'Jewish Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank
Pastor Dale Morgan
Feb 17, 11:31 AM EST
*'Jewish Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank*
By RAVI NESSMAN
Associated Press Writer
BRUCHIN, West Bank (AP) -- With its playgrounds, identical houses and
manicured flower beds, Bruchin looks like any placid Israeli suburb.
Except that Bruchin is not supposed to exist.
Bruchin is among more than 100 West Bank outposts never officially
authorized by the Israeli government. And Israel's repeated commitments
to freeze settlement construction haven't hampered Bruchin's
transformation from a cluster of trailers less than eight years ago into
a thriving community of 380 people, girded by government supplied roads,
electricity and water.
"Normally, when you think of an outpost you think of a water tower. This
is a real town," said Amishai Shav-Tal, one of Bruchin's founders.
Unlike the full-blown settlements that have been built in the face of
international criticism, the outposts have never gone through the public
process of gaining official government approval. Many of them began as
little more than a cell phone tower or trailer erected by settlers on a
West Bank hilltop to establish a presence there, a seed they used to
quickly establish a new community.
The outposts infuriate the Palestinians, who see them as part of a plan
to strengthen the Jewish grip on land they want for an independent state.
With the international community focusing its disapproval mainly on the
traditional settlements, Israel has managed to quietly plant a slew of
the outposts across the West Bank, say Palestinians, Israeli critics and
even the settlers themselves.
"This is the game that the government always played with the settlers:
'You will do it, we will turn a blind eye and then one day when we are
politically able to, we will legalize it,'" said Dror Etkes, who
monitors settlements for the Israel's Peace Now movement.
Israel has not built an official settlement in more than a decade. When
it approved a new one in late December, it quickly backed down under
international condemnation.
But Bruchin is a different story. Settler leaders and a former Cabinet
minister say the government cooperated through every phase of its
creation in the northern West Bank. In recent talks with the Defense
Ministry, which must approve new settlement construction, the settlers
demanded Bruchin be the first in a string of developed outposts to be
recognized as full settlements, which would ease fears that they could
be forcibly removed.
"They have no choice, they have to recognize most of the outposts," said
Bentzi Lieberman, a settler leader.
Over the 40 years since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967
Mideast War, the settlers have cultivated political allies and
manipulated divided coalition governments in their favor. They
capitalized on Palestinian hostility toward Israel to push the claim
that the entire West Bank is the Jews' biblical birthright and a vital
security buffer with the Arab world.
But some outpost residents fear the government may be turning against them.
As prime minister, Ehud Olmert started out with what looked like a
campaign to tear down the unauthorized settlements, and was elected on a
platform calling for the country to abandon much of the West Bank and
all but the largest settlement blocs.
Political troubles following last summer's war in Lebanon have forced
Olmert to put his plan on hold, but the settlers of Bruchin say they
felt the change.
The army office in charge of the West Bank has issued orders to stop
construction at the outpost and to demolish what has already been built,
spokesman Capt. Zidki Maman said without providing details. It has also
prevented Bruchin from upgrading its electricity hookup, which the
settlers complain is too small for its growing population.
"Bruchin is an illegal outpost," Maman said.
The settlers blame U.S. pressure, and say they feel betrayed by the
government.
Meanwhile, Bruchin continues to thrive - with the government's help.
On a sunny winter morning, soldiers sent by the government stand guard
at Bruchin's gates, while the squeals of children at play ring out from
the outposts' nine preschools, many of them funded by the Education
Ministry.
Down a tidy road lined with tall street lights and brick sidewalks, past
the marble-walled synagogue and the community center, stand 40 two-story
yellow stucco houses in two rows. A large sign says they were built with
Housing Ministry help.
Nearby, a cluster of nearby trailers houses another 40 families, who
arrived in recent years.
Residents describe Bruchin as a quiet, close-knit, religious suburb.
They have neighborhood barbecues, cooking classes for the wives, and
after-school judo, ceramics, basketball and Torah for the kids.
"It's a good place," said Avi Galimidi, a 30-year-old student who moved
here 2 1/2 years ago with his wife and four children. "It has wonderful
and good people. And I want to settle the land."
Israel has repeatedly promised to freeze all settlement activity in the
West Bank, where nearly 270,000 settlers - a 6 percent increase from a
year ago, according to government figures - live among 2.4 million
Palestinians.
Several thousand Israelis are believed to be living in outposts.
Under the 2003 "road map" peace plan, Israel agreed to remove dozens of
outposts built since March 2001, but that deal that does not include
Bruchin, since it was started two years earlier. Israel also agreed to
freeze settlement growth, which should have ended all expansion at
Bruchin. Israel did not follow through on either of those commitments.
The Palestinians have also failed to live up to their road map
commitment to disband militant groups, who effectively rule the streets
of the West Bank and fire missiles at Israeli towns from Gaza.
The U.S. sees the settlements and their continued construction as
obstacles to peace, at a time when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice has scheduled a Feb. 19 summit between Olmert and Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas to foster a rapprochement.
"The Israel government should live up to its commitments, and that
includes on the settlements, that includes on outposts. These are
commitments, by the way, to the United States, they're not commitments
to the Palestinians," U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones said.
The Israelis "should not create facts on the ground," he said.
But more than 100 outposts have been built since 1995, and most now have
at least some form of basic infrastructure, Etkes said.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat calls the outposts "baby
settlements."
"Our worst fear there is being realized, which is that they will boom
and become major settlements," he said.
Like many outposts, Bruchin was a response to violence - the fatal
shooting of an Israeli woman, Yael Mevar, as she drove near an Arab town
on Dec. 31, 1997.
Angry settler leaders dusted off old plans for a settlement about 12
miles east of Tel Aviv, between Israel and the large settlement of
Ariel, deep in the West Bank. In the spring of 1999, Jewish seminary
students moved into trailers on a hilltop.
"You can't come and just shoot Jews and we'll do nothing," said
Shav-Tal, 31. "We'll show them that we live in this country, and we are
the people that own this country."
In October, Shav-Tal and five other families answered the students' call
to settle in Bruchin. They moved into trailers powered by electricity
generators, with water tanks filled every three days, Shav-Tal said.
"The challenge that you have of building something where there is
nothing - that's real Zionism," he said.
That core group posted fliers in nearby settlements, advertised on the
Internet, and were flooded with applications, Shav-Tal said.
"Our problem from the first day was more people want to come than the
places we have," Shav-Tal said.
More trailers rolled in. The government-owned electricity company hooked
Bruchin up to the grid. The water company installed a pump and pipes.
The local council paved 1.5 miles of roads. Public bus service began.
The settlers received approval from the Housing Ministry to build 40
permanent houses, and their occupants moved in 2 1/2 years ago, well
after the road map was unveiled. Their newly empty trailers became
available for new arrivals, and by December, these too were filled,
bringing Bruchin's population to 380.
The army may call Bruchin illegal, but in her government-commissioned
report on the outposts two years ago, attorney Talia Sasson said the
Housing Ministry spent $785,000 on Bruchin's infrastructure and public
buildings.
The government was deeply complicit in the creation of many of the
outposts, Sasson wrote.
"Most of the outposts were financed by some ministry in Israel," she
told The Associated Press.
"We helped build it," said Yitzhak Levy, who was housing minister in
1999. "It is supposed to be a city. It has a large area. It is clear
that this is a place that was going to grow, and therefore there was
investment. It was done openly."
Yehudit Passal moved here 1 1/2 years ago with her husband and two
children because it allowed her family to be near the Tel Aviv job
market while strengthening Israel's hold over the West Bank, she said.
Her decision was strengthened, she said, by Israel's 2005 withdrawal
from the Gaza Strip, which included the dismantling of 21 settlements
and another four in the northern West Bank.
She said she wanted the remaining settlements to be large, "so it would
be that much harder to take them down."
A few hundred yards down the hill lies a town of 4,000 Palestinians. Its
name is Brukhin, the Arabic form of Bruchin. Mayor Akrima Samara says
the outpost's existence blocks Palestinians from their olive groves and
grazing land, and has dimmed their hopes for a state of their own.
"With every passing day we see the outpost grow," he said. "This land is
lost."
The settlers of Bruchin have big plans. A detailed blueprint envisages
expanding their community tenfold, to 750 families, said Itzik Turk, the
outpost's general secretary.
But the sympathy the settlers once enjoyed in Israel has weakened as
Israelis have wearied of war with the Palestinians and the burden of
being an occupying power.
Galimidi, the student, says he is not worried about Bruchin's future.
"I believe that all the problems will be solved little by little," he
said. In another 20 years, "Bruchin will be a city, and we will have
malls."