News Analysis: Efrat Confrontation Recalls Earlier Dispute with Settlers

The recent confrontation between Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor-led government and Jewish settlers in the West Bank is loaded with history and irony.

Nearly twenty years ago, the same Rabin confronted the same group, and he was outmaneuvered and eventually defeated by them.

Some students of that period believe that Rabin’s failure to enforce his policy on the then-fledgling Gush Emunim settlers’ movement was a major factor in his government’s decline and Labor’s defeat, in 1977, at the hands of Menachem Begin’s Likud Party.

Whatever one’s retrospective analysis of the confrontation in the mid-1970s, both sides today are keenly conscious of the historic parallels.

The most recent conflict revolves around Efrat, one of several Jewish settlements in the area known as Gush Etzion, which had sought to build 500 new housing units on a hilltop near the settlement.

But the neighboring Arab village of Al-Khader contended the land belonged to them.

Palestinians warned that the conflict threatened the future of the peace process.

After a week of protests by both settlers and residents of Al-Khader, Rabin and his Cabinet decided on Monday to halt construction on the disputed land known as Givat Hatamar.

Rabin said that although his government still supported its policy of private expansion of settlements – which is what the Efrat expansion would be – the decision was made in the interest of preserving peace with the Palestinians.

Instead the government proposed an alternate site for expansion, Givat Hazayit, which is closer to Efrat.

Amid the current debate, Israeli voices across the political spectrum were heard this week mentioning Sebastia, the now almost-legendary site in the heart of the West Bank.

It was there that in 1974, in a Turkish-period railway station, Gush Emunim pitched its first unauthorized caravan-settlement and held its first mass demonstrations.

The soldiers clashed violently with Israeli soldiers who were sent in to remove them.

In the wake of a series of such episodes that dotted Rabin’s three-year term in office, several Jewish settlements took root on the West Bank. The settlements sprouted in clear defiance of the Rabin government’s policy, which had sought to confine settlement-building to the environs of Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.

In contrast to the 1970s, however, Emunim’s stand against the Rabin government today is tempered by differences between hard-liners and moderates in the movement.

The settlement leadership has shown relative pragmatism at this time. They did not call our their cohorts to protest at once, but gave the government a 48- hour period of grace.

And leaders of the Efrat community met with government officials on Tuesday to discuss the alternate proposal, which involves the building of 268 housing units on Givat Hazayit.

The decision reflects Efrat Council head Yinon Ahiman’s insistence, in the face of open anger and contempt from the hard-liners, that the government be given a chance.

Ahiman, who runs a flourishing community with a large Anglo-Saxon professional and academic component among its population, is intent above all on getting his new suburb built.

Dozens of families have invested their savings in the construction scheme and are anxious to see the building get under way.

Efrat, and the surrounding Jewish settlements on the Bethlehem-Hebron road, comprise Gush Etzion, an area of Jewish settlements dating back to the pre- state era that has always been considered part of the national consensus on settlements and borders.

The Labor Party itself has always regarded this area as a bulwark of “Greater Jerusalem.”

It is rather ironic, therefore, that Round Two of the historic conflict between Rabin and the advocates of Greater Israel should focus on Gush Etzion.

Because of this and in contrast to the more moderate forces, the Emunim hard- liners have decided to force a full-fledged confrontation with the government. They know that no area in the West Bank can elicit a more widespread and more emotive response than Gush Etzion.

Because of this, Rabin is determined to develop a solution to the Efrat dispute that wins at least grudging acceptance from Ahiman and his pragmatic burghers, thereby driving a wedge between them and the Emunim hard core.