New arrivals fight West Bank plan

Canvas tents on a basketball blacktop look out to an idyllic valley lined with olive groves, giving this Jewish settlement slated for evacuation an air of summer camp.

But it is actually a makeshift neighborhood for newcomer families of religious ideologues who hope to block the Israeli withdrawal from this artists' village, one of four emaciated secular settlements in the northern West Bank that the government wants to abandon next month.

"When there is a basis of faith, the path is clearer," says Irit Frenkel, who moved to Sa-Nur last month with her seven children, some clothes, blankets, and kitchen utensils. "We didn't establish this country to expel Jews from their homes."

Viewed from the ancient Samarian slopes of the West Bank, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan looks different from the exit from Gaza's sand dunes. Because the communities being evacuated contain barely 500 residents, compared with Gaza's 8,500, these withdrawals look like an afterthought. But the evacuation, which Israeli officials said Sunday would begin on Aug. 17, will nonetheless create a Palestinian district 2-1/2 times the territory of Gaza and signal Israel's willingness for future concessions in the West Bank.

Once a launching pad into Israel for suicide bombings by militants based in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, the northern West Bank has quieted since Israel sealed off the region with a security barrier of fences, concrete walls, and barbed wire. On Sunday, Israel's cabinet said the completion of the barrier in Jerusalem would close off the city, leaving some 50,000 Palestinian residents separated from neighbors, jobs, and schools. The proposed barrier will include 12 crossing points between the West Bank and Jerusalem.

In the northern West Bank, the redeployment is expected to dovetail with Israel's military handing over security responsibility to the Palestinians in Jenin. Opponents of the withdrawal warn that it will give militants breathing room to stockpile rockets that could be fired over Israel's West Bank security barrier, threatening the sprawling metropolis in central Israel.

"You'll be creating a terror state that would threaten most of the country with Kassam [missiles]" said Yossi Dagan, a resident at Sa-Nur who moved here three years ago. "Sharon is trying to make the people forget about the northern West Bank. It's easy to market the withdrawal from Gaza. When the people realize the danger in withdrawing from northern Samaria, they'll decide to call it off."

Dagan has overseen a month-long influx at Sa-Nur of about 25 families, a badly needed infusion into the colony that until three years ago was populated only by a handful of aging Russian artists who arrived at this settlement in the 1980s and early 90s.

Like the other three West Bank settlements slated to be abandoned by the end of the summer, Sa-Nur withered over the course of the five-year Palestinian uprising. Isolated by in a hilly region which gave an advantage to gunmen from neighboring Arab towns and villages, its residents once required military convoys to travel to and from their homes.

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