Unsettled settlement

Mon, Aug. 11, 2003
Unsettled settlement: On a knife-edge: What to do about a cutting-edge city.
By Michael Matza

ARIEL, West Bank - "I'm the most sophisticated mayor in Israel," says Ron Nachman, sounding more matter-of-fact than boastful. "This multimedia, it's going to change the world."

The municipality over which Nachman, 61, presides, the Jewish settlement of Ariel, is a high-tech wonder. Its mayor speaks of virtual networks, wireless Internet, and the day when his community, the second-largest settlement of Jews on land Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, will lead the world in information technology.

If your idea of a contested settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tin-roofed cabin a la Little House on the Prairie, forget it. This ridge-top settlement of 18,000 in the Samarian Hills looks more like a little suburb of San Diego - garden apartments, manicured lawns, flowering trees, a topflight health club, Internet cafes and a college campus.

Is there any way Israel would abandon all this to help create a future Palestinian state?

"I think that, behind closed doors, [the Likud leadership] realizes the need [to evacuate some settlements]. But I don't think anyone in the Likud would even discuss evacuation now," said Collette Avital, an Israeli parliament member of the opposition Labor Party. "It's difficult to think that a big city like Ariel is going to be dismantled. You've got to be realistic."

"Who will come and pull out the people here?" Nachman asked. "One million soldiers? There are things that are irreversible."

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says it is much too early for final-status negotiations. First, he says, the Palestinian leadership needs to put a stop to violence against Israelis.

Still, the future of Ariel is in the news because of the 230-mile-long barrier that Israel is building to separate itself from the West Bank. The United States has expressed concerns that the barrier, a series of walls and fences, will be perceived as a political border. While it mostly follows the "green line" that separated Israel from the West Bank before the 1967 war, it would veer almost 10 miles into the West Bank if it is to encompass Ariel.

Sharon, at his recent meeting with President Bush in Washington, said Israel would delay construction of the fence in the vicinity of Ariel. Last week, Israeli officials said planners were considering leaving Ariel "outside" the fence.

If that happens, Nachman said, he will sue Israel.

"In principle, I don't like the fence. And I respect the President of the United States," Nachman said. "But you cannot say the fence is for security and leave me out of it."

The first 250 acres to build Ariel were purchased in the 1970s from a neighboring Palestinian village, Nachman said. Subsequent development took place on what Israel calls public land. Now Ariel stretches across 24 square miles, with an adjacent industrial park.

"In the beginning, we used camels to put barbed wire around the perimeter because you couldn't get around in vehicles," Nachman said. "Now it's a city, not a settlement... . Ariel is the center of the East of Israel, the same way Haifa is the center of the North," as permanently Israeli as Tel Aviv.

Of the 18,000 residents, about half are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Some were recruited by representatives who traveled to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Central Asian countries.

About 90 percent are nonobservant Jews who chose Ariel for its clean air, open space, tax advantages, and tidy, two-bedroom apartments that sell for about $100,000. Two out of three people commute 25 miles to the Tel Aviv area for work.

Tooling through Ariel in his gleaming, white Volvo, Nachman pointed out the building-top transmitters that support streaming video on the municipality's ultra-modern Web site.

Ariel and the 25,000-resident Maale Adumim, the largest settlement, stand squarely in the way of the Palestinian dream of a contiguous state on the West Bank.

Even if many of the smaller and more remote of Israel's 150 settlements are dismantled, Ariel and Maale Adumim, which is east of Jerusalem, seem destined to stand as enormous "facts on the ground."

So what sort of territorial compromise is possible?

"It's not an accident that Ariel and Maale Adumim are as big as they are," said Michael Tarazi, a lawyer in the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department. "These are not the ideological settlements. These were the ones in which people were 'incentivized' to move in as part of a grand strategy from the very beginning because Israel wanted to be able to come to us and say, 'It's too late now [for a larger Palestinian state]. You just have to accept it and be realistic.' "

While the two sides' negotiating positions are deeply entrenched, there are creative solutions that should be pursued, Tarazi said.

"They were incentivized to move in. Incentivize them to move back, over a period of three to five years. They are not there for ideological reasons. They are there for a good deal. So make them a good deal to move back" across the green line, he said, emphasizing that his comments are just ideas, not official Palestinian policy.

"Or," Tarazi said, "let the settlers remain where they are under Palestinian sovereignty, a sort of 'green card' arrangement - citizens of a foreign country but with rights to reside. Or make them Palestinian citizens."

"We can repatriate them, give them compensation, resettle them inside the green line or in the cluster of settlements that we annex," Labor's Avital said. "But I don't know [any Israelis] crazy enough to live under Palestinian rule."

The most likely compromise, one that was discussed at the failed Camp David peace talks in July 2000, is a land swap. Israel keeps Ariel and Maale Adumim and gives up land on its side of the green line.

At Camp David, Israel offered desert land adjacent to the Gaza Strip. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat dismissed the offer, saying the land was polluted.

"If we are talking about land swaps, we have to be talking about land of equal value, size and contiguity," Tarazi said. "... You could, for example, take the Gaza Strip and double its width. There are all different creative solutions which should be pursued.

"But it should be our right to decide if it is a fair trade, because what they are asking for is a compromise on our side of the green line."