Sharon Wins - an Answer, or a New Question?

I've been skimming the Mid East Press ... opinions of Sharon's prospects vary widely, and despite the margin of his victory there is some scepticism. The Arab Street is not thrilled either.

Israel's Sharon Seeks Unity After Win
1 hour, 37 minutes ago

By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM - Bolstered by a resounding election victory, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) on Wednesday called for national unity against "the murderous hatred" of Palestinian militants, but his efforts to form a broad coalition government are likely to be thwarted by the defeated Labor party.

Sharon might be forced into an alliance with ultranationalist parties that want to block U.S.-backed peace moves and spur him to even tougher moves against the Palestinians. Israel TV quoted Sharon as saying off-camera that he'd rather call new elections than preside over such a coalition.

The founder of Maon Farm, Yehoshefat Tor, says he still thinks the bombing was a good idea. ''The Torah says we should kill all the Arabs,'' he told me. ''Not just Arabs who maybe help terrorists. Everybody.'' (see page seven)

All over the West Bank in recent years, and particularly since the start of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, Israeli teenagers and young adults, almost all of them passionately religious, have been doing what Zar's grandchildren did -- claiming a small piece of land for their own. They are motivated sometimes by personal grief, sometimes by political anger, sometimes just by the youthful desire to be part of a daring adventure. Because they usually move onto hilltops, the Israeli media have taken to calling the most radical and colorful of these young settlers the ''hilltop youth.'' When these young settlers claim a new hill, they also claim the land around it, which in some cases Palestinians have been farming for many years. The new settlers don't seize the land in any official way; they simply uproot Palestinians' trees or shoot in the air at any Palestinian who comes close. About 70 of these small encampments, known in Israel as outposts, have been built in the last two years; together they represent a movement that intends to transform the West Bank, and the conflict in the Middle East, from the ground up...

On the surface, tiny outposts like Ramat Gilad appear to be ad hoc and unauthorized. Their population is small -- estimates of the total number of outpost residents range from 500 to 1,000. It's clear that they have some contact with the government -- who else sends the soldiers and the garbage trucks? -- but it is a relationship that for the most part is invisible.

According to Ezra Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Yesha Council, the low profile is by design. ''There is a time for everything,'' he told me and then sketched out a potential series of events for the next few months. ''Let's say there's a war in Iraq. Well, then the government can build 10,000 new housing units in Judea and Samaria'' -- the biblical names for the area that settlers prefer to use -- ''and it won't be on the front pages or all over the talk shows. So in the meantime, we can do this with the outposts. The government's hands are clean; they have no involvement. It's small potatoes, so it doesn't get covered outside of Israel.''

Jewish settlement in the West Bank has expanded continually since the land was captured in the 1967 war. At first, settlement was rare, undertaken only by religious extremists. In that era, the government tried to prevent the building of settlements in Palestinian population centers, a policy that led to repeated evacuations of religious settlers by soldiers.

When the Likud Party came to power in 1977, though, the government began constructing Jewish villages and cities all over the territories. Ariel Sharon, then the minister of agriculture, engineered a settlement plan with financial incentives that made the territories an attractive home even for Israelis who didn't feel strongly about the political ideology that drove the settlement project. The settlements grew quickly, and there are now 400,000 Israelis living outside the country's 1967 borders -- 200,000 in East Jerusalem, and another 200,000 deeper into the West Bank and Gaza.