Israel, Plo Vie To Run West Bank Views Will Be In Stark Contrast During Meetings With Clinton

Palestinians consider the West Bank - an area about the size of Delaware - the heart of their future state.

To Israel’s government, the hills overlooking the Israeli coastal plain are a biblical birthright and a strategically invaluable buffer against Arab attack from the east.

President Clinton will hear widely divergent views on the territory when he meets separately with Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week: Israel says it must retain at least half of the 2,300-square-mile area, while the Palestinians insist that Israel already promised, in writing, to withdraw from the vast majority of it.

Israel wants Palestinian towns, already autonomous, to be islands in an Israeli sea; the Palestinians want Israeli settlements, which they have agreed to let Israel keep for now, to become islands surrounded by a Palestine-in-the-making.

Palestinian Cabinet minister Nabil Shaath said the Palestinians will stick to their demand that the peace process must give them an independent state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem.

“We are not going to surrender,” Shaath said.

The two areas together amount to only about a fifth of the Palestine ruled by the British from 1922-48, he said.

In the 1948 war that established Israel, Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip and Jordanian troops rolled across the Jordan River and seized its “west bank.” The areas were captured by Israel in 1967, and Egypt and Jordan now support the Palestinians’ claim to them.

Most Israelis were happy to be rid of small, overcrowded Gaza in 1994, when it became autonomous in the first stage of peacemaking by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israel’s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

But the West Bank is a different story.

First, the area has tremendous historical and religious resonance, its hills and valleys dotted with names from the Bible: Shilo, Bethel, Hebron, Jericho, Bethlehem.

Second, it dominates central Israel, coming close to Tel Aviv, surrounding Jerusalem on three sides, and looming above Israel’s main airport. At one point, Israel proper is a scant 12 miles wide, inviting an enemy to divide it in two.

Third, the West Bank is home to 150,000 Jewish settlers. Most live close to the border in communities intended to slightly expand Israel’s boundaries, which the Palestinians might tolerate. But some settlements are located deep in the territory, a strategy by rightist Israeli governments to make a pullout impossible.

Partial Israeli withdrawals have left the West Bank a patchwork of three types of territory:

Area “A,” under full Palestinian autonomy, is several disconnected areas containing the main Palestinian cities and accounting for three percent of the territory.

Area “B” is under Palestinian civilian control, but joint Israeli-Palestinian security control; it covers another 24 percent of the West Bank, mostly rural areas around the cities.

Area “C,” under Israeli control, includes the rest of the territory, the settlements and a relatively small population of Palestinians.

In 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became reluctant heir to a peace process that badly clashed with the ideological raison d’etre of his Likud Party - that Israel must keep the West Bank. Last year, under U.S. pressure, he grudgingly embraced his predecessor’s commitment to carry out three more troop pullouts by mid-1998.

But how much land he owes is not clear.

At the end of the three pullouts, the Palestinians say, they must control about 90 percent of the West Bank. They base this on page 74 of the September 1995 Israel-PLO accord, which says that Israel will limit troops to “specified military locations” - bases, for example.

But Netanyahu sees those “military locations” as potentially including all territory where Israel has strategic interests.