Laborites Balk at Govt Plans to Finance Gush Settlement Activities

The Labor Alignment is trying to mount opposition to government moves to legalize the Gush Emunim and provide it with public funds to consolidate and expand its settlement activities on the West Bank. The Treasury requested the Knesset Finance Committee yesterday to authorize IL 81 million to further Gush plans to set up three additional settlements in the first quarter of 1978.

Discussion was postponed until the committee’s next meeting. Labor MKs Yehoshua Rabinowitz and Naftali Feder said that to provide a political movement such as the Gush with public funds would amount to financing settlements established in defiance of government policy operative at the time.

Another Laborite, MK Yossi Sarid, took sharp issue with Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposal that the Gush be granted status as an official settlement movement. Sarid filed an urgent motion to debate the issue but it was supported only by the Alignment, the Independent Liberals, Sheli and the Rakah Communists and was stricken from the agenda.

Sharon declared that if the government did not make settlements one of its principal objectives it would be no better than the previous government. Sarid retorted that the purpose of recognizing the Gush was not to intensify settlements in parts of the country where they are urgently needed but to establish the Gush “as an instrument of possible annexation, as a means of imposing rule on a million Arabs.” He said the Gush is not interested in settlement but in forcing itself into densely populated Arab areas on the West Bank. Sharon accused Sarid of “hate, fanaticism and extremism.”