Israel eyes West Bank growth

About 10 minutes down the winding road from Maskiot is the settlement of Hemdat, where nine of the 16 families who had lived in the Gaza settlement of Shirat Hayam are now living in a cluster of mobile homes on the side of hill. Shirat Hayam's name means "Song of the Sea," a reference to a biblical poem, which is depicted as a song sung by the Israelites just after their exodus from Egypt.

The analogies are not coincidental. Here, people take an extraordinary long view of history. They don't use the word disengagement or withdrawal so much as gerush, which means expulsion and is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

The leader of the group of temporary settlers, waiting for what they now expect will be their new homes in Maskiot, says they've taken shelter in five different places since being evacuated by Gaza.

"We wanted to build our new community as quickly as possible. It's already more than a year and we're still not in our homes," says Yosef Hazut, a young father of two, after tramping through the rainy season's red mud between the boxy trailer homes.

"It's not so easy to start a new community over the Green Line," says Mr. Hazut. There they looked in the less populated parts of the country that Israel has long expressed hopes to develop, such as the Negev and the Galilee. They face only obstacles and delays, he says, and decided to come here.

Still, the dislocation of being moved out and around has not discouraged them from resettling in the West Bank. The fact that they don't believe there's too great a likelihood they'll be evacuated yet again is a window into how Israelis see this area, which they refer to as the Jordan Valley, but not the West Bank. Polls have shown that the majority of Israelis think they should maintain control of this area, even if only for defense purposes.

"We're people of faith," says Hazut. "And I think there's only a very small chance there would ever be a disengagement from the Jordan Valley. "For most Israelis, the Jordan Valley is a red line: giving up the Jordan Valley means to return the whole of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and allow the establishment of a terrorist state here, just the way we're seeing in Gaza."

The gap between how most Israelis view the West Bank and how it is viewed elsewhere appears to be widening. As a case in point, Education Minister Yuli Tamir introduced a plan to change Israeli school textbooks to include the Green Line on maps of the country. Her proposal was voted down earlier this week, 8-2, by a Knesset education committee panel that disagreed and painted her as a radical with a extreme left agenda.

Rather than this being a conscience decision to build up settlements in the Jordan Valley, some analysts here say, the government is taking an ad hoc, policy-less approach to which settlements grow and where.

"Maskiot was a kind of military settlement a few years ago and they want to kind of reestablish it," says Hillel Cohen, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace.

"I think the point is the Israeli government doesn't really know where it's going to," says Professor Cohen. "I don't see that they have any plan. They just deal with problems from day to day. Where they want us to be in five years isn't clear. So if they have a group that wants to settle in the Jordan Valley, they say OK, go settle there.

"I don't think [that] the government really thought about it and they didn't think the US would say much about it, either."

One of the reasons for this view, he says, is that in the 1970s, Israeli military strategist and foreign minister Yigal Allon proposed a plan to give West Bank Arabs autonomy but keep the Jordan Valley forever under Israeli sovereignty. The plan is unacceptable to all known Palestinian political factions.

But Mr. Allon, from the same left-leaning Labor Party that later signed a historic peace deal with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was once seen as a bulwark of the security-conscious mainstream. He encouraged settlements in the Jordan Valley, and drew many agriculturalists there. Today, some 70 percent of the current residents are secular people from liberal backgrounds, unlike the religious nationalist population that dominates in other areas of the settlements.

"In the heart of people in the Labor Party, we know that there are places which seem more logical or legal to settle, and this is one of them," says Cohen. "Also today, I think that if there is a plan of the Israeli government, it does include keeping at least part of the Jordan Valley as part of the future Israeli state."

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