The Associated Press May. 6, 2002

BEITAR ILLIT, West Bank – On what was a simple West Bank hilltop just a dozen years ago, construction workers hammer out the walls of yet more new houses in this now massive Jewish settlement.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who meets Tuesday with US President George W. Bush to discuss efforts to restart peace talks, says he will not uproot a single one of these communities, built on land the Palestinians claim for their state. In fact, 34 new hilltop outposts – which Israel insists are merely extensions of existing settlements – have sprung up under his government.
These new settlement efforts send a clear message that Sharon is more interested in extending Israel’s borders than in trying to negotiate peace, Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said. “Sharon is destroying every possibility for peace between our two peoples,” he said.
Bush intends to urge Sharon to curb the settlement building, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday. “Something has to be done about the problem of the settlements,” he said. “The settlements continue to grow and continue to expand.”
But Sharon, a former housing minister with a long history of supporting the settlements, faces pressure from the right wing of his Likud party and would find it politically difficult to freeze all building in settlements.
Some 200,000 Israelis live in settlements in the territories – and a similar number live in the annexed section of Jerusalem that Israel seized in 1967 and the Palestinians consider occupied as well.
Past peace proposals have envisioned the dismantling of many, if not most, of the settlements, but last month Sharon appeared to close the door to any such move – at least under his watch – saying the settlements should be treated no differently than the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
“No settlement will be evacuated,” he said. “Such an evacuation would only encourage terrorism and increase the pressure on us.”

Critics say many of the settlements are so deep inside the Palestinian areas that they make a territorial division between Israel and a future Palestinian state impossible.
But Beitar Illit Mayor Yitzhak Pindrus said that his community – a suburb of neat stone houses, clean streets and fresh air just south of Jerusalem – was close enough to Israel to be annexed.
In just 12 years it was transformed from an empty hill into a thriving bedroom community with 34 schools, endless rows of white-stone townhouses and 25,000 residents, nearly all of them Orthodox Jews who work or study in Jerusalem.
Many describe themselves not as settlers but as parents searching for affordable housing and trying to give their children the kind of slow-moving, peaceful life they could never get in a big city like Jerusalem.
“There is no tension here. It’s quiet. There’s no stress,” said Shimon Hazan, a 32-year-old teacher.

Others said they moved here because they would never have been able to afford a house without the massive government grants and loans given to many settlers.
“Without the money, no one here would own a house,” said Moshe Wassershin, a 23-year-old student who moved here two years ago.

Those grants have become a large drain on Israel’s recession-strained budget.

Throughout the 1990s, the country spent on average 2 1/2 times as much money on settlers as on other Israelis, according to a study by the Adva Center, a liberal think tank in Tel Aviv.
Sharon’s government has proposed reducing tax breaks to settlers as part of a larger package of budget cutting measures, but no action has been taken yet.
At the same time, however, Sharon’s government has allowed the creation of new hilltop outposts at an unprecedented rate, according to the Peace Now group – five on the on the very night Sharon was elected in February 2000 and another 29 since.
Though private citizens were responsible for these efforts, the army has the capability to prevent them, as was done under the previous, more moderate government of Ehud Barak, Peace Now spokesman Didi Remez said.
“The message that it puts across to the Palestinians is the major problem,” Remez said. “If the (US) administration wants to conduct constructive talks, it also must conduct them on the issue of the settlements.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2002 and is filed under hotnews.