Jewish settlers agree to dismantle outposts
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Your support makes all the difference.MILITANT JEWISH settlers, who had vowed to fight every inch of the way, have agreed to dismantle 12 out of 42 illegal West Bank outposts established in the run-up to last May's Israeli elections.
MILITANT JEWISH settlers, who had vowed to fight every inch of the way, have agreed to dismantle 12 out of 42 illegal West Bank outposts established in the run-up to last May's Israeli elections.
Ariel Sharon, a former senior minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government and the current Likud opposition leader, had urged them to "seize every hilltop" to pre-empt territorial concessions to the Palestinians by a more flexible administration.
The Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, alarmed the settlers earlier this week by proposing to remove 15 of the outposts, while leaving a door open to negotiation with them.
Late on Wednesday night, senior officials and settler leaders reached a compromise. The settlers agreed to go quietly from 12 outposts, although the families living there may still put up a show of resistance. Both sides claimed a measure of victory.
Mr Barak had created a precedent for evacuating settlements, while avoiding a violent confrontation with the militants.
He is expected to invoke it to justify his planned removal of small, isolated settlements that will be left surrounded by Palestinian territory under a permanent peace agreement.
His declared intention is to concentrate them into more viable settlement blocks that would eventually become part of Israel.
The settlers saw the bargain as a seal of legitimacy on the remaining 30 outposts. "The point," said the Housing Minister, Yitzhak Levy, one of the settlers' most influential supporters, "is that construction in Judea and Samaria is legal."
But their claim to legality was dented on Wednesday when Mr Netanyahu's former defence minister, Moshe Arens, denied ever having approved any of the 42 outposts built on land under military rule.
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