Past The Point Of No Return?

As the U.S. turns on the economic pressure, settlers insist it's too late for territorial compromise

September 27, the bar mitzvah of the West Bank town of Ariel; fireworks, a performance by rock star Danny Sanderson, a televised concert led by sing-along entertainer Saraleh Sharon. A normal Israeli anniversary, just as any town within the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, might throw for itself. And normalcy is precisely what Ariel is celebrating. From its unceremonious founding in 1978-two tents dropped by helicopter onto a stony hill-Ariel has grown into a town of cottages and villas, and low, pastel-colored apartment buildings, housing some 10,000 people-1,500 of whom are new Soviet immigrants. In this, the fourth year of the Intifada, Ariel has just opened its first hotel, complete with an artificial waterfall near the swimming pool; on Rosh Hashanah, all 102 rooms were filled, mostly with guests from the coastal plain. Ariel's pre-university and vocational school, the College of Judea and Samaria, has an enrollment of 2,200 students, 90 percent of them from within the Green Line. But perhaps Ariel's most surprising fact is this: Of the 2,500 workers employed in the industrial area adjacent to the town, some 400 commute from Greater Tel Aviv-a reversal of the conventional assumption that settlements like Ariel are merely "bedroom communities" for commuters who work within the green line. In the empty hills at the edges of town, entire new streets are rising. Ariel's real-estate agencies are packed with young couples from the coastal plain seeking inexpensive, high-quality housing-handsome villas that sell for as little as $ 150,000, or three-room apartments for $ 75,000, far cheaper than the going rate in the Tel Aviv area.

Most of the 1,200 housing units now going up have already been bought; another 3,000 are to be built next year. The Trans-Samaria road, linking Ariel and neighboring Jewish settlements with the Tel Aviv area, is being widened from two to four lanes, to accommodate the new influx. Along with Ma'aleh Adumim, just east of Jerusalem, Ariel is the fastest expanding Jewish town in the West Bank. Ask people on the street whether they believe their town could ever be returned as part of a Middle East peace agreement, and the response is either an incredulous stare or outright laughter. That confidence, buttressed by the current building drive, is shared by Jews throughout the territories. "There are more Jews living today in Ariel alone than lived in all of Sinai before the withdrawal in 1982," says Dina Shalit, Ariel's spokeswoman. "The Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is a fait accompli." Even were Israel to accept the settlement freeze that the United States is demanding, as a precondition for granting Israel $ 10 billion worth of loan guarantees for absorbing Soviet immigrants, some experts believe that it is too late for territorial compromise. While Secretary of State James Baker, on his last visit to Jerusalem, was reaffirming the U.S. commitment to an Israeli withdrawal from the territories, left-wing West Bank expert Meron Benvenisti dismissed the possibility as an idea whose time has passed. "In 1983, I said that the settlement process had become irreversible," recalls Benvenisti, former head of the West Bank Data Base Project. "If I thought so then, what do you suppose I think now?" The current housing boom, he adds, is merely the "final blow" to the possibility of territorial compromise. But other anti-settlement activists contest the point. "Just ask the Estonians about the irreversibility of annexation," says Peace Now spokesman Amiram Goldblum. "The Soviets settled Estonia with almost 50 percent Russians, but the Estonians got their independence anyway. We're not yet past the point of no return." Despite the new American hard line, the Israeli government is working hard to ensure that that point will soon be reached. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir remains adamant that there will be no settlement freeze. Far from it. Estimates of housing being built in the territories this year alone range from government figures of 6,800 units to Ratz Knesset member Dedi Zucker's 19,000. Whatever the real number, the boom is rivaled only by the initial spurt of settlement building that followed Menachem Begin's election victory in 1977. As many as 50,000 Jews may be on their way to the territories in the next two to three years. To appreciate the magnitude of that number, consider that it has taken 24 years for the settlement population to reach itscurrent level of about 100,000. Like Ariel, the entire settlement enterprise has come of age. Indeed, a visitor traveling the Jewish West Bank these days begins to wonder whether the word "settlement" conjuring up enclaves of mobile homes and generators, populated by idealistic members of the religious-nationalist Gush Emunim movement-is still relevant at all in many cases. Small settlements are becoming towns, towns are becoming cities. Within the next few weeks, Ma'aleh Adumim-with 15,000 inhabitants, the largest town in the territories will be officially declared the West Bank's first Jewish city. Of 143 settlements, a total of 13 are classified as towns and scheduled to become cities-reflecting government plans for significant population growth there. About half the 13,000 units the government says it will build in the territories in the next two years are slated for Ma'aleh Adumim and Ariel, but other expanding towns include: Givat Ze'ev and the ultra-Orthodox town of Betar, both near Jerusalem; Efrat, in the Gush Etzion region, between Bethlehem and Hebron; Oranit, near the Green Line in Samaria, or the northern West Bank. Even Emanuel, the ultra-Orthodox town near Ariel that went bankrupt after a financial scandal in 1985, is stirring: building has resumed and the town's 500 families may soon be joined by another 1,800 families. Many smaller settlements are doubling their populations. Shilo, north of Ramallah, with 120 families, is building homes for another 130; nearby Eli is quadrupling from 30 to 120 families. Givon Hahadashah, a settlement just past the northern Jerusalem suburb of Ramot, is adding 64 housing units to its current 80. Even downtown Hebron the one Arab West Bank city where thegovernment has permitted Jews to settle now has nearly 600 Jews. As the Green Line has blurred, so have the differences in Jewish demographics on both sides of the former border. Though Gush Emunim was the first to settle the territories, settlement leaders estimate that 75 percent of Jews there today are secular. Nor are they a homogeneous population politically: In 1988, 14 percent of both Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim voters backed Labor. And despite Labor's ambivalence about the future of Ariel, the party maintains a branch office in the town; in May, the Histadrut opened a spacious local headquarters there, in a ceremony attended by the labor federation's chairman, Yisrael Kessar. STATISTICAL MYSTERIES According to the settlements' umbrella group, the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, there are now 143 settlements, 17 in Gaza and the rest in the West Bank. Peace Now's Goldblum places the total number at "about" 135. The government's most recent statistic is from the end of 1990: 132 settlements. One reason for the uncertainty is that some settlements are in the process of being converted from outposts manned by Nahal, the army's settlement corps, to civilian and therefore "official" Jewish communities. But the confusion about the most basic facts on the ground is appropriate: the entire settlement endeavor is surrounded by mystery, much of it deliberate. Researching settlement activity is one of the more frustrating journalistic pursuits in this country. Settlement spokesmen tend to exaggerate their success and inflate their own numbers; settlement opponents alternately exaggerate the figures to sound the alarm and minimize them to undermine their rivals; whereas the government merely attempts to conceal and obscure. "There are almost no reliable facts available," says Hebrew University economist Ephraim Kleinman. "You have to be a detective to find the truth." Not surprisingly, the number of Jews in the territories is intensely contested. Government statistics from the end of 1990 placed 82,000 Jews in the West Bank and Gaza. Settlement spokesmen claim the figure has now grown to between 105,000 and 110,000. But Peace Now's Goldblum believes the actual numbers are far lower. He notes that "very reliable army sources" informed his group that 75,000 gas masks were distributed to Jews in the territories before the Gulf War. At the time, he adds, settlement leaders were claiming 92,000 Jews in the territories. Settlement spokesmen dismiss Goldblum's figures as irrelevant. They note that thousands of settlers, who had moved from inside the Green Line, never bothered to change the official place of residence on their identity cards the criterion by which the army determined where a citizen received his gas mask. "Many people don't want to wait on line at the Ministry of the Interior to change their identity cards," says Ariel's Dina Shalit. "It's a very Israeli attitude." Peace Now is currently investigating the number of settlers by what Goldblum calls "a new and secret method" an implicit concession that the group's 75,000 figure is inaccurate. Goldblum acknowledges that his group hasn't been overly scrupulous in the past with statistics. "We were happy to accept the settlers' high figures, to emphasize the threat. But now we feel the truth must come out." However many settlers Peace Now manages to count in the coming weeks, its figure will quickly become obsolete, as thousands more move to the territories. The potential for Jewish expansion is enormous. Of the West Bank's roughly 5 million dunams (four dunams equals one acre), some one and a half million are government-owned allocated for either military or civilian use. Ownership of an additional million dunams is being contested between the government and local Arabs, according to Uri Ariel, secretary general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The rest of the land is privately owned by Arabs. Despite the heavy military presence in the territories, land for civilian settlement is hardly lacking. Ariel's 10,000 people live on 3,000 dunams, a mere 10 percent of the town's allotted space. Ma'aleh Adumim's 15,000 residents inhabit 7,500 of the town's 37,000 dunams, stretching from the outskirts of Jericho to the foot of Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem. One of the few areas of Jewish settlement that is not dramatically expanding is the Jordan Valley. About 5,000 Jews live in its 17 agricultural settlements and its regional town, Ma'aleh Efraim. Until two years ago, some of the Valley's moshavim were near collapse, and almost a hundred families left the area. Since then, defections have been staunched. This year, with the arrival of 60 new families half of them Soviet immigrants the Valley registered more people moving in than leaving. But with 200 empty houses, there is little need for new construction. THE COST OF SETTLEMENTS Needless to say, no official figures are available about how much the government has spent on settlement. Those amounts are buried in the general budgets of each ministry. But Benvenisti estimates that by next year the total figure should come to about $ 5 billion. Amiram Goldblum places the figure at closer to $ 7 billion. Last year, according to Goldblum, the government spent 1.3 billion shekels on housing and infrastructure in the territories, and at least 300 million shekels for education, agriculture, industry and absorption there. This year, Goldblum estimates the government will spend 2.5 billion shekels on settlements about 2.8 percent of the national budget. Goldblum says his figures are based on leaks from government employees sympathetic to Peace Now. After housing, industry is the government's major settlement priority. Goldblum maintains that some 10 percent of all new industrial projects recognized and subsidized by the government are being set up in the territories, far out of proportion to the number of settlers, compared to residents within the Green Line. In the first six months of 1991, says Peace Now, $ 50 million worth of new industrial and tourism projects were approved three times the total for the same period last year. New government-authorized industries in the territories receive a 38 percent start-up grant in addition to the 7 percent income tax break granted to all settlers. Most of the settlements' industry is concentrated in four industrial parks, located in Ma'aleh Adumim, Kiryat Arba near Hebron, Ariel and neighboring Barkan. The last is by far the most successful. Barkan's 80 factories produce goods ranging from computer diskettes to pretzels; exports account for two-thirds of its $ 300 million annual turnover. Barkan is now almost entirely filled, and building may soon begin on "Barkan Two." FAIT ACCOMPLI? When the Intifada began in December, 1987, there were fewer than 62,000 Jews in the territories. Almost four years later, that number haspractically doubled. The inability to dissuade Jews from moving to the territories is arguably the Intifada's greatest failure, and the settlement movement's most impressive success. When asked whether he believes the annexation process is irreversible, Ron Nachman, founder and current mayor of Ariel, tells this story: "In 1978, Arik Sharon brought Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times to Ariel. It was at the time an empty hill. Sharon introduced me to Rosenthal as the mayor of Ariel. Rosenthal looked around and said, Mayor of what? I don't see anything here.'" Nachman smiles expansively. "When I look out at the empty hills around Ariel, do you know what I see? Thousands of Jews living in towns and cities. Mr Baker can say whatever he wants. Here in Ariel, we know that we've already won."