Israeli 'Outposts' thriving in the West Bank

An Israeli soldiers aims his weapon against Palestinian stone throwers, not seen, during clashes in the West Bank village of Kalandia between Jerusalem and Ramallah Friday, Feb. 16, 2007. Palestinians protested against Israel 's renovation works near the disputed Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

February 17, 2007

By RAVI NESSMAN, Associated Press Writer

With its playgrounds, identical houses and manicured flower beds, Bruchin looks like any placid Israeli suburb. Except that Bruchin is not supposed to exist.

Bruchin is among more than 100 West Bank outposts never officially authorized by the Israeli government. And Israel's repeated commitments to freeze settlement construction haven't hampered Bruchin's transformation from a cluster of trailers less than eight years ago into a thriving community of 380 people, girded by government supplied roads, electricity and water.

"Normally, when you think of an outpost you think of a water tower. This is a real town," said Amishai Shav-Tal, one of Bruchin's founders.

Unlike the full-blown settlements that have been built in the face of international criticism, the outposts have never gone through the public process of gaining official government approval. Many of them began as little more than a cell phone tower or trailer erected by settlers on a West Bank hilltop to establish a presence there, a seed they used to quickly establish a new community.

The outposts infuriate the Palestinians, who see them as part of a plan to strengthen the Jewish grip on land they want for an independent state.

With the international community focusing its disapproval mainly on the traditional settlements, Israel has managed to quietly plant a slew of the outposts across the West Bank, say Palestinians, Israeli critics and even the settlers themselves.

"This is the game that the government always played with the settlers: 'You will do it, we will turn a blind eye and then one day when we are politically able to, we will legalize it,'" said Dror Etkes, who monitors settlements for the Israel's Peace Now movement.

Israel has not built an official settlement in more than a decade. When it approved a new one in late December, it quickly backed down under international condemnation.

But Bruchin is a different story. Settler leaders and a former Cabinet minister say the government cooperated through every phase of its creation in the northern West Bank. In recent talks with the Defense Ministry, which must approve new settlement construction, the settlers demanded Bruchin be the first in a string of developed outposts to be recognized as full settlements, which would ease fears that they could be forcibly removed.

"They have no choice, they have to recognize most of the outposts," said Bentzi Lieberman, a settler leader.

Over the 40 years since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast War, the settlers have cultivated political allies and manipulated divided coalition governments in their favor. They capitalized on Palestinian hostility toward Israel to push the claim that the entire West Bank is the Jews' biblical birthright and a vital security buffer with the Arab world.

But some outpost residents fear the government may be turning against them.

As prime minister, Ehud Olmert started out with what looked like a campaign to tear down the unauthorized settlements, and was elected on a platform calling for the country to abandon much of the West Bank and all but the largest settlement blocs.

Political troubles following last summer's war in Lebanon have forced Olmert to put his plan on hold, but the settlers of Bruchin say they felt the change.

The army office in charge of the West Bank has issued orders to stop construction at the outpost and to demolish what has already been built, spokesman Capt. Zidki Maman said without providing details. It has also prevented Bruchin from upgrading its electricity hookup, which the settlers complain is too small for its growing population.

"Bruchin is an illegal outpost," Maman said.

The settlers blame U.S. pressure, and say they feel betrayed by the government.

Meanwhile, Bruchin continues to thrive — with the government's help.

On a sunny winter morning, soldiers sent by the government stand guard at Bruchin's gates, while the squeals of children at play ring out from the outposts' nine preschools, many of them funded by the Education Ministry.

Down a tidy road lined with tall street lights and brick sidewalks, past the marble-walled synagogue and the community center, stand 40 two-story yellow stucco houses in two rows. A large sign says they were built with Housing Ministry help.

Nearby, a cluster of nearby trailers houses another 40 families, who arrived in recent years.
Residents describe Bruchin as a quiet, close-knit, religious suburb. They have neighborhood barbecues, cooking classes for the wives, and after-school judo, ceramics, basketball and Torah for the kids.

"It's a good place," said Avi Galimidi, a 30-year-old student who moved here 2 1/2 years ago with his wife and four children. "It has wonderful and good people. And I want to settle the land."

Israel has repeatedly promised to freeze all settlement activity in the West Bank, where nearly 270,000 settlers — a 6 percent increase from a year ago, according to government figures — live among 2.4 million Palestinians.

Several thousand Israelis are believed to be living in outposts.

Under the 2003 "road map" peace plan, Israel agreed to remove dozens of outposts built since March 2001, but that deal that does not include Bruchin, since it was started two years earlier. Israel also agreed to freeze settlement growth, which should have ended all expansion at Bruchin. Israel did not follow through on either of those commitments.

The Palestinians have also failed to live up to their road map commitment to disband militant groups, who effectively rule the streets of the West Bank and fire missiles at Israeli towns from Gaza.

The U.S. sees the settlements and their continued construction as obstacles to peace, at a time when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has scheduled a Feb. 19 summit between Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to foster a rapprochement.

"The Israel government should live up to its commitments, and that includes on the settlements, that includes on outposts. These are commitments, by the way, to the United States, they're not commitments to the Palestinians," U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones said.

The Israelis "should not create facts on the ground," he said.

But more than 100 outposts have been built since 1995, and most now have at least some form of basic infrastructure, Etkes said.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat calls the outposts "baby settlements."

"Our worst fear there is being realized, which is that they will boom and become major settlements," he said.

Like many outposts, Bruchin was a response to violence — the fatal shooting of an Israeli woman, Yael Mevar, as she drove near an Arab town on Dec. 31, 1997.

Angry settler leaders dusted off old plans for a settlement about 12 miles east of Tel Aviv, between Israel and the large settlement of Ariel, deep in the West Bank. In the spring of 1999, Jewish seminary students moved into trailers on a hilltop.

"You can't come and just shoot Jews and we'll do nothing," said Shav-Tal, 31. "We'll show them that we live in this country, and we are the people that own this country."

In October, Shav-Tal and five other families answered the students' call to settle in Bruchin.

They moved into trailers powered by electricity generators, with water tanks filled every three days, Shav-Tal said.

"The challenge that you have of building something where there is nothing — that's real Zionism," he said.

That core group posted fliers in nearby settlements, advertised on the Internet, and were flooded with applications, Shav-Tal said.

"Our problem from the first day was more people want to come than the places we have," Shav-Tal said.

More trailers rolled in. The government-owned electricity company hooked Bruchin up to the grid. The water company installed a pump and pipes. The local council paved 1.5 miles of roads. Public bus service began.

The settlers received approval from the Housing Ministry to build 40 permanent houses, and their occupants moved in 2 1/2 years ago, well after the road map was unveiled. Their newly empty trailers became available for new arrivals, and by December, these too were filled, bringing Bruchin's population to 380.

The army may call Bruchin illegal, but in her government-commissioned report on the outposts two years ago, attorney Talia Sasson said the Housing Ministry spent $785,000 on Bruchin's infrastructure and public buildings.

The government was deeply complicit in the creation of many of the outposts, Sasson wrote.

"Most of the outposts were financed by some ministry in Israel," she told The Associated Press.

"We helped build it," said Yitzhak Levy, who was housing minister in 1999. "It is supposed to be a city. It has a large area. It is clear that this is a place that was going to grow, and therefore there was investment. It was done openly."

Yehudit Passal moved here 1 1/2 years ago with her husband and two children because it allowed her family to be near the Tel Aviv job market while strengthening Israel's hold over the West Bank, she said.

Her decision was strengthened, she said, by Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which included the dismantling of 21 settlements and another four in the northern West Bank.
She said she wanted the remaining settlements to be large, "so it would be that much harder to take them down."

A few hundred yards down the hill lies a town of 4,000 Palestinians. Its name is Brukhin, the Arabic form of Bruchin. Mayor Akrima Samara says the outpost's existence blocks Palestinians from their olive groves and grazing land, and has dimmed their hopes for a state of their own.
"With every passing day we see the outpost grow," he said. "This land is lost."

The settlers of Bruchin have big plans. A detailed blueprint envisages expanding their community tenfold, to 750 families, said Itzik Turk, the outpost's general secretary.

But the sympathy the settlers once enjoyed in Israel has weakened as Israelis have wearied of war with the Palestinians and the burden of being an occupying power.

Galimidi, the student, says he is not worried about Bruchin's future.

"I believe that all the problems will be solved little by little," he said. In another 20 years, "Bruchin will be a city, and we will have malls."