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The World’s Aaron Schachter reports on growing anger among Jewish settlers over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to temporarily freeze construction in West Bank settlements.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reached out today to Jewish settlers.  He unveiled a plan to offer them additional funding and benefits.  Netanyahu made the announcement a day after thousands of settlers converged on his home.  They did it to protest his temporary freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank.  The World’s Aaron Schacter reports from Jerusalem.

AARON SCHACTER:  (Sounds of crowds of protesters in the background.)  The sound of large protests isn’t new or even especially dramatic in this world, but the politics of this particular fight are getting interesting.  Israel’s Right Wing Prime Minister, Netanyahu, is clashing with the group that, arguably, got him elected—the 300,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank.  Bobby Brown is a former advisor to Netanyahu.  He and other settlers accuse the Prime Minister of selling-out to America for a peace deal that won’t come any time soon.

BOBBY BROWN:  We believe we have a right, as Jews, to settle where we are.  To say there’s going to be a freeze based on religion—that a Muslim can build and a Jew can’t—is not something we expect in this day and age.  Israel wants an agreement.  Israel has stated over and over again, “We are ready to negotiate.”  Who’s our partner?

SCHACTER:  And the anger isn’t just directed at Netanyahu, it’s spilling-over to anyone implementing the freeze.  That includes just over a dozen inspectors, with the job of roaming the West Bank, looking for illegal construction.  At least some of them are settlers themselves.  (Sound of protesters.)  This was the scene at the Kedumim settlement earlier this week when inspectors arrived.  Police had to drag settlers out of the road.  The Head Inspector is Rami Ziv.  He and his family live in another settlement, in the northern West Bank.  Ziv’s wife, Ayala, says their neighbors have begun picketing outside their home.

AYALA ZIV:  I don’t like people making demonstrations out of my house, but I understand the situation is very problematic.  They will do whatever they can to that the government would change this decree.

SCHACTER:  Ziv’s husband used to make sure people weren’t building without permits.  Now he has to insure that people with permits don’t build.  Ayala Ziv says it’s a tough job, though she feels for the many settlers who have already sunk thousands of dollars into licenses, land, and down payments on construction.  But many analysts say the settlers should have known that the days of unfettered growth were numbered.

GERALD STEINBERG:  I think this was entirely predictable.  Anybody who didn’t see it coming was really fooling themselves.

SCHACTER:  Gerald Steinberg is a professor of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.

STEINBERG:  Netanyahu knew that he had to govern from the center, because that’s where the dominant Israeli public is.  But the people who make the greatest amount of noise, as in almost every democratic political process, are the people on the fringes.  They make a huge amount of noise internally, and it gets picked-up externally, but they don’t set policy.

SCHACTER:  The settlers also feel betrayed, again, by one of their own.  In their view, Netanyahu is just following in the footsteps of hawks like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who evacuated Jewish settlers from Gaza; and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords.  Dror Etkes is a long time human rights campaigner.  As the head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, he documented a tripling of settlers since 1993.  Etkes says the settlers express anger in Netanyahu for what they say is caving-in to American pressure; but it’s their own intransigence that set things in motion.

DROR ETKES:  It’s exactly this hard line and lack of willingness to conduct any dialogue with the Arab world unless it’s a violent dialogue, which brings Israel to increase dependency—economical, political, military dependency on America—and eventually brings Netanyahu to declare that he is freezing settlements, something which never happened before in Israeli politics.

SCHACTER:  The settlers are vowing to continue their protests—both in and outside Israeli controlled areas.  Recently, settlers burned a house and a car near the Palestinian city of Nablus.  The Israeli army is reportedly concerned that such acts will only grow more violent in the days to come.  For The World, I’m Aaron Schacter in Jerusalem.

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