewish settlers and Ultra Orthodox Jewish men pray to support Israeli settlements in the West Bank (File)

A delegation of four hawkish Israeli Cabinet ministers toured controversial settlement outposts in the West Bank Monday in solidarity with Jewish residents there.

It was a direct challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to dismantle about two dozen outposts in response to pressure from the United States. Washington has demanded a complete freeze on settlement expansion, saying Israel is creating facts on the ground on territory the Palestinians seek for a future state.

There are about 100 outposts in the West Bank, most of them consisting of makeshift structures and trailer homes. Residents are young, religious settlers, who seek to expand the Jewish presence in all the biblical Land of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu has declared the outposts illegal, but the Cabinet delegation denied that, saying they are legitimate because previous Israeli governments had approved them.

Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein of Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party noted that Israel just marked the fourth anniversary of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where 21 Jewish settlements were dismantled and 8,000 settlers evacuated. He said there should be no further evacuations because, when Israel pulled out, the Islamic militant group Hamas took over.

"We removed all the settlements out of the Gaza Strip. We have a terrorist entity there, shooting rockets at the Israeli civilians. The whole area is insecure," Edelstein said.

While Mr. Netanyahu supports the settlements ideologically, he is prepared for concessions because he wants to heal a growing rift with Washington. Edelstein is hoping that Israel and the U.S. can find common ground.

"There are misunderstandings, there are disagreements on certain issues; and at the same time, we always have to keep in mind that it's still possible to bridge the gaps," said Edelstein.

But bridging the gaps won't be easy as long as Mr. Netanyahu's nationalist coalition partners try to tie his hands and prevent any significant action against the settlements.

Mubarak to Tell U.S. Israel Must Make Overture

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — In White House meetings beginning Monday, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is expected to tell the Obama administration that Arab nations want peace, but are unwilling to abide Mr. Obama’s call to make good-faith concessions to Israel until Israel takes tangible steps like freezing settlements, an Egyptian official said.

As part of its effort to resuscitate the peace process, the Obama administration has asked Arab countries to make small but symbolic gestures to normalize relations with Israel, like allowing planes to fly through their airspace or improving cultural ties. The administration has also asked Israel to freeze all growth in settlements.

So far, neither side has agreed to Mr. Obama’s proposed first steps, and so the president is expected to look to Mr. Mubarak for help in breaking the latest Middle East deadlock, regional analysts said.

Mr. Mubarak flew from Cairo to Washington on Saturday for his first American visit in five years, accompanied by Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Gen. Omar Suleiman, chief of Egypt’s intelligence service. He was scheduled to meet Monday with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other officials, and is to meet with Mr. Obama on Tuesday.

Mr. Mubarak will tell Mr. Obama that from the Arab perspective, the best way to build confidence is to press Israel to freeze settlements, implement an economic plan to improve life in the West Bank, ease pressure on Gaza and agree to negotiate with all issues on the table, including the status of Jerusalem and refugees, said Ambassador Hossam Zaki, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.

“If they do this and engage immediately in negotiations with Abu Mazen, this is a recipe for openness and the Arabs will make the gestures needed,” Mr. Zaki said, referring to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. “But they don’t want to make this first step. They are demanding the Arabs make the first step. The Arabs should not make the first step. They are the occupying power. The occupation must end.”

In many ways, Mr. Mubarak’s visit to Washington signals a new beginning to an old script, as Arabs and Israelis argue which side should go first, Arab states revert to their old roles in the region, and the United States tempers its criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record in return for Egypt’s regional cooperation.

During the Bush years, the region’s more radical forces, those against the peace process, had the upper hand, including Iran, Syria and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that now controls the Gaza Strip.

But while the dynamics of the region are always fluid, the tone, at the moment, appears to favor those in the peace camp, regional analysts said. That shift has been attributed in part to Iran being distracted by the internal political tumult over its disputed presidential election, and Mr. Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, especially his speech in Cairo, which has won the president, if not the United States, popular good will.

“The extremist forces now in the region are to some extent receding,” said Abdel Raouf al-Reedy, former Egyptian ambassador to the United States and chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. “If you notice for instance Hamas, Hamas’s discourse has begun to soften a bit. If you notice Syria, now Syria is actually cooperating with the United States.”

Mr. Mubarak’s visit also signals an effort to re-establish Egypt as the United States’ chief strategic Arab ally after years of tension and animosity between Washington and Cairo. Mr. Mubarak had refused to visit Washington in protest over President Bush’s Middle East policies, the invasion of Iraq and the public criticism of Egypt’s political and human rights record.

The Bush administration effectively sidelined Egypt, turning more to Saudi Arabia as a regional force to counter the growing influence of Iran and push forward a peace initiative that the Saudi king initially sponsored, political analysts here said. But today, the Saudis have stepped back.

Political analysts said that Mr. Obama was pressing Saudi Arabia to take the lead in offering so-called confidence-building measures to Israel, but the Saudis flatly refused, saying they had already produced a peace initiative endorsed by all 22 members of the Arab League.

“Saudi Arabia will not accept to take any steps before Israel shows that it wants peace to be its first choice,” said Anwar Majid Eshki, chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, a research center in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. “President Mubarak will listen to the demands of the United States and then present the Arab point of view in this regard.”

Egypt remains weighed down by domestic problems, including high unemployment, widespread poverty and uncertainty over who will replace Mr. Mubarak, who is 81 and in his 28th year in office. But the White House appears to have calculated that Egypt, as the largest Arab nation with regional goals similar to Washington’s, remains the best place to turn.

“The United States has to have a regional power to coordinate its policies with and Egypt cannot be a regional power without the United States,” said Mr. Reedy, the former Egyptian ambassador. “So there is some kind of a complementary relationship.”

Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and now a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that the meeting between Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Obama was important, but that their discussion should focus on what Israel insists is the primary problem in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and its regional ambitions.

“The issue is Iran and what seems to be an American reluctance to take care of this problem, which is much more meaningful for Mubarak than Israel,” he said.

Ambassador Zaki, of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said that the presidents would address many issues besides the peace process, including Iran, Sudan and extremism.

But on the peace process, he said, Egypt’s opinion is unshakable.

“We think this huge gap of confidence requires movement from the Israelis first,” he said. “Then the Arabs are willing to make gestures. This is the way Arabs see it.”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.

Israeli Settlements: Obama Should Know Better

Photo courtesy of Mairav Zonszein

Early in the morning on July 7, an excited crowd of more than 100 gathered in Ben-Gurion International Airport to greet 232 new Jewish immigrants to Israel who arrived from North America on an El Al charter flight organized and funded by Nefesh B'Nefesh (which means "Soul in Soul" in Hebrew). The airport's old and defunct Terminal 1 has been transformed into a celebratory arrival hall for new immigrants brought by the nonprofit organization, which was founded in 2001 with the aim of revitalizing immigration to Israel from North America and Britain.

• Mairav Zonszein: Obama says he wants a freeze on Israeli settlement expansion. If that's the case, he should turn his attention to the US-based nonprofit that encourages American immigration to the West Bank.

Recently considered by the Jewish Agency to be serious competition when it comes to immigration, NBN is now recognized as the official operator of North American immigration to Israel. After some years of animosity and tension between the two groups, the Jewish Agency, along with the Israeli government, signed a contract with NBN last September that not only grants formal recognition to NBN but also guarantees that the government and the Jewish Agency will each fund a third of NBN's $12 million annual budget. The remaining third comes from private donors. It is noteworthy, given the fact that Israeli taxpayer money goes toward this enterprise, that so few Israelis have heard of it.

NBN's declared mission is to remove any obstacles that may stand in the way of those who wish to move to Israel. As such, it offers incentives, primarily cash. In addition to the "absorption basket"--a set of social and financial benefits provided by the government--new immigrants are flown over in an El Al plane, given their immigrant certification upon arrival and receive a lump sum of money. This money is stipulated as an advance, awarded only after the olim (immigrants) have lived at least three years in Israel. Amounts vary, depending on family size and financial situation. Although all immigrants sign a contract with NBN requiring that they "agree not to disclose the amount of the advance of funds to any person," a single man who moved from the United States in 2006 was willing to divulge that he was granted $4,000 when he moved.

In the years since its first plane landed, NBN has brought 20,000 immigrants to Israel from North America and Britain. Of those 20,000, NBN PR and communications manager Renana Levine claims that fewer than 3 percent (600 people) have moved beyond the Green Line to settlements in the West Bank.

However, on this last flight alone, seven families were reportedly moving to Ma'ale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank. Even if we take the modest amount of three members per family (despite the fact that it is surely more, as one family had five children), that is already twenty-one people on a plane of 232, making it nearly 10 percent of the flight. And this is only one settlement. A representative of the Efrat Council, a long and narrow settlement in Gush Etzion, said that he expected fifteen families to move there this summer. The 3 percent claim is thus highly suspect.

While some of the territories beyond the Green Line, such as Gush Etzion, are considered by most Israelis to be "consensus areas"--places they assume will remain part of Israel in any final resolution with the Palestinians--they are nonetheless settlements undergoing population growth from outside Israel, which is in blatant disregard of President Obama's call to freeze all settlement growth. Yet this does not seem to bother the new immigrants or NBN staff, who appear disturbingly oblivious to recent tensions between Israel and the United States over settlement expansion and their direct role in changing facts on the ground in the West Bank. When asked why he chose Ma'ale Adumim, one new immigrant responded that it reminded him most of his home in Montreal.

NBN clearly does not differentiate between destinations on either side of the Green Line. One need look no further than its website to see that settlements throughout the West Bank figure prominently as ideal destinations. "It is hard to imagine a more hospitable place for religious Olim than Gush Etzion," NBN proclaims. "Kedumim's residents feel very connected to the area's historical roots and are actively working to increase the community's size. They are making a special effort to reach out to North American olim."

When asked about the political implications of NBN's support for Americans moving to the West Bank--where construction is considered by both the international community and the US State Department to be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention--Levine responded that where the immigrants move to is "up to them. We do not promote one location over the other. We are an apolitical organization." But how can a US-based nonprofit that works in conjunction with the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency, and does not differentiate between the West Bank and Israel, possibly consider itself to be "apolitical"?

At the jovial July 7 welcoming ceremony, the newly instated Jewish Agency chairman, Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refusenik turned Israeli success story, addressed the crowd, informing them that they could use the Bible as their destination guide. He enumerated several ideal locations to move to, including Efrat and Bethlehem, where the Jewish settlement of Har Homa stands, severing Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem from East Jerusalem.

When asked about whether Obama's policy has hindered NBN's operations, a staff member responded happily: "No, we are seeing a rise in numbers." Settlement growth last year, at least, was up 69 percent. Of that amount, 39 percent of the new construction was built outside "consensus areas." According to Peace Now, only 60 percent of growth in the settlements last year was "natural" (resulting from internal reproduction), while the remaining 40 percent was the result of immigration to settlements from Israel and abroad. The staff member, himself an NBN immigrant and resident of Gush Etzion, admitted that he does consider himself a settler.

In addition to Israel's foot-dragging on the evacuation of outposts, the Obama administration faces another obstacle in its effort to put a freeze on Israeli settlement growth: American citizens moving to the West Bank. If Obama aims to crack down on Israel's blatant expansion of settlements, he should start from within his own borders.

About Mairav Zonszein

Mairav Zonszein is a Jerusalem-based, American-Israeli Ta’ayush activist and former executive director of the Union of Progressive Zionists. She maintains the blog ibnEzra with Joseph Dana at: www.josephdana.com.

Anti-Settlement Group Takes Palestinian Property Claims to Israel's High Court

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 31, 2009

BURQA, West Bank -- It has been nearly a decade since the Jewish settlement of Migron appeared on the hilltop opposite this Palestinian village, beginning with a communications tower and followed by a cluster of homes and a fence around approximately 90 acres of land.

Data tucked onto the hard drive of anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes's computer indicates that the land belongs to the residents of Burqa and nearby Deir Dibwan, and Etkes said he expects that information will one day force the settlers to leave.

The compulsion won't come from Israel's politicians, world public opinion or the Obama administration, Etkes contends, but from Israel's Supreme Court, where local advocacy groups are having increased success challenging settlements with simple property claims.

Etkes, the 42-year-old coordinator of settlement issues for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, has helped instigate a number of lawsuits through the pioneering use of mapping software to establish where settlements have encroached on private Palestinian land. "You have to create a tsunami that will expose the dimensions" of the problem, he said.

The debate over the status of West Bank settlements has been underway for more than three decades -- with the United States and many other countries regarding them as the improper actions of an occupying power, Israel claiming they are legitimate uses of land it is responsible for administering, and the Palestinians regarding them as an effort to undermine creation of a state of their own. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and about 290,000 Israelis now live in roughly 120 government-sanctioned settlements, as well as several dozen unauthorized ones. Those figures exclude Jewish areas in East Jerusalem.

The enclaves run from small clusters of homes, such as Migron, where some residents feel they are fulfilling a religious call to reclaim the land of Israel, to city-size developments with tens of thousands of residents drawn by cheaper prices and room for growing families.

But even as the international debate has proceeded with no clear resolution -- the dispute between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is the latest in a long series of disagreements between their countries over the issue -- a quiet revolution has taken place among Israeli groups opposed to the settlements.

Limited in the past to political advocacy and efforts to court international opinion, they now have access to a deeply layered database on West Bank land that Etkes assembled over three years. Multiple sets of information can be compared -- official Israeli maps; Palestinian, Jordanian and British records rendered in digital form; hundreds of Global Positioning System images; and aerial photos supplemented by field observations.

The Israeli courts honor the property rights of Palestinians and are beginning to pressure the government to block construction or make plans to remove houses built on private property. Proving landownership in the West Bank is not always easy, though, with a hodgepodge of records and rules that include formal land registrations, conventions that extend property rights to those who traditionally cultivate an area and Israeli government property seizures.

Still, Etkes's data are having an effect. Prodded by litigation, the Israeli government is laying plans now to move the Migron settlers to another part of the West Bank. And building at the settlement of Ofra has been restricted because it is on private land, according to Michael Sfard, the lawyer who has filed most of the lawsuits.

"It's a different universe," Sfard said. "If we had had these tools 40 years ago, I think the landscape would be different." Yesh Din has about 20 cases pending in the courts, and Etkes said "dozens" more are yet to be filed. The change has been noted by the Netanyahu government and others, who say the groups are funded by foreign governments and other outside sources and who have promised more aggressive rebuttals.

But Yesh Din's strategy of relying on the Israeli courts raises some deeper issues, akin to the debates in the United States about the role of the judiciary in molding policy, said Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University, who tracks the funding and relationships among nongovernmental groups.

"There is already a debate that the court is run by a small group of like-minded people that are outside the political process," Steinberg said. "As a result of this, it will increase." Judges are chosen by a nine-member committee that includes three justices, members of the Israeli bar, cabinet members and members of the parliament.

That debate, Etkes said, is the type of issue he hopes his work will raise. There is little chance, he added, that litigation alone will stop the expansion of settlements. But he said he hopes it will make Israelis confront the degree to which the settlements have encroached on private property and make the government enforce the law.

"We're asking questions about what Israel wants to be when it grows up," said Etkes, a former tour guide who said that he was raised in a religious family that supported the settlements and that he spent summers picking fruit in some of the same communities he is now opposing in court. "You talk about the rule of law and say that is your ethos. The main point is: Who controls the West Bank -- the state or the settlers?"

Enforcement of the rules can be slow, with Israeli authorities saying they prefer even years-long negotiations to risking the kind of violence that flared this month when settlers set fire to Palestinian fields and pelted cars with rocks after the removal of a small outpost.

Across the valley in Migron, training-wheel bikes scattered in driveways speak to a community that is nestled and comfortable, despite the large metal security gate and the guard at the entrance.

Itai Harel was one of the first to move to Migron. He said there was no sense of taking land that belonged to anyone else, only of improving barren hills "where our prophets walked and where the Bible was written." In responding to the litigation, Migron residents contended that their homes were built on land that had been abandoned and was under Israeli state control, and that they were abiding by government policy that supported Jewish settlement in the area.

If the larger area that was fenced in around Migron included private fields -- Harel acknowledged that some wheat and barley fields had been maintained in the area -- then compensation should be discussed, he said.

According to Etkes, all of Migron is in a part of the West Bank where private land registration was completed before the 1967 war and ownership was well established. He has become a familiar figure to the settlers, trolling the West Bank in a dusty four-wheel-drive vehicle looking for signs of new roads or outposts.

"They found a genius strategy: go to the Supreme Court, where everybody thinks like them," Harel said of Etkes and groups such as Yesh Din and Peace Now.

"Why should we leave here? If we leave, it is acknowledging it is occupied land," rather than Israel, said Harel, 35, who is raising four children here.

Across the valley, Mohammed Barakat, the Palestinian village treasurer of Burqa, said the wheat and barley fields mentioned by Harel may well have been his: Those were the crops grown on his 10 acres before the fence went up around the place in 2001. The loss has meant a few thousand dollars a year out of his pocket ever since.

"It's paralyzing," Barakat said of the settlements and the road, built for their use, that encircle Burqa. "It's like living in a refugee camp."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003809.html

West Bank Settlers Send Obama Defiant Message

By ETHAN BRONNER

NERIA, West Bank — In this land of endless history and ethereal beauty, several thousand Jewish settlers gathered on a dozen West Bank hills with makeshift huts and Israeli flags over several days this week to mark an invented anniversary and defy the American president, conveying to his aides visiting Jerusalem what they thought of his demand for a settlement freeze.

Eleven tiny settler outposts were inaugurated, including one next to this settlement in the rugged Samarian hills. A clearing encompassing a generator and a hut with a corrugated metal roof and a ritual mezuza on its doorpost now bears the name Givat Egoz. This is how nearby Neria, with 180 families, got its start 18 years ago.

“We are rebuilding the land of Israel,” Rabbi Yigael Shandorfi, leader of a religious academy at the neighboring settlement outpost of Nahliel, said during the ceremony. “Our hope is that there will be roads, electricity and water.” The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.”

None of the hundreds gathered — mostly couples with large families, but also armed young men and teenagers from other outposts — objected. Yitzhak Shadmi, leader of the regional council of settlements, said Mr. Obama was a racist and anti-Semite for his assertion that Jews should not build here, but Arabs could.

Mr. Shadmi said the ceremonies across the West Bank this week honored a moment in 1946 when Zionists established 11 settlements in the northern Negev of Palestine in defiance of the British rulers before Israel was created. It was important for the new outposts to be established while Washington’s emissaries were visiting, he said. George J. Mitchell, the special envoy for the Middle East, who is pressing the settlement freeze, was in the West Bank at the start of the week.

The national security adviser, James L. Jones, and a White House adviser on the region, Dennis B. Ross, held meetings in Jerusalem on Wednesday as part of the negotiations, which also include attempts to get Arab governments and Palestinians to reciprocate if the Israelis agree to the freeze.

“We wanted to do this while they were here,” Mr. Shadmi said. “We’re saying, ‘Mitchell, go home.’ ”

When the settlement of Neria was created in 1991, it had a similar purpose. Yossi Dermer, spokesman for the settlement, said it was known slyly to intimates as “the James Baker settlement” because it was set up to convey a message of defiance before a visit by James A. Baker III, secretary of state for the first President George Bush.

Because West Bank settlements officially require Israeli government approval and the new outposts did not obtain it, the Israeli police have dismantled several of the new ones already. But just as quickly, they are being rebuilt, sometimes a bit bigger. At nearly every outpost, the ruins left by past police actions lie next to newly built huts.

“We’ll build and build, and every time they destroy it we will build bigger and better and prettier,” asserted Tirael Cohen, a 16-year-old girl who lives at Ramat Migron, an extension of the unauthorized Migron outpost, not far from Ramallah, a large Palestinian city in the West Bank. Ruined corrugated metal and pieces of wood were strewn on the ground nearby.

Tirael has lived at Ramat Migron for a year and a half with 10 other girls, and, at a religiously modest distance away, 10 boys live in a separate structure. The girls cook, the boys build and maintain, and all study at nearby religious academies.

About 40 religious girls from within Israel and West Bank settlements spent three days at Ramat Migron last week in what they called “spiritual preparation” for coming battles over the land.

On the outside wall of the kitchen is a rabbinical quotation about the need to redeem the land of Israel. It says “bare mountains and deserted fields cry out for life and creation,” and adds: “An internal revolution is taking place here, a revolution in man and the earth. These are the true pains of salvation.”

The Migron outpost itself is expected to be taken down because it is built on land that, according to a court case, belongs to private Palestinian families. Centuries-old olive trees dot the landscape.

The Obama administration is hoping to help establish a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank next to Israel. One major challenge is what to do with the 300,000 Israeli Jews who have settled here over four decades, often at their government’s urging.

Many could be incorporated into Israel through a border adjustment; others say they would move if compensated. But some, like these outpost settlers, say they will never move because they believe they are fulfilling God’s plan with every hut they put up. They are likely to be a major stumbling block to any attempt to find a two-state solution.

At the Neria outpost celebration, Noam Rein, a father of 10, looked out across the hills at Ramallah and called its presence “temporary.”

He added: “The Torah says the land of Israel is for the Jewish people. This is just the beginning. We will build 1,000 homes here. The Arabs cannot stay here, not because we hate them, but because this is not their place.”

Among the religious leaders who spoke at the ceremony, Rabbi Yair Remer of Harasha, a nearby outpost, noted that Thursday was the Ninth of Av, a Jewish day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the ancient temples. He suggested that the best way to cope with the tragedy of Jewish history was to do what the young builders of this outpost were doing.

“The land rejoices because its children are returning to her,” he said, referring to Jewish settlers, making no mention of the 2.5 million Palestinians here.

Tirael, the teenager from Ramat Migron, put it another way: “I believe that every inch of this land is us, our blood. If we lose one inch, it is like losing a person.”

Unsettled - In West Bank Settlements, Sign of Hope for a Deal

By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER

MODIIN ILLIT, West Bank — Seen from afar, this fast-growing settlement embodies everything that the Obama administration wants to address through its demand for a freeze on settlement building: it sits on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and, with 45,000 residents and 60 births a week, it is the largest and fastest-growing Jewish community in the West Bank.

If, as is widely believed abroad, “natural growth” by Israeli settlers is blocking the creation of a viable Palestinian state, this community should show why.

But appearances are deceiving. Modiin Illit and its sister community, Beitar Illit, are entirely ultra-Orthodox, a world apart, one of strict religious observance and study. They offer surprising potential for compromise.

Unlike settlers who believe they are continuing the historic Zionist mission of reclaiming the Jewish homeland, most ultra-Orthodox do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists and express no commitment to being in the West Bank, so their growth in these settlement towns, situated just inside the pre-1967 boundary, could be redirected westward to within Israel.

Their location also means it may be possible, in negotiations about a future Palestinian state, to redraw the boundary so the settlements are inside Israel, with little land lost to the Palestinians. And the two towns alone account for half of all settler growth, so if removed from the equation, the larger settler challenge takes on more manageable proportions.

“If I thought this was a settlement, I would never have come here,” said Yaakov Guterman, 40, the mayor of Modiin Illit and a grandfather of three, his Orthodox fringes hanging from his belt, his side locks curled behind his ears. Asked about the prospect of a Palestinian state rising one day on his town line, he said: “We will go along with what the world wants. We have gone through the Holocaust and know what it means to have the world against us. The Torah says a man needs to know his place.”

Whether or not Mr. Guterman will be as pliant as he says, Middle East peace negotiators on all sides — Israeli, Palestinian and American — have long viewed small border adjustments and land swaps as key to a deal that would include a solution to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have settled in the West Bank over the past four decades.

This week, three senior American officials will be in Jerusalem for talks that will include settlements: the Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell; the White House Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross; and the national security adviser, Gen. James Jones. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will also be in talks in Jerusalem.

Break With Settler Movement

The ultra-Orthodox inhabitants often express contempt for the settler movement, with its vows never to move. The people here, who shun most aspects of modernity, came for three reasons: they needed affordable housing no longer available in and around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; they were rejected by other Israeli cities as too cult-like; and officials wanted their presence to broaden Israel’s narrow border.

Yet they are lumped with everyone else. The settler movement and the Israeli government point to ultra-Orthodox settlements, with their large and ever-increasing families, to argue that there is no way to stop “natural growth” without imposing acute human suffering. Those seeking a freeze use the settlements as evidence that growth is so out of control that drastic action must be taken. More broadly, opponents say the settlements violate international law, legitimize force by armed messianic Jews and ruin the chance of establishing a viable Palestinian state.

But even those who strongly favor a complete freeze acknowledge that the annual settler growth rates of 5 and 6 percent owe a great deal to these two towns that have little to do with the broader settler enterprise.

Dror Etkes of Yesh Din, an antisettlement group in Israel, noted that half of all construction in West Bank settlements was taking place in these two ultra-Orthodox communities, adding that given their location next to the boundary, it was highly likely they would be in Israel in a future deal through a redrawn border. “From a purely geographic point of view, construction there is not as destructive as elsewhere,” he said.

But he does not want building to continue in Modiin Illit or Beitar Illit without a deal for a Palestinian state, nor does he mean to imply that these settlements have been a benign force. “Land has been taken from Palestinians, in some cases from private landowners, for the building in these settlements, and there are many other issues like sewage flow into Palestinian villages that must be addressed,” Mr. Etkes said.

Settler leaders reject any distinction. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox came to the West Bank to solve their housing problems is “completely O.K. with me,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, the settlers’ political umbrella group. “They are an integral part of our endeavor and our achievement.”

The Palestinian View

But even in Bilin, the Palestinian village that abuts Modiin Illit and has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, the settlers over the fence are viewed as different from the Jewish nationalists in, say, Hebron.

Abedallah Abu Rahma, a teacher from a farming family and a leading activist in the village, pointed toward the settler high-rise buildings visible across the valley from his living room window and said: “They tell us, ‘We are poor, the apartments here are cheaper and we did not know it was a settlement.’ Many told us, ‘Give us our money back and we will leave.’ ”

The Palestinians, who hold weekly demonstrations against the barrier, have even joined forces with some of the settlers. Two years ago, Bilin won a major Supreme Court case that forced a change in the route of the barrier, and some of the documents the victorious villagers used, Mr. Abu Rahma said, had been secretly passed to them by ultra-Orthodox settlers feuding with their own municipal leaders.

Still, none of that lessens the harm to the villagers caused by the very existence of Modiin Illit and the contest over its land. Mr. Abu Rahma said he would respect any agreement reached between the Palestinian leadership and Israel, including one that had Modiin Illit standing in Israel. But noting the village’s reliance on agriculture, its own housing needs and the settlement’s encroachment on Bilin’s territory, he insisted, “We need our land.”

Moreover, protecting the settlements from attack has meant construction of numerous barriers, checkpoints and bypass roads that impair economic development and disrupt daily life.

Across the West Bank and excluding East Jerusalem, there are nearly 300,000 settlers living on scores of settlements among 2.3 million Palestinians. And while some say they will fight to stay put, a third are the reluctant ultra-Orthodox, known in Israel as Haredim, Hebrew for the fearful ones, or those who tremble in awe of God.

They believe it important to live in the land of Israel, because certain commandments can be performed only here. But some Haredim actively reject the formation of a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah, while others are ambivalent. They also say that protecting life trumps holding territory. Very few serve in the military because the ultra-Orthodox say they do more good for the nation by studying the Torah and praying than fighting.

Until his death in 2001, Rabbi Eliezer Schach was the religious authority of the Haredim of European origin. He opposed building Jewish settlements that extended over the 1967 line into territory Israel seized in the war, once calling them “a blatant attempt to provoke the international community” and complaining that they endangered Jewish lives. In fact, when first offered housing for his followers in Beitar Illit, he took it as an insult, according to Yitzchak Pindrus, a former mayor of the settlement.

“Our people live around their families and rabbis, and they were terrified of the idea,” Mr. Pindrus recalled. But with thousands of new couples marrying every year, and the traditional ultra-Orthodox communities expensive and crowded, the Haredim needed homes.

Because few ultra-Orthodox men work, because on average their families have eight children and because they do not integrate easily into the larger community, Teddy Kollek, who was mayor of Jerusalem in the late 1980s, wanted to keep down their numbers. Other cities rejected them. Yitzhak Rabin, as both defense minister and then prime minister, championed the creation of large settlements around Jerusalem to fortify Israel’s hold on the capital, in line with his Labor Party’s strategic plan, so he and the Haredim struck a deal for Beitar Illit in the early 1990s.

For those wanting to remain closer to longstanding Haredi communities in the center of the country, Modiin Illit was an alternative. Private Israeli developers bought tracts of Palestinian land as its base, although the legitimacy of those sales has been challenged. Mr. Guterman, the mayor, said Mr. Rabin “gave his blessing to the city,” telling Rabbi Schach’s disciples that its strategic location on the first rise above Israel’s international airport guaranteed that it would not be given back.

There are smaller pockets of Haredi settlement deeper in the West Bank, where the arm’s-length attitude toward Zionist settlement has shifted toward a more distinctly right-wing ideology. Zvi Kastelanitz, of the Immanuel settlement, who produces silver-inlaid Jewish handicrafts, for example, said he had no objection to two states for two peoples, “but not here.” Still, the Haredi settlers even there remain distinct. After Palestinians ambushed two buses on the road to Immanuel, southwest of Nablus, in 2001 and 2002, killing a total of 20 people, the Haredi settlers did not react like their nationalist counterparts, defiantly setting up another settlement outpost. Instead, about a third of Immanuel’s 4,000 residents left.

Shunning Secular World

The Haredi world is all about being together and apart from secular temptations, an intricate patchwork of groups with allegiances to different rabbinic dynasties and courts. In the new cities, Haredi rules apply. At the entrance to Beitar Illit, a sign warns visitors to dress modestly. The streets are all named for rabbis and sages from Poland to Yemen. There is Internet access, officially intended for professional use only. Televisions are allowed, but nobody admits to having one. And there is poverty: about 40 percent of wives support their large families because their husbands do not work. There are few cars, lots of buses and baby strollers.

Dov Fromowitz, a father of nine who moved to Beitar Illit from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn 12 years ago, runs a central charity fund that collects money from better-off residents and distributes it to the poor, while connecting them with other social welfare services outside the settlement. He says he has 1,200 needy families on his books.

Without most Israelis noticing, Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit have turned into the Haredi towns of the future, cleaner and saner versions of their often decrepit and densely packed neighborhoods elsewhere. They contain open space, even some greenery, and apartments with lots of bedrooms. Their young are shielded from secular Israel, and secular Israelis never see them, thereby reducing the tensions found in Jerusalem over driving on the Sabbath and sexy advertising at bus stops.

The Question of Coexistence

Even if the ultra-Orthodox appear to be less ideologically committed to the West Bank, the longer they live here, the more invested some have become.

In Modiin Illit, Mayor Guterman has ambitions to build what he calls “the largest Haredi residential community in Israel.” Over the past three years, he has set up a business center that he considers the wave of the future. Now 1,000 women, mostly mothers in their 20s, sit at work stations providing phone services to Israeli credit card clients and paralegal research for real estate businesses in the United States. It is outsourcing that seeks to take advantage of the educational level and work ethic of Haredi women.

The question of coexistence with Palestinians hovers, however. In Beitar Illit, farmers from the village of Husan enter daily in cars and on donkeys to work their lands in the valleys among the settlements’ built-up hills. The new mayor, Meir Rubinstein, is proud of the city’s cooperation with local Palestinians, whom he calls “the neighbors.”

“We very much want there to be peace here,” he said. “We pray for it three times a day.” But the question of peace at what price remains.

Avraham and Riva Guttman, who arrived in Beitar Illit 15 years ago from Toronto and have seven children, look out from their street at Palestinian villages. They believe strongly in living in the land of Israel, they say, and they are happy for the parks and space lacking in traditional Haredi areas of Israel. But they do not insist that it is there or nothing. “We are not here for political reasons,” Mr. Guttman said. “Ninety percent of the people are here for the affordability, not for ideology. Haredim don’t fight with Arabs.”

Perhaps not, but his wife, Riva, bristled at the idea of moving. “If you told me to move elsewhere because Arabs needed a place to live, it would not sit quietly on my conscience,” she said. “I am a Jew in the Jewish homeland.”

And increasingly, the Haredim have vested interests over the 1967 line. Yaron and Sara Simchovitch arrived in Beitar Illit from Jerusalem 13 years ago with a group led by their rabbi. The couple now have a thriving butcher shop.

Yoseph Shilhav, an expert on the ultra-Orthodox at Bar-Ilan University, said that almost every Haredi family now had a member beyond the 1967 border, subtly shifting their attitudes about settlement and withdrawal. The Haredim make up 10 percent of Israel’s population and are a fast-growing electoral force. The Chabad movement and Sephardic or Middle Eastern-origin Shas party have increasingly adopted the nationalist agenda.

The rocket fire into Israel that resulted after its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has also taken its toll on Haredi views. “In general, Haredim are very practical people,” said Mr. Pindrus, the former Beitar Illit mayor. “We are not right or left. If we get up in the morning and see that leaving Gaza means missiles, then no, we’re not leaving another centimeter.” He added, “We want to live, and our children not to blow up.”

Still, a surprising number do not oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state if safety can be guaranteed. Since housing is the No. 1 Haredi concern and they feel no need for it to be in the West Bank, redirecting the building of their new homes inside Israel could go a long way toward a solution.

“If the Americans can convince us there will really be peace and we won’t be living in fear of rockets, we’ll bring a recommendation to our rabbis,” said Mr. Guterman, the mayor of Modiin Illit. “Our rabbis want peace. We are not against withdrawing from territory. But life is above all.”

Israeli Settlers Versus the Palestinians

by Nine Burleigh /Efrat

In a hilltop suburb South of Jerusalem called Efrat, Sharon Katz serves a neat plate of sliced cake inside her five-bedroom house, surrounded by pomegranate, olive and citrus trees that she planted herself. She glances out the window at the hills where, she believes, David and Abraham once walked. "We are living in the biblical heartland," she sighs.

It is a heartland the prophets would not recognize, replete as it is with pizza parlor, jazz nights at the coffee shop, grocery store and yellow electronic gate with machine-gun-wielding guards. Efrat is one of 17 settlements that make up a bloc called Gush Etzion, located not in Israel but in the occupied West Bank. The Katzes (Sharon, husband Israel and five children) consider themselves law-abiding citizens. They publish a small community magazine and take part in civic projects. Sharon raises money for charity by putting on tap-dancing and theater shows. And yet to much of the outside world, the Katzes are participating in an illegal land grab forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an occupying power from settling its own civilians on militarily controlled land. Some Israelis have admitted as much. While Benjamin Netanyahu, then as now Prime Minister, was negotiating with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1998, Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon got on Israeli radio and urged Israelis to settle more land fast. "Grab the hilltops, and stake your claim," he said. "Everything we don't grab will go to them." (See pictures of life in the West Bank settlements.)

The Palestinians ("them") hate the settlements as a reminder of occupation, proof that if and when any agreement with Israel is forged, they will never get back the land they call theirs. The settlements have joined other intractable issues — like the desire of Palestinian refugees to return to villages their families left 60 years ago — that have stymied every effort to find peace in the Middle East for a generation. The Obama Administration says negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis can only proceed if Israel agrees to stop settling occupied land. "The settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward," said Barack Obama when he met with Netanyahu in May. But for Israeli politicians on both the left and the right, even agreeing to freeze the settlements — much less dismantling them — is easier said than done. And the Katzes are one of the reasons why. (Read "Despite Jewish Concerns, Obama Keeps Up Pressure on Israel.")

It wasn't always so. After the Six-Day War in 1967, two groups of then rare (now commonplace) religious nationalists settled one small site each in the Galilee and Efrat. At the time, the Israeli government had no intention of settling seized Arab land and sheepishly described the settlements as military bases. Over the years, though, Israeli governments of all political persuasions have supported colonizing the West Bank — providing money, building permits and water and sewage services, as well as constructing special settlers-only roads. The number of settlers has grown fast in the past 15 years, as Israeli troops have pulled out of Arab cities and moved into the countryside, where they protect the Jewish population centers. In 1995, according to Israeli census figures, 138,000 settlers lived in the West Bank and Gaza. Now in the West Bank alone (no settlers remain in Gaza), there are nearly 300,000, mostly nestled together in heavily guarded blocs, living among 2.5 million unwelcoming Arabs. An additional 200,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem, which Israel "annexed" in 1967.

A Gathering of the Exiles
Over the years, the Israeli government has paid lip service to the idea of opposing settlements, mainly by evacuating small outposts while supporting the large, suburban-style blocs. In 2005, Israel turned Gaza over to Palestinian control, ceding major settlements for the first time in 30 years. For the settlers, who frequently justify their presence as sanctioned by God, that act was a benchmark provocation and — in the view of religious nationalists — a divine repudiation of Israel's failure to settle yet more land. The government compensated each of the Gaza families with up to $400,000, but the money is of little interest to Sharon Katz and others in Efrat. They intend to stay put.

Watch TIME's video "Protesting Gaza, Carefully, in the West Bank."

See TIME's Israel covers.

The Katz family moved to Efrat from Woodmere, N.Y., in 1985, after a family visit to Israel during which Sharon had an epiphany while her children played with some newly arrived Ethiopians. "I looked at my sons in their Izod shirts next to these children from Africa, and I saw black, white, black," she says. "The Bible talks about the ingathering of the exiles, and here were these children all together." The Katzes don't think their town is an obstacle to peace. They can sometimes see Palestinian Arabs on the green flats far below but have no interaction with them. Most people in Efrat take bulletproof buses to Jerusalem, 15 minutes away, via a "bypass road" — one of a vast network Israel has built in the West Bank. The Katzes believe Arabs arrived in the area only in the 1970s. "People tried to build here many times and failed because the conditions were very harsh, rocky, no water," Israel Katz explains. "Jews are very stubborn people. If they want something, they won't stop. Jews started coming here and to talk of a community. That's when Arabs started coming here." (See pictures of 60 years of Israel.)

The Netanyahu government, like its predecessors, makes a distinction between what it calls "legal" settlements like the Gush Etzion bloc (pop. 75,000) and "illegal" outposts deeper in the West Bank. Within sight of the Arab city of Nablus, settler Itay Zar, 33, lives in a two-room shanty with his wife and their five children, above a stretch of road at risk from Palestinian snipers. Zar's father, Moshe Zar, is one of the biggest — and therefore most despised by Palestinians — Jewish buyers of Arab land in the West Bank. Zar grew up in the West Bank. His outpost — named Havat Gilad after an elder brother killed by Palestinians — consists of a dozen shabby metal shacks and trailers inhabited by 20 families, with 40 to 50 children among them. A plastic slide and swing set stand on a weedy corner of the arid hilltop. Havat Gilad gets electricity from generators and water from a hilltop tank. The Israeli government evacuated the settlement five years ago but recently agreed to transport its children to school. "We are on a mission," Zar tells TIME. "We didn't come here for fun, although we have fun sometimes. When we came here, this land was deserted. Since the Jews came back, it has started to flourish."

To reinforce the spiritual mission, Zar erected a yeshiva that houses 35 young men. Their families pay about $250 a month for room, board and religious instruction centered on their role in God's plan to populate the occupied area with Jews. The settlement's spiritual leader, Arie Lipo, 35, sporting a 9-inch ginger beard and an ankle-length white gown, tells TIME he battled Israeli solders during the last evacuation, but he talks softly of a kind of peace. "We build small heavens here," he says. "We are the people of the Bible. If Obama fights what God has done in bringing the people of the Bible here from the four corners of the earth, he will fall. Now the question is, Who is the boss? God? Or Obama?"

In the absence of divine intervention, resolution of the settlement conflict will have to depend on human effort. Itay Zar and Sharon Katz are profoundly unlike each other, but Palestinians revile them equally. To the Arabs, Israeli settlements have sliced and diced up territory that once belonged to them, taking scarce resources like water and requiring special checkpoints that make their daily lives a misery. Down the hillside a few miles from the Katz home, Naim Sarras, 49, a Christian Palestinian farmer, vehemently disputes the claim that Arabs arrived only in the 1970s. He displays a long row of grapevines with thick trunks, and papers from the Ottoman era that he says prove his family has farmed the land for 150 years. He can no longer sell much of his produce because the Israeli government requires him to label it PRODUCT OF ISRAEL and the Palestinian Authority forbids that. But he can't afford to leave the fields fallow — and open to Israeli confiscation. Three Sarras brothers and a cousin tend the fields under the constant surveillance of video cameras at the edge of a nearby settlement. They complain that settlers from the Gush Etzion bloc have come in the night and uprooted or poisoned olive trees. "I am willing to live with Israelis," Sarras says. "But they will not live with us." Shaul Goldstein, mayor of the Gush Etzion regional council, defends his community's dealings with local Arabs. "We have the right to have cameras to protect our communities," says Goldstein, 49, a builder who constructed many of the Etzion homes. He insists he has Palestinian friends and says, "When I saw someone had uprooted trees, we condemned it very, very dramatically. I don't accept any kind of violence."

See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.

Watch a video about Israel's lonesome doves.

Plumbing and Powerful Men
For every Itay Zar (there are at least 100 hilltop settlements like his in the West Bank), there are thousands of Sharon Katzes in communities with plumbing and Little League. These suburban settlers make up the established West Bank colonies that Israel does not want to relinquish — in fact, would like to expand. So far, Netanyahu has not directly challenged Obama on the settlements, other than to say he won't stop "natural growth" (that is, houses for expanding families). Since the Israeli army is always skirmishing with radicals like Zar, giving up the occasional outpost is politically feasible, even popular. But challenging powerful men like Goldstein ("He has a lot of friends in America," former President Jimmy Carter told TIME on his way into a meeting with the mayor) and law-abiding citizens like Sharon Katz is another matter. Politically, it is not easy for Netanyahu to face down the settlers. But if he does nothing, Obama will have to confront the Israelis more directly than has any other President since George H.W. Bush, who threatened to refuse granting Israel $10 million in loan guarantees as long as the expansion of settlements continued.

In Israel, settlers from suburban towns to hilltop outposts alike express contempt for Obama. The U.S. gave $2.4 billion in aid to Israel last year, but Israel Katz says the cash does not entitle a U.S. President to "tell us how to live." He adds, "He is butting into another country's interests. I don't think Israel tells Obama what to do."

In the end, even if Obama continues to apply pressure, the solution to the settlement question will have to come from inside Israel. For many Israelis, the settlements are not a matter of ideology — they simply offer a cheap place to live for a growing population. Still others see no need for settlements at all. Two opinion polls in June had very different results. In one, 56% supported Obama's position; in the other, 56% opposed it. As the settlers build, tacitly assisted by the state, activists often campaign against them. "This is about the borders of morality. Do we want to rape 3 million people to obtain a national narrative?" says Dror Etkes, who works for an Israeli human-rights organization, Yesh Din, that challenges settlements in court. "The settlers are a small minority of strong militants. I don't think they will provoke a civil war, but I think disengagement will be the hardest trauma in Israel's history."

Sitting around their kitchen table, with grandchildren's plastic toys scattered on a deck beyond sliding-glass doors, the Katz family doesn't look or sound militant. Indeed, to American ears, their version of the national narrative sounds rather familiar. "I would love it that the little outposts someday have their own playgrounds and Little League," Sharon Katz says. "Israel shouldn't leave any hilltop! How did communities start out in the American West? With one log cabin. When we bought this land, it was a rocky hillside. Look what it looks like today."

— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein and Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem

To Israelis, It's a Suburb, Not a Settlement; To Palestinian Villagers, It Means a Barrier on Their Land

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

MODIIN ILLIT, West Bank, June 29 -- Chaim Hanfling knows a lot about this settlement's population boom. Six of his 11 siblings have moved here from Jerusalem in recent years to take advantage of the lower land prices, and at age 29, he has added four children of his own.

Located just over the Green Line that marks the territory occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the booming ultra-Orthodox community, home to more than 41,000 people, shows why the settlement freeze demanded by the Obama administration is proving controversial for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and also why Palestinian officials are insisting on it.

Amid their gleaming, modern apartment buildings, with Tel Aviv visible on the horizon, residents say they have little in common with the people who have hauled mobile homes to hilltops in hopes of deepening Israel's presence in the occupied West Bank. But they are having lots of babies -- and they expect the bulldozers and cement mixers to keep supplying larger schools and more housing, a typically suburban demand that the country's political leadership is finding hard to refuse.

"We don't feel this is a settlement," said Hanfling. "We're in the middle of the country. It's like Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan," another Israeli city.

Across a nearby valley, residents of the Palestinian village of Bilin have watched in dismay as Modiin Illit has grown toward them and an Israeli barrier has snaked its way across their olive groves and pastureland. Two years ago, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the fence relocated, but nothing has happened. A weekly protest near the fence, joined by sympathetic Israelis and foreigners, has led to a steady stream of injuries, with protesters hit by Israeli fire and Israeli troops struck by rocks. One villager, Bassem Abu Rahmeh, died in April when a tear gas canister hit him in the chest.

"The court said, 'Move the fence,' so why is he dead?" villager Basel Mansour said as he surveyed the valley between Bilin and Modiin Illit from his rooftop. "Why hasn't it been moved?"

Amid a dispute with the Obama administration over the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak left for the United States on Monday for talks with White House special envoy George J. Mitchell. Local news reports say he may propose a temporary construction freeze of perhaps three months, though Netanyahu's office said it is committed to "normal life" proceeding.

Of the nearly 290,000 Israelis who live in West Bank settlements, nearly 40 percent reside in three areas -- Modiin Illit, Betar Illit and Maale Adumim -- where the impact of a settlement freeze would probably be felt most deeply.

Debate over West Bank settlements is separate from discussion of Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their national capital. The Obama administration has also asked Israel to freeze construction in Jerusalem neighborhoods occupied after the 1967 war.

"The goal is to find common ground with the Americans," said Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev. "Israel is willing to be creative and flexible."

Palestinian officials said Monday that they will not restart peace talks with Israel until a full settlement freeze is declared.

A trip across the valley outside Modiin Illit shows why the settlements remain a central Palestinian concern.

When the Israeli barrier was built around Modiin Illit, it looped into Palestinian territory -- too far, according to the Israeli Supreme Court, whose 2007 decision said that the route went farther than security needs required in order to make room for more building in the settlement.

Planned additions to the community have since been canceled by the Defense Ministry, which is in charge of construction in the West Bank. Israel Defense Forces Central Command spokesman Peter Lerner said the military has designed a new route for the fence that will return land to Bilin, but has not received funding.

The lack of an agreed-upon border, Palestinian officials and human rights groups said, figures into a variety of problems -- such as the violence that flares regularly between Palestinians and settlers, as well as larger policy matters. The rights group B'Tselem said in a recent report that neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority is taking clear responsibility for wastewater treatment in settlements or Palestinian towns and villages -- putting local drinking water at risk.

Facing U.S. demands, Israel has said it will take no more land for settlement and has agreed to remove more than 20 unauthorized outposts. But even that has proved slow going. The government recently proposed dismantling the outpost of Migron, a settlement of about 40 families that is under legal challenge for being built on private Palestinian land, by expanding another settlement nearby.

"The individuals in outposts shouldn't be rewarded" for building illegally, said Michael Sfard, an attorney for the group Peace Now who helped prepare a lawsuit against Migron.

In the City Hall of Modiin Illit, such struggles seem part of a different world. Pointing from a hillside to bulldozers busy in one part of town and graded sites ready for building in another, Mayor Yaakov Guterman said the city has 1,000 apartments under construction but is running out of room.

Modiin Illit can't expand to the west, back over the Green Line, he said, because that is a designated Israeli forest area. He said the community should be allowed to spread to the surrounding valley because, in his view, Modiin Illit "will be on the Israeli side" of the border under any final peace deal.

Meanwhile, he said, local families are having dozens of new babies every week, a boom that a construction freeze would "strangle."

"It'd be a death sentence," he said.

Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.