Israeli Settlements

JERUSALEM -- Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank use only 12 percent of the land allocated to them, but one-third of the territory they do use lies outside their official jurisdictions, according to a new report released yesterday by Peace Now, a dovish advocacy group. According to the report, based on official data released by the Israeli government after a court order, 90 percent of the settlements sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.

TAWANEH, West Bank -- Less than a week after the Israeli army uprooted a group of radical young Jewish settlers from a West Bank hilltop, Israeli soldiers came to Palestinian Mahmoud Hamamdeh about a mile away.They ordered him, his wife and seven children out of the cave they live in, and where his mother gave birth to him 35 years ago.The cave settlement, in the desolate rockscape outside Hebron, where Palestinian farmers and shepherds have lived for decades, has been designated a closed military training zone.

SUNDAY, when the highway through Israel opens to link Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians will gain tangible results long promised by the peace process.There's another in store, too: An Israeli Cabinet committee authorized Prime Minister Ehud Barak to dismantle any of 42 rogue Israeli settlements planted without legal authority in the West Bank. This is a token of what must come.On the other side, the Palestinian Authority has timidly begun to crack down on the illegal weapons trade in the West Bank.

LONDON -- The British Empire came to an end just 40 years ago, its death agony lasting from the 31st of October to the 6th of November, 1956. The proximate cause of death is known. The real cause remains a mystery.The proximate cause is called by historians ''Suez.'' The agents of the empire's execution were Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anthony Eden. Colonel Nasser was considered by Eden, then Britain's prime minister, as ''a new Hitler.'' He was the first of the Western-designated ''new Hitlers'' to appear in the Middle East.

THE WHITE HOUSE summit today and tomorrow is a calculated risk. President Clinton was right to call it. What he needs to do about the crisis that erupted in Jerusalem is to act presidentially, to do what is right and to ignore the considerable risk of being seen to fail. That is what he is doing. To have done nothing, the alternative, would have been wrong.The summit may fail because Israelis and Palestinians are far apart and the principals bring out the worst in each other. The devious Chairman Yasser Arafat has not convinced Israelis of his commitment to peace.

The bombers in Gaza are a small percentage of Palestinians. Militant settlers are a tinier proportion of Israelis. But these minorities could control events and determine policies. The Israeli government and the PLO have not allowed that, but the pressures mount.Two suicide car bombers from rival extremist factions, in unrelated incidents Sunday, managed to kill seven Israeli soldiers and an American student and wound scores of Israelis.After those attacks, Palestine Authority police rounded up more than 100 suspected terrorists but they have not mounted a major effort to disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad, fearing a backlash would undermine Yasser Arafat.

EREZ CROSSING, Gaza -- Edging toward the next phase of Palestinian self-rule, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat agreed yesterday to start talks next week on elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.After meeting with Mr. Arafat for nearly two hours at an Israeli base on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, Mr. Rabin announced at a joint news conference that the talks would start Oct. 3 in Cairo and that the two leaders would meet again within a month to gauge progress and address problems.

Hopes had been built up that Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would bring concrete concessions on Palestinian security to President Clinton on Wednesday. They were --ed when Mr. Clinton and Mr. Rabin, in their joint press conference, had nothing concrete to say.Both leaders made all the right noises in a general way on the need to restart the peace process between Israel and the PLO, and to negotiate a peace between Israel and Syria by year's end. But they could describe no gesture by Israel, in the wake of the Feb. 25 mass murder of Palestinians in Hebron by an Israeli, to entice PLO chairman Yasser Arafat back into dialogue.

WASHINGTON -- Almost from the time Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, successive U.S. administrations have opposed the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and been frustrated in efforts to stop them.U.S. opposition to the settlements is rooted in the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bars military occupiers from transferring civilians into occupied territory.Israel contends that the Geneva Convention does not apply tthe occupied territories but that in any event it follows the humanitarian provisions of the convention.

Washington. -- After the tragic Hebron massacre, television showed us the portraits of two Israeli settlements. Arab spokesmen say that Israeli settlers must be disarmed, that the settlements are the paramount issue, and that the settlements must now be put on the negotiating agenda immediately instead of later, as originally planned.Because the settlements on display are vastly atypical, this argument is dubious.One of the settlements in the camera's eye is a small one, composed of ultra-religious Jews in the old Jewish quarter of Hebron, an otherwise all-Arab city.

JERUSALEM - -President Barack Obama's Middle East envoy ended his most intensive round of shuttle diplomacy Friday without an agreement on one of the administration's top foreign policy goals, restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks as a step toward a broader regional peace. U.S. officials had hoped to coax enough concessions from Israel and the Palestinian Authority to help Obama announce a regional peace initiative next week. The timing is sensitive because a fresh round of talks on Palestinian statehood, the administration believes, could bolster the United States in a looming showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

As the Obama administration moves to transform Palestinian arguments about Israeli settlements into U.S. policy, an examination of the facts underlying these issues is appropriate. There may be no better place to begin than the swimming pool at Rimonim, a Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank. The scene is a familiar one. Families picnicking together. Mothers yelling at children to be careful. Young children calling out to moms to watch them do dangerous things. But it is the view from the hilltop pool that is striking.

Obama's settlement stand won't help Following is a reader comment on Friday's Sun editorial posted on baltimoresun.com/secondopinion. Obama's stand on the settlements will bring him grief. The Israelis feel besieged by Arab numbers. The Arab fertility rate is higher, and some if not all of the Israelis believe one day soon they will be outnumbered and diminished to a minority status in their own lands. The settlements, in their minds, are one way to keep a toehold where the Arabs are multiplying.

JERUSALEM -- Israel is constructing a road through the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, that will allow both Israelis and Palestinians to travel along it - separately. There are two pairs of lanes, one for each group of people, separated by a tall wall of concrete patterned to look like Jerusalem stones, a beautification effort indicating that the road is meant to be permanent. The Israeli side has many exits; the Palestinian side has few. The point of the road, according to those who planned it under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is to permit Israel to build more settlements around East Jerusalem, cutting the city off from the West Bank, but allowing Palestinians to travel unimpeded north and south through Israeli-held land.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank use only 12 percent of the land allocated to them, but one-third of the territory they do use lies outside their official jurisdictions, according to a new report released yesterday by Peace Now, a dovish advocacy group. According to the report, based on official data released by the Israeli government after a court order, 90 percent of the settlements sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday praised Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's controversial plans to redraw the West Bank's borders as "bold ideas" that could open the way to a separate Palestinian state, even without agreement from Palestinian leaders. In his first White House meeting with the Israeli leader, Bush emphasized that he was only beginning to learn about Olmert's "convergence" plan, which would remove some smaller Israeli settlements on the West Bank while absorbing larger Israeli settlements into Israel.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Palestinians continued to celebrate a new sense of freedom yesterday, pouring across the temporarily open border with Egypt and through the abandoned Israeli settlements. President Mahmoud Abbas, in a televised speech last evening, urged Palestinians to "create a model and civilized Gaza," but he also vowed to restore order, beginning with small militant groups aligned with his own Fatah movement. "We are not going to tolerate chaos after today," he pledged. But yesterday, there was chaos aplenty, with thousands of Palestinians rushing across the border to Egypt to shop, while thousands of others continued salvaging salable or usable materials from the 21 former Israeli settlements.

THE VOICES raised in the Israeli settlements across the Gaza Strip last week were enraged and bitter. Accusatory and hateful, they rang out in protest and prayer to admonish their fellow Israelis - "Jews don't expel Jews." But the uniformed soldiers on a most difficult assignment completed the mission, emptying most of the 21 settlements without serious injury, ahead of schedule and in accord with the government's order. It was a testament to the Israeli army's professionalism, its soldiers' humanity and the resilience of the Middle East's only stable democracy.

Where is outcry over suffering of Palestinians? It is quite disturbing when sophisticated minds such as Alan M. Dershowitz have to lament in the name of peace about the treatment of a few Israeli academic institutions (three in all, including Haifa University, which may have direct ties with illegal Israeli settlements) being boycotted by the British Association for University Teachers (AUT) ("Anti-Semitic boycott hurts peace process," Opinion Commentary, May 1), when they fail to decry the fate of millions of Palestinian souls still living under occupation after more than 40 years.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Presaging a police crackdown designed to halt deadly rocket fire, Palestinian security forces prepared yesterday for an imminent deployment along Israel's border. At the same time, Israel agreed to resume security coordination with Palestinian forces, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met again with leaders of armed factions to try to persuade them to end attacks on Israeli settlements and towns. Israel had severed all contact with Abbas' government and threatened a major military offensive in Gaza after an ambush last week at a border crossing that killed six Israelis.