Kadima Planning West Bank Pullout

Front-Running Party Would Consolidate Israeli Settlements While Retaining Troops

JERUSALEM, March 5 -- The Kadima party, far ahead in opinion polls before Israel's parliamentary elections this month, is drawing up a four-year plan to evacuate thousands of Israelis living in scattered West Bank settlements and move them into larger ones that Israel intends to keep under any final peace agreement.

Avi Dichter, the former director of Israel's Shin Bet security service and a top Kadima candidate, told a radio station here Sunday that "Israel will have to define, by itself, its final borders, and that will involve the consolidation of smaller settlements into settlement blocs."

Dichter said the Palestinian parliamentary election victory of the radical Islamic group Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist, has made future negotiations with the Palestinians impossible. But he said a second unilateral withdrawal of settlers from territory that Palestinians see as part of their future state would leave Israel's military in place. Last year, Israel evacuated 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip, along with the thousands of soldiers who protected them.

"It will only be a civilian disengagement, not a military disengagement," Dichter told Israel Radio.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has previously outlined plans to retain Israel's largest West Bank settlement blocs, Jordan Valley "security zones" and East Jerusalem in any final agreement with the Palestinians. But Dichter's comments, following several recent polls showing a slight Kadima slide, are the most explicit indication yet that the party intends to pursue those goals through unilateral steps.

Kadima was created last year by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who engineered the withdrawal from Gaza and four small West Bank settlements, as a centrist movement that would draw Israel's final borders around a durable Jewish majority. The party platform calls for doing so through the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map," which calls for negotiations to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But Israelis have generally assumed that Kadima, now led by Olmert after Sharon suffered a stroke in January, favors a large-scale withdrawal from the West Bank, where a fast-growing Arab population would threaten the long-term viability of Israel's Jewish majority if the land is annexed.

"This reflects the determination of the Israeli government to continue its policy of dictation rather than negotiation," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. "I believe it will only add to the complexities of the larger problems."

Much of the Israeli electorate, frustrated by years of failed negotiations, has rallied behind the idea of relinquishing some territory to set Israel's final borders on its own terms. But Israeli hawks sharply oppose another unilateral withdrawal, saying that leaving Gaza without any Palestinian concessions helped elect a Hamas majority to the Palestinian parliament in January.

In a recent meeting with reporters, the Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister whose party is running third in polls, said: "The question today is who will cede territory and who will hold on to territory. I will hold on to territory."

A Kadima spokeswoman, Maya Jacobs, said Sunday that "the road map remains the main peace plan." But she added that unless Hamas renounced violence and recognized the Jewish state, "Israel and the international community will find another solution to define our secure future borders."

Stuart Tuttle, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, declined to comment on Dichter's statement. But he said, "The road map is the only internationally agreed-upon solution to these issues," which include the final status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. "The United States believes that final-status issues need to be settled by negotiation between both parties," he said.

The Haaretz newspaper reported Sunday that Olmert's government will seek U.S. support for the withdrawal plan if it wins the March 28 elections.

Dichter, who ranks fifth on Kadima's candidate list, did not say which settlements would be evacuated.

But Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel's largest-circulation newspaper, said the plan calls for evacuating 17 settlements whose roughly 15,000 residents would be moved into large blocs that Israel intends to hold. Settlement blocs to be kept include Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim, the Jordan Valley and Ariel. The paper also reported that Israel would keep the highly ideological Jewish enclave inside Hebron and the Kiryat Arba settlement on its outskirts.

There are an estimated 250,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, not including those in East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel following the 1967 Middle East war is not recognized internationally.

During the Palestinian parliamentary campaign, leaders of Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, held up Israel's Gaza withdrawal as evidence that its armed campaign was more effective than negotiations, the path endorsed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Israeli and Palestinian analysts say voters turned against Abbas's Fatah party for other reasons, namely its decade of corrupt and hapless administration of the government.

Palestinian fighters continue to fire crude missiles from Gaza into southern Israel on a daily basis, the vast majority falling harmlessly into empty fields. Israel, meanwhile, has stepped up military operations in the West Bank since Hamas's victory while small-scale attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers have increased.

"Avi Dichter forgot that the last unilateral withdrawal caused Hamas's victory," said Shaul Goldstein, chairman of the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem. "Any unilateral concession is a victory for terror. This plan will cause more terror activity, which is already rising again."