EXCERPTS:

    The real motive propelling Sharon and Netanyahu to approve settlement on the Golan is strategic. Blocs of settlements along the south and east of the Heights are required to preclude any future peace agreement with Syria based on the "full withdrawal" formula.

    By expanding these settlements, Israel is trying to establish enough facts to force Syria to accept an agreement of partial redeployment rather than withdrawal and to substitute security arrangements rather than international law as that agreement's foundation.

For all Likud's anti-Oslo posturing, it is in fact the Oslo formula applied to the Golan. And it is one Syria will reject.

   To back up their rejection, the Syrians need only look to how the formula has worked out for the Palestinians in Hebron, perhaps the most potent symbol of Oslo's failure.

On 20 August, 63-year-old Shlomo Ra'anan was stabbed to death and his caravan home set ablaze in Tel Rumeida, a tiny settlement enclave implanted deep in downtown Hebron.

Tel Rumeida houses seven settler families and has been a bastion of the Gush Emunim and Kach settler movements since it was established in 1984.

Following the killing of 29 Palestinians by Kach supporter Baruch Goldstein in 1994, Rabin briefly considered uprooting the settlement. Warned that such an eviction could produce a civil war in Israel, Rabin opted instead to impose a six-week curfew on the 120,000 Palestinians who live in Hebron.

If the army's military response to the attack was predictable, Netanyahu's political response was incendiary.

On 23 August, the Israeli cabinet decided to replace the caravans that presently house Tel Rumeida's settlers with "permanent structures" surrounded by fences, allocating some 10 million shekels from the treasury to finance them.

To assuage the fears of "ghettoisation" expressed by the pro-settler National Religious Party, Netanyahu assured all that "a fenced-in settlement can later be expanded".

To drive the point home, the government ordered that some 20 other isolated West Bank settlements also be provided with fences and augmented army patrols.

Despite the difference in scale, Netanyahu's response to the Hebron attack is akin to his strategy on the Golan. Settlements are implanted first as preemptive facts on occupied territory.

They are then consolidated and defended in the name of the settlers' security. Finally, they are used to justify the enlarged borders of a future Israeli sovereignty.

In Hebron, the ruse is transparent, producing a Palestinian resistance that is shifting from popular confrontation to guerrilla attacks.

[IMRA: Such as Rabbi Ra'anans murder.]