The New York Times · New York, New York · 10 December 1991

CP-1991-030

Israeli View of Talks With the Arabs From a Lonely Hill on the West Bank

By Clyde Haberman

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Transcribed from the clipping

KEFAR TAPPUAH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank, Dec. 9 — What passes for the budding settlement of Rachelim is nothing more than three battered trailers and a few portable latrines, plunked down willy-nilly on a wind-raked hill two miles south of this town. Most people looking at it probably would not find much there worth fighting about.

But Rachelim (unofficial population: 15) has become the most recent battleground in the long-running struggle over the Israeli Government’s insistence on its right to build Jewish settlements on Arab lands occupied since 1967.

When Middle East peace talks get under way in Washington on Tuesday, assuming no last-minute hitch, the Palestinian delegation is likely to lose little time before denouncing Israeli settlement activity and demanding that it end immediately.

And Rachelim, not yet a full settlement but given an official start last week, could well be mentioned by name, which would suit Yael Ben-Yaakov just fine because she has no intention of leaving. Yes, world opinion may be against her, she acknowledges, and perhaps a majority in Israel as well. But she can live with that, she says.

“We get the sympathy of the world,” Mrs. Ben-Yaakov said inside one of the trailers today, “only when we are beaten, only after the Holocaust, only during the gulf war, when the TV showed the missiles falling on Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan.

Now, that’s over, and we’re the price that Bush wants to pay the Arabs for their participation in the gulf war.” “We need the land; we can’t give it up,” said Shulamit Livyatan, another settler. “I don’t believe giving up land will bring peace. The Arabs just want us out. They want us to go to Europe, go to Africa, go to America.

They have thousands of kilometers in Egypt, in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco. We have just this. This is our place. This is our land.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person.

Context added by this archive

Date check: the masthead reads A14 / THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL / TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1991 — matches the slide date

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