In Israel, mood shifts from settlement issue

MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank -- Rabbi Shimon Garson helped found this sprawling settlement just outside Jerusalem 25 years ago, and all his life he voted for the hard-right religious Shas party.

But to the surprise of some of his neighbors, Garson was out campaigning yesterday for the left-wing Labor Party.

Garson was so confident that Maale Adumim will permanently remain part of Israel that he said he used his vote to express his other passion: social and economic equality.

Garson's decision to support the Labor Party after a lifetime as a right-wing religious activist reflects the profound shift in Israel's electorate away from the question of whether to expand settlements and push for a greater Israel, the issue that drove politics for nearly four decades.

''For the first time in many years I changed my mind. Like Israel, I'm ready for a change," Garson said.

Voters have largely adopted a consensus view, most clearly articulated by the Kadima party, that Israel's borders will eventually include the biggest settlements, especially the cluster around Jerusalem that includes Maale Adumim, home to more than 30,000 Israelis.

''There is no more ideology," Garson said. ''People will look out for their own personal interests."

Many Israeli pundits focused on the record low turnout in yesterday's election; but the fierce opinions voiced in Maale Adumim and Jerusalem served as a reminder that many Israelis are still passionate about their politics.

Ariel Sharon radically changed the political landscape when he withdrew the Jewish settlements from Gaza last summer, and then abandoned the right-wing Likud party to found the centrist Kadima. Sharon suffered a stroke in January and remains in a coma, but even from his hospital bed his strategy dominated the election.

Now, almost all political parties, from the left to the right, agree that Israel has to withdraw from most of the West Bank.

That consensus has liberated some settlers on the right, like Garson, to vote on economic issues, but it has also sparked a feud among rival right-wing parties who fear that a West Bank withdrawal could eventually create momentum to dismantle even major settlements like Maale Adumim.

Avi Rahamim, 47, a businessman and Likud activist, has fought to keep Maale Adumim's right-wing voters from drifting toward other parties like Avigdor Lieberman's ''Israel Is Our Home" Party. Rahamim is not nearly as concerned about centrist Kadima and left-wing Labor.

''This election is not a referendum about future disengagement. It has become fashionable to shrink the borders of Israel," Rahamim said.

Instead, he said, the election is about whether Israel will continue to take a tough position against Palestinians, demanding concessions when it gives up land, and whether the government will continue to extend costly welfare benefits to ''people who are too lazy to work."

Yesterday, he argued loudly but good-naturedly with Garson, 54, outside a Maale Adumim polling station.

He teased activists from the right-wing Likud party and from Shas, the religious party of which he was a member during the 11 years he spent on Maale Adumim's city council.

Pioneers of the settlement movement who share Garson's belief in a strong and defensible Jewish state, he said, can rest easy that the biggest settlement blocs will be annexed into Israel someday soon. He said Israelis should be glad to give up the rest of the settlements, many of them tiny, which drain too many resources.

''There are places with two or three caravans and 10 soldiers to guard them," he said. ''One of them is my son. He is more or less guarding rocks, a frying pan, a barrel. Places like that we can give up for peace."