Jewish Settlers

SHILOH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank -- Batya Medad, once of Long Island, N.Y., lives in a modern neighborhood clawed into a hilltop and surrounded by barbed wire and Arab villages.She worries that her neighbors might kill her.The election this week that will put Yitzhak Rabin at the head of the Israeli government threatens her safety and her community, says the 43-year-old mother of five."The most dangerous thing is if the Arabs are no longer afraid. When they are not afraid, they kill," she says.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police with sledgehammers and chain saws broke into a fortified building in the West Bank city of Hebron yesterday and dragged out more than 200 spitting, stone-throwing Jewish settlers who had defied a court order to leave. The showdown in the center of the city sparked debate in Israel over the source of authority for its army. Seven army officers and soldiers were disciplined Monday for refusing, on religious grounds and with rabbinical blessing, to serve as backup for the police operation.

JERUSALEM -- Until the Jewish settlers arrived yesterday, the small stone building perched on a steep hill in the village of Silwan was merely a house.When settlers and several members of Israel's Parliament moved inside before dawn, vowing not to leave, the house became one of the devices that the extreme right uses to make clear they will insist on expanding settlements even at the cost of regional peace talks. U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III is coming here next week to help prepare for these talks.

HEBRON, West Bank -- Yehuda Shaul stopped abruptly in the middle of a litter-strewn park in this West Bank city to point to a Palestinian school that he and other members of the Israeli army once commandeered so they could shoot at Palestinian gunmen. Shaul operated a grenade machine gun, a lethal though highly inaccurate weapon. "Anything hit within a radius of 8 meters is killed. Anybody within 16 meters will be injured," he said. "When I first learned of my mission, I freaked out." But the young soldier did as he was told, firing as many 100 rounds per night into a crush of Palestinian homes, not knowing whom he might have wounded or killed.

JERUSALEM -- Pressure intensified within the Israeli government yesterday to clear Jewish settlers out of the tinderbox West Bank town of Hebron, where worshiping Palestinians were massacred at a mosque 10 days ago.At the weekly Cabinet meeting, seven of the 15 members reportedly spoke out against keeping the Hebron enclaves, where some 400 Jews live among more than 70,000 Arabs, creating what some ministers called needless frictions and security risks....

HEBRON, Israeli-Occupied West Bank -- A thick metal screen covered the windshield on the family van of Mordechai Lapid, evidence of the risk he accepted to live as a Jewish settler in an Arab city.The screen guarded his family from rocks. He did not expect the bullets.Mr. Lapid, 56, paid for his choice to live here yesterday when gunmen ambushed his van, killing him; his eldest son, Yisrael, 19; and lightly injuring three of his children.He and his son died on almost the same spot as a Palestinian vegetable merchant slain by Jewish settlers Saturday.

GUSH KATIF, Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip -- Behind the high-voltage fences, behind the rolls of barbed wire, behind the Uzi-toting guards who keep the white-washed suburbs free of encroaching Arab slums, the Jewish settlers are glum.The artificial world they created -- the neat and tidy Israeli settlements amid a seething sea of Palestinians -- will be isolated and likely engulfed by Palestinian self-government.Israel's government has promised all the settlements, even this thin string of Jewish neighborhoods in the heart of the Gaza Strip, will remain protected by the Israeli army under the accord signed earlier this month with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

HEBRON, West Bank -- Along with hundreds of other Israelis, Arie Baum traveled to Hebron this weekend to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and support the Jewish settlers determined to live in this embattled city.Baum, 48, is an accountant and a religious Jew from a suburb of Tel Aviv, and the prospect of Israel's withdrawing many of its soldiers in Hebron troubles him. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have said they expect to sign an agreement by midweek.

HEBRON, West Bank - This ancient city, revered by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of the biblical patriarch Abraham, is a place of extremists and hatred. About 400 Jewish settlers live in the city's center, surrounded by 120,000 Palestinians and high hills. There are also Israeli soldiers, who outnumber the settlers they are protecting at least two to one. And the settlers are often at odds with the Israeli government. They were deeply dissatisfied by the Israeli army's decision to withdraw from a Palestinian area before dawn yesterday after sending in tanks that flattened two abandoned cliff houses reportedly used by Palestinian snipers.

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip - Thousands of defiant Jewish settlers and their supporters faced off at dawn today with Israeli troops who poured in to evict them from the Gaza Strip in accordance with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's landmark decision to hand over the territory to the Palestinians. More than 100 Israeli military vehicles rumbled toward the settlements before dawn. But protesters barred the way to many communities, including the largest, Neve Dekalim, where troops and protesters had clashed the day before.

KAFR QALIL, West Bank -- The day is hot and dusty on this West Bank hillside, but 53-year-old Fuad Amer moves with the energy of a man half his age, stripping the fruit from his olive trees in giant handfuls, plucking others from the high branches with a surgeon's care. His enthusiasm is understandable. This is the first time in four years that Amer has been able to harvest his olives. Last year, he says, Jewish settlers set fire to his olive grove and destroyed his harvest. Before that, gun-toting settlers forced his family from the grove when they started picking.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police sawed through a steel door yesterday to evict dozens of Jewish settlers from a house in the West Bank town of Hebron in the first such confrontation since Israel's new government took office. Police were pelted with rocks and paint-filled bottles as they moved to evacuate three families that had occupied the building with more than two dozen settler youths who barricaded themselves inside as a show of support. Last week, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the families out after police determined that documents purporting to show that the house had been legally purchased from its Palestinian owner were fraudulent.

JERUSALEM -- A fiery explosion yesterday in the middle of a busy street killed the top commander of Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian militant group blamed Israel, which denied any involvement. Adding to tensions, gunmen in the West Bank killed a Jewish settler and seriously wounded a second Israeli. Such roadside attacks were common at the height of the Palestinian uprising but had become less common over the past year. The explosion came as Islamic Jihad commander Khaled Dahdouh was driving through the center of Gaza City.

Nearly five months have passed since Israel ordered its Jewish settlers out of Gaza, but Rabbi Elan Adler still is flying an orange sash from his van. Adler, like many Orthodox Jews, opposed the unilateral pullout in August by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But now, he says, his focus is on the fate of the families who were displaced. The spiritual leader of Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation plans to fly the color associated with the Gaza settlers until all have moved into new homes.

Gaza pull-out will strengthen the terrorists The two leftist-dreaming columnists on the Aug. 19 Opinion * Commentary page (Trudi Rubin's column "Gaza pullout creates only illusion of progress" and Alice Rothchild's column "Stress, trauma strain Palestinians") seemed to echo each other's sentiments and repeat each other's condemnations of Israel as they suggested that Israel's occupation of Gaza is the root of all the evil that has happened to the Palestinian population. So, if one can take their logic just one step further, all these evils should disappear when Israeli troops and civilians leave the territories.

BEIT LAHIA, Gaza Strip - As armored Israeli bulldozers knocked down the walls of Jewish settlers' homes yesterday in Gaza, leaving three decades of Zionist dreams in the dust, Nidal Muhammed flashed a wide grin. "The same bulldozers that knocked down our homes are now knocking down the settlers' homes," said the 19-year-old accounting student from the Palestinian town of Jabalia, north of Gaza City. For Muhammad, Israel's withdrawal from the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip has turned his world upside down.

JERUSALEM - Early tomorrow, thousands of Israeli soldiers and police will enter the Gaza Strip's Jewish settlements and knock on the doors of residents, giving them a final warning to leave their homes within 48 hours or be evicted by force. And so will begin, after months of intense debate and national turmoil, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of all 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip plus 500 others living in four settlements in the West Bank. But even before soldiers approach the first settler, Israelis and Palestinians are looking beyond the drama unfolding in Gaza to a larger issue: After the withdrawal from Gaza, what comes next for Israel and the Palestinians?

WHILE MANY eyes focus with a mix of cautious optimism and horror on Gaza, the turmoil in Israel and the rage and sorrow of Jewish settlers, the lack of attention to the lives of more than 1 million Palestinians who share the tiny stretch of coastline is striking. As Avraham Burg, former Knesset member, recently wrote: "Take all the settlers' screams about discrimination and laments about suppression, multiply them many-fold, and you will feel what the Palestinians have lived with for many years without our seeing or feeling."

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip - Thousands of defiant Jewish settlers and their supporters faced off at dawn today with Israeli troops who poured in to evict them from the Gaza Strip in accordance with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's landmark decision to hand over the territory to the Palestinians. More than 100 Israeli military vehicles rumbled toward the settlements before dawn. But protesters barred the way to many communities, including the largest, Neve Dekalim, where troops and protesters had clashed the day before.