In a report by The Associated Press, the agency features disputes among Israeli settlers, those who know they will keep their homes when a peace deal is concluded between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and those who know they will be moved.
Following is full text of the report:
In this bedroom suburb of Jerusalem, a real estate agent’s walls are lined with architects’ plans for new neighborhoods. Farther east, residents of rustic Vered Yeriho despair of plummeting property values.
Both are West Bank Jewish settlements, both theoretically on the table at Camp David this week, where Israeli and Palestinian leaders are working through the toughest issues under the watchful tutelage of President Clinton.
Prime Minister Ehud Barak has made it clear he favors keeping settler concentrations close to the Israeli border _ leaving the future of some 50,000 of the 200,000 settlers unclear.
For the first time, a division has arisen in the settler movement _ between those who know they are likely to keep their homes, and those likely to move.
"The idea of one settlement movement is over," said David Zohar, a settler pioneer already planning his future after Vered Yeriho, a hilltop palm-treed village overlooking Palestinian-controlled Jericho, is handed back. "We"re split."
Barak and his top aides have told settlers it would be impractical for Israel to demand isolated settlements bordering populated Palestinian areas, such as Vered Yeriho, which translates as "Rose of Jericho."
Haim Ramon, a Cabinet minister and a confidant to the prime minister, listed settlements Barak will insist on annexing at his Camp David meetings with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The four he named _ including Maaleh Adumim _ are heavily populated suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Palestinians are still demanding all the land and the dismantling of the settlements _ but off the record, some concede they will give up the bedroom communities, perhaps in exchange for some Israeli land.
As a result, the painful dichotomy between the suburban Israeli pursuing creature comforts and the Spartan pioneer has extended into the settlement movement, dividing suburbanites from ideologues.
"Small settlements, 10, 20 families, were created as provocations," said Shmuel Bar-Shalom, dining with his son and grandchildren at the Burger King at the mall in Maaleh Adumim. "They have no right to exist."
Not all settlers in the isolated settlements are ready to concede _ in Kiryat Arba, town leaders have set up a high-tech business incubator in the shadows of the mosques of the neighboring Palestinian city of Hebron.
Drawing funding from the government and from overseas investors, director Menahem Livni acknowledges that the aim is to reinforce the Israeli presence in the area. "We encourage the businesses to stay here," he said.
One startup, Dr. Fluency, dominates the market for programs that helps stammerers control their disability, and founder Aryeh Friedman, working out of a tiny Kiryat Arba apartment, is contemplating launching an initial public offering.
Yet Ran Zamir, backing an environmentally friendly scheme to recycle rubber, is grateful to Kiryat Arba for enabling the startup but says once the business is under way, it will operate from within Israel.
"The decision is based on economics," he said.
No one has said which settlements will go, but Vered Yeriho fits the "out" specifications to a T _ isolated, small and virtually a neighborhood of a crowded Palestinian town.
Ettie Ahituv said she is searching for homes in Maaleh Adumim"s new projects.
"I look for homes, and I see apartments that are like cages," she said, watching her four children playing in Vered Yeriho"s swimming pool. "I can"t see it _ living with the highways and the perverts and the drugs."
Ahituv and others moved here to buy the roomy, red-roofed homes that are the Israeli ideal _ but out of range of their lower-middle class incomes.
Now, property values are plummeting. Billboards along the Jerusalem-Jericho highway tout a new development in Vered Yeriho _ but only four families have paid deposits for the 41 lots for sale.
By contrast, Maaleh Adumim is undergoing a real estate boom.
"There are new projects all the time," says Kinneret Ofra, interrupting a busy day at her real estate storefront in the settlement"s shopping mall.
"No one"s running away from here."
The settlement leadership has pleaded with those who do not necessarily support its absolute opposition to any concessions to at least remain silent _ to little avail.
Each week, another settlement invites one of Barak"s ministers for a tete-a-tete, to determine where it stands. In a statement last week, the Settler Council decried such meetings as "dialogues of the deaf." – Albawaba.com
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
