Top lawyers from the Defense Ministry and several other government agencies held lengthy discussions Thursday on the legal aspects of a dispute over the expansion of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat.
Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, who has been instructed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to prepare a formal opinion for the Cabinet by Monday, chaired the day-long meeting.
At the prime minister’s request, Ben-Yair is investigating the legality of building 500 housing units on a 150-acre plot south of Bethlehem.
Palestinian residents of the nearby village of Al-Khader claim the land belongs to them. And several Palestinian officials have claimed that such an expansion would violate the Palestinian selfrule accord.
Rabin was meanwhile reported to have re jected the idea of simply declaring the area in dispute a “closed military area.” That kind of declaration would bring an end to the construction work under way there on behalf of the settlers.
Rabin, whose role as defense minister gives him the legal right to close off any area in the administered territories on grounds of security or public order, apparently wants to avoid resorting to this device for what is, essentially, a political decision.
Since coming to power, the Rabin government has adopted a policy freezing all government construction projects in the territories. But questions arose this week over what steps the government can take to stop construction if a private contractor has the building rights.
The issue has been seen as a test of Rabin’s willingness to risk a showdown with the 120,000 Jewish residents of the West Bank.
The lines of the political battle hardened Thursday, in anticipation of the Monday Cabinet meeting.
The opposition parties introduced a no-confidence motion, following reports that Israel had told the Palestine Liberation Organization that the construction work would be suspended.
In practice, the work continued at full pace, with Palestinian protesters maintaining a presence nearby, but not tangling physically with the soldiers at the site, as they did earlier in the week.
Peace Now has scheduled a Jewish-Arab demonstration at the site for Friday.
Settler leaders, for their part, have urged their followers not to hold demonstrations, but instead to rely on the army to protect the bulldozers from interference.
Several Palestinian officials have called for a cutoff of the ongoing negotiations with Israel because of the dispute.
Meretz coalition members sided strongly with the Palestinians in calling for an immediate end to the construction.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
