JERUSALEM — The painful process of dismembering the West Bank settlements began this week — and it will provide a crucial test of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s domestic strength and future ability to move ahead with the peace process.
In a politically significant step, Barak launched discussions with settlement leaders Tuesday night about the government’s intention to remove a number of hilltop outposts set up by the settlers in recent months in an attempt to create new facts on the disputed ground.
“A number” was the key phrase.
The Cabinet on Sunday empowered Barak to decide how many of the 42 new outposts will be dismantled.
Some of the outposts were approved by the previous, Likud-led government. Others were hastily erected by the settlers and won partial after-the-fact approval. Some — at least seven — have no approval at all.
In Tuesday’s meeting, Barak told the settler leaders he would tear down 15 outposts, but agreed to legalize 11 others. The remaining 16 of the 42 disputed outposts would be allowed to stay temporarily, but building there would be banned.
The encampments slated for dismantling include the seven without any approval — the eastern hilltop and Shalhevet farm in Yitzhar, Misgav Dov in Maon, the Hayovel neighborhood and Hirbet a-Shuna in Eli, Emuna in Ofra, and Givat Vuv in Shvut Rahel. The other eight were others set up close to the May elections: Haresha in Talmon north, Mitzpe Kramim in Kochav Hashahar, Shene Ya’acov in Bracha, Sufit farm in Halamish, Mitzpe Hagit and Mitzpe Erez in Ma’aleh Michmash, Nof Kene farm in Karnei Shomron, and Hilltop 660 in Tapuah.
Ideally, as the premier told his cabinet ministers Sunday, Barak would like to reach an understanding with the settlers under which they themselves remove the outposts, without any intervention by the army.
Failing that, Barak would like to achieve an understanding that would prevent, or at least minimize, settler-troop confrontations.
If that, too, is unobtainable and the dismantlement goes ahead without any prior agreement, the test for Barak will be both at the hilltop sites and on the streets of the main cities.
Will Gush Emunim, the main settlement movement, be able to bring out large numbers of activists and supporters to resist the army bulldozers and mount headline-making protests, as they did back in 1979, when Menachem Begin’s government dismembered settlements in northern Sinai? Or has the momentum for large-scale protests largely dissipated?
The signs within the settler camp are mixed.
On the one hand, settlers pledged Wednesday to fight Barak’s plan to dismantle the 15 enclaves.
On the other, central figures like Aharon Domb of Kiryat Arba have recently been saying that the dream of Greater Israel needs to be tempered by realism and that compromise is therefore the best policy.
Some of these utterances are tinged by a bitter, almost fatalistic realization that the political battle for the soul of the nation has been lost.
This feeling was crystallized by the poor showing of the settler-based National Unity Party in the May elections. It won just four seats and its leader, Ze’ev “Benny” Begin, promptly resigned from the Knesset and from politics on the grounds that he found himself “a general without an army.”