Israelis quick to take more land

By PHIL REEVES Herald correspondent

JERUSALEM- The cluster of spartan white huts has just sprouted up among the dark hills and vine terraces that separate the Dead Sea from the eastern Mediterranean's edge; in any other, less troubled landscape, the huts would have little significance.

There are only five of them, planted at the end of a newly carved kilometre of muddy track, tucked into a hillside with a commanding view - on a clear winter's morning - of the plains that lead to another world: a world of motorways, McDonald's and high-rise buildings, leading to the secular, Americanised Tel Aviv.

But here, in the tense and dangerous Israeli-occupied West Bank, at the smouldering heart of the territorial battle between Israel and the Palestinians, these mean and lowly buildings take on enormous significance.

They serve notice that Israel's army of Jewish settlers has no intention of being intimidated by the bloodshed during the four-month Palestinian intifada aimed at ending its occupation of Arab land.

And they serve notice that now, as Ariel Sharon wraps his corpulent form in the mantle of Prime Minister, its determination has risen to new heights.

The huts were erected on Wednesday, the day Sharon - the man known as "the Bulldozer" - won his resounding victory, ousting his rival, Ehud Barak, after only 21 months.

As crowds of ecstatic, banner-waving Likud supporters in Tel Aviv prepared to celebrate the old right-winger's arrival in office with an all-night party, a crane was already busy at work out in the West Bank hills, lowering the buildings into place just south of the perimeter of the settlement of Karmei Tsur.

Ariel Sharon, now a silver-haired 72, was always seen as the champion of the Jewish settlers. As a cabinet minister, he poured money into settlement construction. It was he who told Israelis to run and "grab" the hills of the West Bank after Israel signed another interim peace deal with Yasser Arafat. And it is he who now says he will not uproot one of the many scores of settlements that dot the occupied territories.

Barak, by contrast, was talking about removing 20 per cent of them. So, it was both fitting and depressing that at the exact moment Sharon was propelled to power, Jewish settlers were taking another small bite out of the land that Israel seized in 1967, which the Palestinians have been demanding back ever since in order to build their state.

Like most of the settlements, Karmei Tsur itself feels wholly unreal, like a Hollywood movie set on lonely hinterland.

Some 500 people live here, religious Zionists convinced that the land is Jewish, accorded to them by God and 3000 years of history. A grocer's shop, a small furniture factory, an insurance agency, several small playgrounds and a centre for Jewish art all enhance the sense that it is a village like any other. But, like most of the other outposts in the occupied territories, it looks as if this village has been cross-bred with Colditz.

A heavy yellow electronic metal gate, with a guardhouse manned by an unfriendly Israeli soldier fingering an M16, blocks the path of any visitor. A watch-tower rears up in the settlement's centre. A 12m antenna towers over the pocket-handkerchief gardens, with a bouquet of loudspeakers attached to its top - to broadcast instructions during times of attack and emergency.

No one seems to see the fat ringlets of barbed wire, three layers of them in some places, that are hung from the surrounding fence to keep out the Palestinians.

"At least Sharon won't negotiate when violence and terrorism is going on," said Esther Uliel, a mother of five, who acts as the voice of the Karmei Tsur community. "It was really wrong for Barak to do that."

"But it will be difficult for Sharon. Everyone expects him to start a war, so he will want to prove that he won't do that. He doesn't believe in final agreements. He believes in long-term interim agreements.

"When he talks about peace, he really means quiet. I believe that people in Israel will settle for that. They don't want more, because they don't believe that there can be more."

But this week, even that seems wildly optimistic.

Sharon says he wants "peace with security;" in fact, he said that, mantra-like, throughout his short election campaign. But it is perfectly clear that one cannot exist without the other. No state - no matter how brilliant its intelligence service or Army - can completely contain a determined guerrilla war. And that is what we now have in the Middle East.

Two hours after Uliel spoke, as if to prove the point with grim emphasis, a bomb went off in the middle of Jewish Jerusalem.

The attack had the hallmarks of an attempt by Sharon's Arab opponents to signal that they will not be deterred by their arch-enemy's return to power. The powerful bomb, in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood close to the unmarked boundary with Arab east Jerusalem, sent a cloud of black smoke curling over the rooftops of the holy city, a signature of violence with which its residents are all too familiar. The bomb reduced the car in which it detonated to mangled shreds, but no one was killed and only one person was slightly hurt, while nine other people were treated for shock.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT

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