OFRA (West Bank): Yossi Rund is one of the few Jewish settlers who says aloud that he could accept Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip. He voices the same fear as many others that even though Israel is actually tightening its hold on big West Bank settlements, the pullout dims the ultimate settler dream of a ‘Greater Israel’ on land occupied in the 1967 war.

At the same time, Rund worries that if resistance is too violent it could rupture all settler links to mainstream Israel — where most see Gaza as too costly and dangerous to keep.

“If the withdrawal can unify the people and does not harm our security, somehow I can accept it,” says Rund, 53, a retired chicken farmer and veteran resident of Ofra, a West Bank enclave that is not on the current removal list.

“But I try to believe it won’t happen ... It is definitely a blow to us.”

The World Court has branded the settlements on land the Palestinians want for a state illegal, though Israel disputes this. Even Israel’s main ally the United States has called settlements an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

But for decades, the settler movement has been a powerful force in Israeli politics as governments from both right and left built and fortified communities that now house 240,000 settlers alongside 3.8 million Palestinians.

There is still no question for Israel of giving up its biggest settlement blocs. Washington has said Israel can expect to keep some land under any eventual peace deal with Palestinians, who bitterly resent the settler presence.

While some 9,000 settlers leave 21 enclaves in Gaza and four in a corner of the West Bank, the rest will remain on almost 120 settlements whose populations are still growing. This adds to Palestinian fears that while they will get Gaza, they will never get a viable state.

But there is also no doubt that Sharon’s plan for ‘disengagement’ from conflict with the Palestinians puts a dent in a settler movement he helped create and sets a precedent that others might follow — if not in the short term.

“If the disengagement indeed goes as planned, the idea of a Greater Israel is dead,” says Gadi Taub of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, using a term coined by rightists for all the land in the post-World War One British mandate of Palestine.

“It is a process nobody can stop once it begins... It would be like if France had withdrawn from only half of Algeria,” he said, referring to the pullout from France’s former colony after independence in 1962.

Zionists settled in the 19th and early 20th centuries, helping create what became the Jewish state within boundaries that were set after the 1948 war with the Arabs.

Israel’s victory in the 1967 war spawned a settler movement across the former ‘Green Line’ boundary, driven by a biblical claim to the occupied land and encouraged by security hawks like Sharon who sought a bulwark against Arab enemies.

Clusters of trailer camps built in the early 1970s grew into more than 140 settlements, including towns of red-roofed homes housing tens of thousands.

Many settlers were drawn by cheap houses and tax breaks rather than ideology. But the core of the movement kept its nationalist and religious roots.

The movement came into question in the 1990s when Israel signed interim peace deals and handed over West Bank and Gaza cities to Palestinian self-rule.—Reuters