Barak accord with settler leaders angers Palestinians

Jewish settlers are this week - perhaps as early as today - due to begin evacuating 10 settlement outposts in the West Bank, …

Jewish settlers are this week - perhaps as early as today - due to begin evacuating 10 settlement outposts in the West Bank, established without full Israeli government permission in the final months of Mr Benjamin Netanyahu's prime ministership, under an agreement reached by settler leaders with the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak.

The agreement, which leaves another 30 of the outposts in place, has infuriated the Palestinians and left-wing Israeli activists, who wanted all of the outposts removed. But it has also deeply divided the settler community.

Several thousand settlers and their supporters converged on Mr Barak's official residence in central Jerusalem on Sunday night to protest against the evacuation. But, following pleas from across the political spectrum to avoid a descent into the vicious anti-government demonstrations mounted by right-wingers in the months before the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the protest was generally calm.

Unlike the Rabin era, there were no placards denouncing the Prime Minister as a murderer, and there were no calls for violent resistance to the scheduled evacuations, although some residents have pledged "passive resistance". Significantly, too, the demonstration was not backed by the settlers' umbrella group, the Council of Jewish Communities, which negotiated the evacuation deal with Mr Barak.

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In contrast to Mr Rabin, who made clear his personal opposition to the hardline core of the settlement movement, Mr Barak, during his four months in office, has repeatedly gone out of his way to stress his support for Jewish settlement in parts of the West Bank where he believes it boosts Israel's security, and his empathy even with those settlers he is now asking to relocate.

In an Israel Television interview on Sunday night, he said that, where settlement was concerned, he was "closer to the position of Yitzhak Levy [the settlers' champion and rabbi who heads the National Religious Party] than to that of Yossi Sarid [of the leftwing Meretz party]."

He also singled out two settlements in the Ramallah area, north of Jerusalem - Ofrah and Beit El - which he said would be "ours forever, just as Ramallah will be Palestinian forever".

That kind of talk, underlined by Mr Barak's decision to approve new building schemes at several existing settlements, prompted Mr Nabil Amr, an aide to Mr Yasser Arafat, to warn yesterday that a "real crisis" was brewing. But it has also enabled Mr Barak to isolate the settler hardliners, and deny them the widespread Israeli public support that, ultimately, led to the killing of Mr Rabin by a right-wing Jewish extremist.

In an interview marking the fourth anniversary of Mr Rabin's death, his widow, Leah, yesterday said the low turnout at Sunday's protest was a vindcation of his policies. But she also warned Mr Barak not to be complacent about extremist opposition.

"It's better to always worry," she said, "to take into account that someone could carry out a suicide attack."