"Defiant West Bank Settlers Vow To Stay On"

From the Toronto Star's Middle East Bureau
by Oakland Ross

BEIT EL, Israel - Do not talk to Yishai Fleischer about peace.

The 31-year-old Israeli radio-station manager has heard it all before, and he doesn't believe a word.

"I don't buy any of it," said the bearded, rapid-talking ideologue who also hosts a thrice-weekly current-events program on Arutz Sheva, an Internet radio station that promotes a conservative Jewish agenda. "We're not living in a time of peace. I don't think Israel should make any concessions. Israel should be strong."

For Fleischer, the concept of strength includes an all but absolute refusal to live anywhere other than this airy hilltop settlement high in the Samaria Mountains, some 20 kilometres north of Jerusalem.

It is a fair bet the same defiant sentiment is shared by his neighbours, who number about 5,300 people, almost all of them religious Jews who did not wind up living in Beit El by accident.

The town's name means "House of God" in Hebrew and it is one of dozens of Jewish communities speckled across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on rocky, arid real estate that most of the world considers to have been confiscated from Palestinians.

Many differences separate Israeli and Palestinian negotiators who this week formally launched a new Middle East peace effort during an international gathering in Annapolis, Md., but none of the challenges ahead is likely to be more daunting than the task of sorting out which tracts of land belong to whose side.

"The key is the territorial," senior Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo said in a recent interview. "If we solve the territorial, other issues will be easier."

After 40 years of nearly relentless expansion, approximately 450,000 Israelis now dwell on soil that much of the world considers to be Palestinian land – 270,000 of them in the West Bank and an additional 180,000 in East Jerusalem, which the Israeli government annexed in 1967. If the new round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks goes ahead more or less as planned, the Israeli government may soon find itself under intense pressure to withdraw people from some of these settlements and to give at least a portion of this land back.

Just be careful broaching this subject in the presence of Yishai Fleischer.

"To envision it happening is almost impossible," he says. "The underpinning to our presence here is spiritual and religious. Our essence here is our antiquity, our legacy here, our promise from God. This is our heritage, our gift. Our return was prophesied."

In other words, his people were here yesterday, he's here now, and he damned well means to be here tomorrow, along with his wife, their six-week-old daughter, and a lot of their equally determined friends.

As the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proceeds along a road that may – or may not – lead to an eventual peace agreement with approximately 3 million Palestinians, it will have to confront a plenitude of adversaries, no small number of whom will be in possession of Israeli passports.

Fleischer is just one of them, an Israeli-born, U.S.-educated young man who moved to Beit El four years ago, largely for religious reasons, and who won't be leaving town without a fight.

"I could have been a hotshot lawyer in New York City," he says. "Instead, I live in a trailer home. Our project is not greedy. It's a holy project."

Almost no one believes that Israel will withdraw entirely from the West Bank, if only because any government rash enough to propose such a measure would not long survive in power.

"This would be civil war," said Arnon Sofer, head of research at the Israel Defence Forces' National Defence College and a leading Israeli demographer.

Sofer believes some 70 settlements might be dismantled and about 60,000 settlers withdrawn. The rest of the settlements would remain in Israeli hands, but the Palestinians could be compensated with land swaps, mostly involving territory in the Negev Desert of southern Israel, some of which could be added to the West Bank and some to the slender Gaza Strip.

But Sofer's vision would also see Israel retaining control of the entire Jordan Valley as a military buffer zone, to prevent the possible smuggling of weaponry into Palestinian territory in the West Bank from the Kingdom of Jordan, which stretches to the east of the Jordan River.

Even that rather stingy arrangement would fail to satisfy Fleischer, who flat-out rejects the idea of peace between Arabs and Israelis, either now or, quite possibly, ever.

"I respect Arabs," he says. "I don't hate them. But you have to be tough. Israel needs to fight.'

As an example of what happens when Israel fails to fight, Fleischer points to the Gaza Strip.

Under a policy championed by former prime minister Ariel Sharon, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the coastal territory two years ago, removing some 8,500 Israeli settlers by force and closing down its military posts.

Now Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a militant Islamist movement.

"It wasn't months before Gaza became a terrorist state," says Fleischer, who predicts the same pattern would unfold here if Israel withdrew from parts of the West Bank – a prospect he and others vow they would mightily oppose. "There would be resistance, civil disobedience on a grand scale."

But Fleischer does not believe it will come to that, primarily because he does not believe the current search for Middle Eastern peace will prove any more successful than have all the failed searches of the past.

"We have been through this wringer before," he said. "We Jewish people are not terrorists. We're here because we love the land."