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Who is leading the settlers' fight for the West Bank outposts?
By Chaim Levinson
Tags: Israel News, West Bank 

It isn't clear whether Israel has a partner for negotiations in the West Bank. Not for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, but between Israelis and themselves. And it's not at all certain whether the Israeli military establishment has anyone to talk to about the unauthorized Jewish outposts in the West Bank, and if any agreement resulting from such talks would be worth the paper it's written on.

The status of the outposts is topmost on the settlers' agenda. This week several of them were visited by a quartet of cabinet ministers: Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon, Information and Diaspora Minister Yuli Edelstein, and Science and Technology Minister Daniel Hershkowitz. They are pushing for making the outposts legal, without either the High Court of Justice or the Sasson Report (which revealed that many of these locales were established on privately owned Palestinian land, or land of unknown ownership). Pressure is being exerted so that efforts dovetail with the diplomatic schedule: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to travel to London this week to meet with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell. The settler leadership assumes that American pressure to dismantle the outposts will mount in September, when President Barack Obama's Mideast peace commission brandishes its whip.


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nowledgeable sources say that the government is capable of forcibly removing the outposts, but it is obvious to everyone that if the level of violence reaches that of when homes in the illegal Amona outpost were demolished in 2006, there will be far-reaching political consequences. Most of the pro-outpost effort is thus aimed at influencing future negotiations with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Some of the methods being used in this effort are: partially evacuating outposts, moving some of them to existing settlements and arranging for approval for others.

The Yesha Council of settlements is a natural partner to negotiations, but since the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, it has not had sole authority over events in the West Bank. The council has implemented internal reforms, but its new leadership has yet to pass an important test, and recently failed a particularly small one. Ze'ev Haver, the director of Amana, the Yesha Council's settlement arm, who is considered "the father of the outposts," was unable to carry out the removal of three mobile homes from the Bnei Adam outpost, near Wadi Kelt, in accordance with an agreement reached with GOC Northern Command Maj. Gen. Gadi Shamni. Haver was expelled ingloriously from the outpost, which was established by Amana activists from the Yitzhar settlement and from the Land of Israel Youth movement. The mobile homes were not removed, and the ground is now set for a struggle.

Despite this incident, some members of the Yesha Council believe they will be able to "sell" an agreement if it benefits the settlers.

"The agreement will be bad for our health, and cause fights," council secretary-general Pinhas Wallerstein says. "We won't be a partner to a total freeze on construction - Barak can go beat his head against a brick wall. It will be possible to reach an agreement like the one at Migron (which is slated to leave its current site and join the Adam settlement), on the condition that building continues in Ariel and in Ma'aleh Adumim. This kind of accord with the Yesha Council will receive the support of the majority of the [Jewish] inhabitants of Samaria."

In the past two years more militant settlers' committees have arisen as alternatives to the Yesha Council, but their leaders' abilities are as yet untested.

"Barak doesn't have anyone with whom to sign an agreement about the outposts, because there isn't one leading group," says Benny Katzover, one of the founders of the settlement movement and chairman of the Samaria Settlers' Committee. "If he wants to remove some of them in order to supply a pound of outpost flesh to the Americans, I'll recommend that my members not cooperate."

The harshest opposition to the Yesha Council comes from activist Danielle Weiss and from Youth for the Land of Israel, which represents hundreds of teenagers who are prepared for a violent confrontation. According to Weiss, an agreement is out of the question, because "every grain of soil in the Land of Israel is as sacred as a book of the Torah."

Meir Bartler of the Bnei Adam outpost near Shiloh says there is no popular support for Wallerstein's promises to the Defense Ministry, to remove outposts in exchange for the continuation of building in existing settlements. "There are approximately 70,000 [Israelis living] east of the separation fence, including 17,000 activists. Of these the Yesha Council represents about 3,000. They do not have the public legitimacy to sign an agreement and remove outposts."

The outpost considered closest to the council is Givat Haroeh, in the Eli bloc. But there too, settlers see no use for an accord. Elisha Nadav says he would consider an agreement like the one reached at Migron, but he adds, "I have no control over the people who will come to fight for this place. I can't tell them to leave; it's their Land of Israel as much as it is mine. I am acting as an emissary. My mobile home isn't my private property. In terms of what is happening on the ground, any agreement would be just a show."
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