Voices from front line

THE rolling hills inland from Israel's busy coastal strip are dotted with towns and villages nestled under towers rising above the olive groves.

Looking closely, though, one sees that some towers are the minarets of mosques, while others are concrete lookout posts for Israeli troops guarding Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

These are uneasy neighbours and the future of the settlers, who have built on land occupied by Israel in 1967, is among the "core issues" Palestinians and Israelis must resolve if they are to make peace in negotiations to be launched at next week's US-hosted Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

Few around the settlement of Ariel see much chance of that - Israeli residents are determined to stay and build, whatever their government decides, but Palestinians insist that the settlers must go.

"My vision is ... to build here a city of 60,000 people," says Ron Nachman, mayor of Ariel, today home to about 18,000.

"As long as I live and I have the power and the strength, I'll do everything in order to fulfil this vision," Mr Nachman adds, in his office in the neat, hilltop industrial town, 25 miles east of Tel Aviv's beaches. "I want to live in peace with my neighbours."

A few hundred yards down the hill, that vision is not shared by Sadeq al-Khuffash, the mayor of Marda: "I don't dream of us living together. These are settlements built illegally. They should be removed. You can't expect me to live with the people who took our land by force."

The World Court says the settlements, home to about 270,000 Jews among 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, are illegal.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, reiterated a pledge to curb expansion this week and wants to abandon outposts while arranging land swaps to make Ariel and other places part of Israel.

In Marda, home to 2,400 people, murals lauding Basque guerrillas painted by visiting activists from Spain brighten the dusty main street. Residents say Ariel and a string of smaller settlements cramp their life with security restrictions and by curbing access to water.

Mr Nachman brands as "a big lie" the charge that Ariel pumps up water from an underground supply and deposits its sewage on Palestinian land. "Untrue," says Mr Khuffash when told of Mr Nachman's assertion that Israel offers water to the Arabs on good terms.

Water is an increasingly scarce resource in the Middle East and is, in itself, a core issue for any future peace accord.

Mr Khuffash also complains his two-mile trip to the town hall from the insurance office he runs takes half an hour by car because of Israeli roadblocks. Locals in Marda say olives are rotting on the trees because Israeli troops prevent them harvesting groves close to Ariel.

Mr Nachman rejects charges the town he helped found in 1978 took any private land - "there was nothing, only boulders".

Pointing to daily attacks from the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew in 2005, Mr Nachman believes Israel cannot be secure next to an independent Palestine. Giving up land in return for peace does not work, he insists.

Mr Olmert's readiness to end settlement under pressure from the US president, George Bush, and Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy, angers him: "The government asked me to come. So to say I'm an obstacle to peace, it's not only stupidity, it's evil."

Asked about an incident this week in which gunmen killed a settler nearby, Mr Khuffash says: "This is our home and resistance is a legal right. If there is no respect for agreements and international law, things will go on like this, with violence."

But neither violence nor an Israeli government withdrawal persuade Mr Nachman that Ariel's future is in doubt: "What I have done here is a fact," he says. "When Tony Blair has passed away, and President Bush, and I, this will remain."