Israeli officials said to aid settler outposts

JERUSALEM -- A report commissioned by the Israeli government is recommending legal action against government officials who helped Jewish settlers build outposts in the occupied West Bank even as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was promising the international community to halt the practice and to dismantle existing outposts, officials said.

The report, drafted by a former state prosecutor after a seven-month probe, marks the first time Israeli officials confirm what critics of Jewish settlement have been saying for years -- that even when settlers run afoul of official government policy in order to expand their presence in the West Bank, they are aided passively or actively by bureaucrats and army officers. The report is to be released today but was leaked to news organizations after being handed to Sharon yesterday.

Jewish settlers reacted to the findings by saying all the outposts were endorsed by decision-makers at the highest echelons of government, including Sharon. Left-wing groups contended the probe did not go far enough and should be followed by a criminal investigation.

Sharon, once the political godfather of the settlement movement but lately at odds with settler leaders over his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, said only that his Cabinet would decide at its weekly meeting on Sunday whether to adopt the recommendations.

The report said in some cases officials authorized the seizure of private Palestinian land in the West Bank to create the outposts, which settlers hoped eventually to convert to full-fledged settlements. It recommended curbing the authority of some government bodies and dismantling many of the outposts, a demand included in the US-backed peace plan known as the ''roadmap."

''It seems as if blatant violations of the law have become institutional and institutionalized . . . [and] that no one seriously intends to enforce [it]," said the report, quoted by the Reuters news agency.

The report, written by the former head of criminal prosecutions in the state attorney's office, Talia Sassoon, said government ministries financed the outposts through allocations to local councils in the West Bank. It singled out officials in the Defense and Housing Ministries and the army for allowing trailer-homes to be moved to the outposts and for authorizing their connection to the water, power, and phone grids.

Palestinians, who number about 2 million in the West Bank, contend that settlements and outposts encroach on land they want for their future state.

About 100 outposts have sprung up in the West Bank in the past few years, most alongside existing settlements or at the site where Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks. Most are inhabited by a small number of families -- less than 10, usually. By some estimates, about 2,000 Israelis live in the outposts, a fraction of the 220,000 settlers in the West Bank.

While most of the world considers all Israeli settlements illegal, the outposts were not even authorized by Israel. Sharon agreed to dismantle all outposts erected after March 2001 when his government accepted the roadmap peace plan two years ago, but most of the communities are still standing.

In fact, settlers built four new outposts in 2004 and significantly expanded 12 others, according to the left-wing group Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity. Though the issue has caused occasional friction between Israel and Washington, President Bush has been hesitant to press Sharon, who is already under pressure from right-wing groups for his plan to dismantle 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank this summer.

Sharon says the settlers resort to building wildcat outposts because he and other prime ministers have banned the building of new settlements and restricted construction in existing ones. But his critics on both the left and right side of the political map point to his history as a patron of settlers and specifically to a speech he made in late 1998 as proof that his curbs on settlement expansion were merely lip service aimed at appeasing Washington.

In an address to a far-right political party seven years ago, Sharon, who served as foreign minister at the time, instructed settlers to ''grab as many hilltops as [you] can and to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will remain ours."

Prominent settlers referred to that speech yesterday and said Sharon was in on the outpost plan from the start.

''There's no outpost that was built by us without all of the relevant officials knowing about it and cooperating, including the head [of the government]," said Pinchas Wallerstein, a member of the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements.

Left-wing critics of Sharon's government have also suspected that the outposts were quietly endorsed by the Israeli leader. Dror Etkes, who heads the settler monitoring team for Peace Now, said Sassoon's report played into the hands of the settlers by deflecting attention from the wider issue. ''As long as the settlers' spin works and Israelis are duped into mainly focusing on the outposts, there will be no real debate on what do about the large settlements in the West Bank, which are the real problem," Etkes said.