West Bank conflict brews after Gaza

JERUSALEM -- Among the dry, yellow hilltops east of Jerusalem, a new Israeli regional police station will soon be built, the first construction on a swath of land that the Israeli government has long wanted to cover with Jewish settlements to solidify its grip on the heart of the West Bank.

The project is also one small part of Israel's plan to strengthen control of the eastern flank of Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs clustered at the center of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a goal Israeli officials vowed to pursue even as they pulled settlers out of the Gaza Strip in August.

A series of other land-planning moves that Israel has made over the past two months -- largely unheralded as world attention focused on the Gaza withdrawal -- seems to bear out that strategy. Such steps help explain why many Palestinians see the withdrawal less as a milestone of liberation than as Israel's first step toward cementing dominion over East Jerusalem and its West Bank surroundings, areas Palestinians want for the capital and economic center of a future state.

The Israeli government views the settlements around Jerusalem as de facto Israeli territory that should remain in place to preserve security and Israeli control of the city. Palestinians and their international advisers say that a future Palestinian state will be crippled if it can't follow a natural growth pattern expanding outward from Jerusalem, which because of tourism is projected to provide nearly half of a future state's economy.

''The metropolitan area is hugely vital," said Jan de Jong, a cartographer who has mapped the West Bank for the Strategic Assessments Initiative, an international group working on security and land-planning issues related to Israel's recent pullout from settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank.

''Now they are withdrawing from Gaza Strip, but here they intend to take land," Hani Issawi, a Palestinian businessman, said recently as he gazed from his roof at the empty hills between his struggling neighborhood in East Jerusalem and the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, about 3 miles east into the West Bank.

Those hills are part of a 4.6-square-mile area called E-1, where Israel has long planned to build 3,500 housing units that would fill in most of the open area between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem, completing a ring of Jewish settlements around the ancient city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital.

But the land is equally important to Issawi's clan, which owns patches of it and dreams of building new housing there for growing families.

Adding to the dispute is the security barrier Israel is building to separate Israeli and Palestinian areas. Israel says the barrier -- part fence, part wall -- is designed to separate Israelis from Palestinians to keep out suicide bombers and other attackers.

But in many places, the barrier cuts into the West Bank to protect settlements beyond the so-called Green Line, Israel's border before the 1967 war and long envisioned as the boundary of a Palestinian state. Plans to extend the barrier around Maale Adumim would fence off an estimated 23-square-mile area, including E-1. Even if nothing more is built there, critics argue, the barrier would effectively divide the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.

If that plan is carried out, de Jong said, ''there is no possibility of a Palestinian metropolitan Jerusalem."

Israel has not begun building housing in the E-1 area because of US objections that it would violate the ''road map," a US-backed peace plan that calls for a freeze on all settlement construction. But the government faces constant pressure from the Israeli right to start construction. That pressure has sharpened now that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faces a backlash from his right-wing base, which was so incensed over the Gaza pullout that it tried to oust him from the Likud party leadership and the prime minister's seat.

More than 367,000 Israelis live beyond the 1967 boundary, including 210,000 in areas that both sides agree are West Bank settlements and more than 157,000 in areas of East Jerusalem annexed by Israel but considered occupied territory by the United Nations.

Since Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, removing about 9,000 Jewish settlers, Israeli officials have been demanding that Palestinians give them credit for a dramatic step and take dramatic steps in return -- for instance, disarming groups that attack Israelis.

But Palestinians downplay the Gaza pullout, noting that Sharon sold the move to his supporters by arguing that jettisoning the less-important Gaza Strip would preserve Israel's Jewish majority and allow the state to hold on to West Bank settlement blocs like Maale Adumim that he vows to make forever part of Israel.

Successive Israeli governments have described building in E-1 as a priority. Last month, speaking to Jewish supporters during his trip to the United Nations, Sharon gave a nod to that view, declaring that Maale Adumim ''will be connected to Jerusalem."

When the government gave the green light in August to start building the police station, it rang an alarm bell for Palestinians as well as for Israelis who support freezing settlements or withdrawing from the West Bank altogether. They feared it could be the first step toward developing the area, while the government calls it a security measure.

Other moves this summer pointed toward settlement expansion and consolidation:

A proposed new Jewish settlement in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City won preliminary approval last month from a municipal committee. The site is potentially explosive because it is in the already overcrowded Palestinian section of the Old City, near the Al Aqsa mosque.

Construction has begun this year on more than 3,000 housing units in the West Bank, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that calls for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. Most of the units are in Modi'in Ilit and Betar Ilit, two settlements on the Israeli side of the security barrier.

About 117 housing units are under construction in the Ariel settlement, whose eastern edge lies more than 10 miles into the West Bank -- and another place where the security barrier is expected to cut in.

In August, the Israeli military seized a 9-mile strip of land for the barrier's route around Maale Adumim. Construction is also under way to expand Maale Adumim's housing toward a nearby industrial zone that is within that planned barrier, according to Peace Now.

''Israel is tightening its grip around Jerusalem," Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser Kidweh declared last month. ''If Israel does not carry out serious withdrawal in the West Bank, there will be a big problem."

A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, Mark Regev, says that Israel is not ''outwardly expanding" existing settlements.

''Nothing we're doing is preventing the establishment of a contiguous, democratic Palestinian state in the long term," he said in a recent interview.

But that view of contiguity depends on Israel's plans to build a road connecting the north and south West Bank by means of a tunnel and sunken road bypassing Maale Adumim. De Jong and Israeli and Palestinian critics argue that ''transportational contiguity" -- along a road that Israeli security forces could block at any time -- is no substitute for a continuous area in which Palestinian commerce, housing, education, health services, and political activity could evolve normally.

De Jong of Strategic Assessments Initiative, which has advised Palestinian negotiators, cites Israeli defense officials' statements that Israel should keep large blocs east and south of Jerusalem, as well as Ariel, settlements overlooking the Jordan Valley, and the valley itself.

That would leave a West Bank too fragmented, he says, for meaningful economic development

Palestinian legislator Ziad Abu Amr says Palestinians would find themselves in a political box if Sharon goes on to pull unilaterally out of other West Bank settlements. Even if Israel keeps the most problematic settlements, he said, the outside world could view any Palestinian complaints as unreasonable.

In Maale Adumim, with its sturdy condominiums and large shopping mall, residents view themselves as suburbanites who have the right to build up E-1 for their security.

''I don't see myself as a settler," said Susan Weinstein, whose husband was killed in a Palestinian bus bombing in 1996. ''I didn't come in a covered wagon. I came in a car, and I bought an apartment that was on the market."

But Lena Baklanova, 27, a saleswoman at Tower Records, said all the security she needs is the swift highway to Jerusalem. A Russian immigrant with memories of the Berlin Wall, she said building a barrier or developing E-1 without creating jobs for Palestinians will ''make people more aggressive. . . . No wall is good for people."