NEWSWEEK
The settlements should never have been there to begin with, he says. We have to confess it was a mistake [to build them],he recently told a visiting delegation of Jewish Americans. It is a dream that we cannot have today.
His listeners groaned aloud. The grief was for Israel?s broken dreams, but it could just as well have been for Labour?s faltering hopes on Election Day. Speaking ill of the settlements has yet to help Mitzna win popular support away from Ariel Sharon and his Likud bloc. The current prime minister has good odds of keeping his job; the latest polls put his approval rating around 70 percent, and most of the 200,000 settlers on the West Bank are solidly behind him.
A 300-MILE FENCE
Still, one plank in Mitzna?s platform has already won massive public backing: the idea of fencing off the West Bank. With no hint of any break in the hostilities after 26 months of riots, terrorist attacks and armed clashes, more than 70 percent of Israelis now tell pollsters they want ?unilateral separation? from the Palestinians. Israel sealed off its entire 32-mile border with Gaza after the 1994 Oslo accords, and security experts are urging a similar barricade along the 300-mile Green Line that separated Israel from the West Bank in the years after it captured the area in 1967. They say a fence would be a big help in keeping Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel. Last week 11 victims died and 47 were injured, many of them high-school students, in an explosion aboard a packed bus in Jerusalem; the bomber was identified as a 23-year-old Palestinian from the West Bank town of Bethlehem. The proposed fence is drawing support even from hard-liners like Sharon?s right-wing rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always hated anything that might be seen as limiting Israel?s territorial claims.
So far the scheme has been stymied by political questions disguised as geographic ones: where the fence would run and what would become of settlements on the Palestinian side. ?When you build a fence, you create a reality,? says Uzi Dayan, a retired general who until recently was Sharon?s national security adviser. ?It involves tough decisions, and Israeli politicians don?t like making tough decisions.? Mitzna says he?s prepared to face the settlers? wrath. He?s done it before. When Israel handed back Sinai to the Egyptians in 1982, he was the commander in charge of evacuating one of the last Israeli bastions, the kibbutz of Yamit. His troops wrestled the last holdouts off the rooftops and forced them into trucks that carried them back to Israel.
NEGOTIATING OVER OLIVE TREES
The man who ordered the evacuation was Israel?s Defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon. He doesn?t seem eager to repeat that experience in the West Bank. Although Sharon has authorized fence construction at a few points along the border, the job hasn?t gone far. Four months ago teams started working along a parched strip of land between Jenin and Megiddo. Their machines have often been idle. ?First we had to wait for negotiations with the owners of the olive trees here that blocked our path,? says one crewmember, Eli Goldenberg. ?Then the Antiquities Authority held us up for six weeks because diggers stumbled on some old relics.? So far his team has put up less than a mile of fence. Some mornings he watches Palestinians dodging Army patrols as they sneak into Israel from Jenin, desperate for work.
Pro-separation groups say Sharon has deliberately chosen border areas far from Israeli settlements in order to avoid hard decisions. ?If he wants to build the entire fence, eventually he?ll have to decide to incorporate some settlements into Israel [and ?leave others out],? says Yehiam Prior, a physicist who was an early advocate of physical partition. Prior says the peace plan put forward two years ago by Bill Clinton should serve as the blueprint for separation. That plan allowed Israel to annex about 5 percent of the West Bank. Although such a redrawn map could incorporate most settlers? homes, Prior says it would still oblige the Israeli government to evacuate about 50,000 people.
Many Israelis on the West Bank have no intention of going anywhere. David Wilder, a New Jersey-born settler, lives in a tiny cluster of Jewish homes on the edge of the Palestinian city of Hebron. If Mitzna won, the enclave could be among the first Jewish settlements marked for dismantling. Wilder says the move could provoke a mass rebellion. In October, Israeli soldiers forcibly removed dozens of settlers from houses they had built or reoccupied outside the legal boundaries of their community. The troops spent days scuffling with the residents. ?Imagine a scene like that involving not dozens of people but hundreds or thousands,? says Wilder. This month Palestinian gunmen killed 12 soldiers and settlers in a valley nearby. That didn?t stop other settlers from erecting another unauthorized encampment on the very site of the massacre. On a recent day, seminary students sat in a large tent studying Jewish Scriptures. Others assembled a shelter out of corrugated metal. Don?t talk to Wilder about fences: ?We didn?t come here to live in ghettos like in Eastern Europe.?
Other settlers just want to get out of the ghetto they?re in, and move back across the Green Line. Far north of Hebron, in the settlement of Hermesh, some residents say they want only fair compensation for pulling out. One local settler says her family has wanted to leave the West Bank for more than a year. There?s just one problem: they can?t afford a house in Israel unless they sell their place in Hermesh?and they can?t find any takers. ?Nobody wants to buy a house here now,? she says. Israeli and Palestinian moderates used to talk about trading land for peace. Now, even for a peacemaker like Mitzna, a sturdy fence will do.