TEKOA SETTLEMENT/ JERUSALEM: Most Palestinians support the decision to renew peace talks with Israel and oppose armed struggle, but few expect the negotiations to lead anywhere, according to a poll published Thursday.
The survey by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre (JMCC) found that 54.3 percent of Palestinians believe that the decision to relaunch talks on September 2 "serves the interests of the Palestinian people," with 34 percent saying it was harmful to them.
The same poll found that 59.4 percent of Palestinians oppose "military operations against Israeli targets," with 30.3 percent supporting them.
Pessimism about the peace process remains high, however, with 55.7 percent saying there will not be a "significant change in the status quo" as a result of the talks and 38.3 percent saying there would be.
The poll found that 43.8 percent of Palestinians would have voted for President Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party if local elections had been held this year, compared to 13.5 percent who would have voted for the militant Hamas.
However, 26.4 percent said they would not have voted at all.
The poll surveyed 1,200 adults from across the occupied West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on September 11-15, with a margin of error of three percent.
On the Israeli said, another scene is on the ground.
For Arieh Haskin, the roar of a bulldozer outside his West Bank home is the welcome death knell of an Israeli settlement moratorium he always opposed.
"We live here because this is our land," the 40-year-old Jewish settler and father of five said. "How can it be that the only place in the world where a Jew cannot build a house is Judaea, the birthplace of the Jewish people?"
Sunday’s expected end of a moratorium on new West Bank settler homes has been the subject of intense negotiations in recent weeks and threatens to upend peace talks relaunched on September 2 after a 20-month hiatus.
The Palestinians view the presence of 500,000 Israelis in more than 120 settlements across the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major threat to their establishment of a viable state in the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.
They have threatened to walk out of the talks if building resumes, and US President Barack Obama has led a chorus of international calls for Israel to extend the partial ban.
But on this hilltop settlement in the southern West Bank, where some 1,500 Israelis live in neat rows of red-roofed homes, settlers are preparing the ground for construction and hoping Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds firm in his vow to let the moratorium expire.
"I hope that construction will finally resume," Haskin said, adding that his community hopes to one day build an additional 800 homes, including 180 in the next few years.
"The building of houses in Judaea and Samaria is not the problem," he said, using the biblical name for the occupied West Bank. Tekoa is believed to be the birthplace of the Jewish prophet Amos in the 8th century BC.
"The real question is whether the Palestinians are ready to recognize the existence of a Jewish state," he said. "Netanyahu is determined to resume construction as he promised."
Netanyahu’s own rightwing Likud and other pro-settler parties in the coalition have demanded he resist pressure to extend the moratorium, warning that such a move could threaten his political future.
"In what other country would a political leader be prevented from building his home by his own government," said Zeev Elkin, a Likud member of parliament who bought land in Kfar Eldad, a cluster of mobile homes near Tekoa.
Elkin is living on the site, waiting for the building restrictions to expire.
"This is not a personal problem, but a problem for the state of Israel, which cannot continue to deprive its citizens of the basic right to build on their own land."
Many settlers have meanwhile ignored the ban, continuing to erect structures that are sometimes dismantled by the military.
"Whatever happens, we will continue to build, with or without authorization," said Danny Halamish, one of the founders of Maale Rehavam, an outpost near Tekoa built in violation of Israeli law.
The international community considers all settlements illegal.
Having lived in the West Bank since 2001, Halamish insists he is not worried about one day being asked to leave as part of a peace agreement.
"For the past 10 years they have been asking how I would respond if I were expelled. It doesn’t prevent me from building," the father of three said with a smile.
Since the moratorium began on November 25, 2009 hundreds of families who had obtained permits to build have had to wait 10 months to commence work.
Others who managed to break ground before the ban came into effect were allowed to proceed under a loophole in the moratorium that permits the construction of public buildings and housing projects already under way.
"We have hundreds of families who are waiting for authorization to finally build, and it is time that this farce, which did not contribute anything to anybody, comes to an end," said Shaul Goldstein, the head of the regional council for the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem.
"Netanyahu is my prime minister, not the Americans, and we voted for his program, not for Obama," adds Goldstein, who also serves on the Likud’s central committee.
For Elkin, who serves as the majority whip in the government, "construction will resume on September 26 as the government decided by a strong majority."
"In any case, Netanyahu will not survive politically if he is not capable of resisting American pressure," he adds.
