Dugard recalled that the wall between Israel and Palestinian territories - described by Israel as a security measure - had gone ahead despite a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice.

The report to the UN was immediately condemned by the Israeli UN envoy to the UN rights panel, who said the document was pursuing "manifest political ends".

Meanwhile, a report by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said the Israeli army had increased the number of roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank by 25% since last summer.

The number of road obstacles rose to 471 in January, from 376 last August at the time of Israel's Gaza pullout, OCHA said, and they tightened travel restrictions for Palestinians and made it harder for them to reach properties, markets and medical services.

Israel says its network of permanent checkpoints, concrete barriers and temporary mobile roadblocks are needed to protect Israeli towns and Jewish settlements from Palestinian attacks.

At the end of February, international organizations received an e-mail from Lieutenant Colonel Offer Mey-Tal, head of the Civil Administration's foreign relations and international organizations branch, saying that as of March 1, all organizations that have not submitted a list of Palestinian employees for 2006 and a list of authorized employees requesting permits "will not be able to receive permits for their Palestinian staff, no exceptions."

It appears that all the international organizations that assist the Palestinian population - which has suffered particularly in the seam-line area - have rejected the demand. They say that obeying the order would be a sort of recognition that Israel has in effect annexed parts of the West Bank.

The international organizations said they think Israel has backed down from its demand for a list of the employees, but continues to insist that the approximately 1,700 Palestinians employed by the organizations submit requests to enter the seam-line area. The Israel Defense Forces has declared the entire area a closed military zone, meaning that Palestinians are allowed to pass through the gates and roadblocks manned by soldiers only if they have entry permits provided by the Civil Administration. Until the last few weeks, delegations from international organizations - foreigners as well as Palestinians - were permitted to enter the area without permits.

According to the Civil Administration, the international organizations in the territories include 35 governmental organizations and 74 non-governmental organizations (among them about a dozen United Nations groups).

A member of one of the organizations told Haaretz that his group understands the Israeli security establishment to be relating to the seam-line area as Israeli territory: Just as entry into Israel requires authorization for Palestinian workers, so too for entry into the seam-line zone. The organizations - the largest of which is UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East  regularly submit requests for their Palestinian workers to enter Israel (including East Jerusalem) or to travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

"There is a contradiction between the public declarations of their desire to make our humanitarian work easier and help out, and the limitations that hamper our ability to work," said an official from one of the organizations.

The Civil Administration spokesman said its request for updated lists of the organizations' Palestinian workers who regularly receive permits to enter Israel was intended "for the purposes of increasing the efficiency and improving the work we do with the organizations."

The demand for permits is one of several steps that Israeli authorities have taken to curb the freedom of movement of Palestinians who work for international organizations and limit the number of people who can enter East Jerusalem, where most of the organizations' main offices are located.

Israel is also demanding that the international organizations note who on their lists of Palestinians seeking permits to travel from Gaza to the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a "senior" employee and who isn't. The organizations are refusing to make this distinction and said they will continue to submit their requests for permits on the basis of work needs and not on the basis of seniority. The organizations are well aware that the Civil Administration could refuse to issue permits to those not considered "senior."

The security establishment has also asked the organizations to select "essential workers" who live in the West Bank, with the intention that only these workers will be authorized to enter East Jerusalem when the army imposes a total closure on the territories.

In an attempt to isolate any Palestinian government led by the terrorist organization Hamas, pro-Israel activists are backing a bill - the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 - that bans all non-humanitarian American assistance to the Palestinian Authority and prohibits official American contacts with the P.A. unless Hamas recognizes Israel and renounces terrorism. Thousands of lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee flooded Capitol Hill Tuesday, holding almost 500 meetings with legislators and their staff, in which they urged members of Congress to endorse the bill.

But Israeli officials told the Forward that it could be a serious mistake to pass the bill before a Palestinian government has been formed and before the March 28 Israeli elections. They argued that at this point the bill could end up limiting the diplomatic flexibility of the new Israeli government in dealings with the new P.A. regime. In addition, Israeli officials said, the bill may place the onus of providing for the wellbeing of the Palestinian population on Israel, the occupying power in the territories. The bill could also result in the cancellation of several internationally funded aid programs in which Israel has a vital interest, in fields such as public health, water and sewage.

"Israel has not decided what to do yet. An elected government will have to do that," said an Israel official who attended Aipac's annual policy conference this week, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's really too early to make such decisions," the official said. "Israel, the U.S., the international community all need to wait and see what Hamas does and how things play out, and then decide if to engage with the Palestinian government and on what level."

Rather than openly oppose the efforts of their allies in Washington, however, Israeli officials are operating under the assumption that the Bush administration, along with some lawmakers, will work to scale back some of the proposed restrictions.

In the first sign of such softening, the Senate version of the bill, introduced Tuesday by Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell and Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden, makes a distinction between Hamas and the P.A., allowing interaction with non-Hamas members of the Palestinian government. It also makes some of the sanctions on the P.A. discretionary rather than mandatory.

Gidi Greenstein, director of the Israeli think tank Reut and a former adviser to Labor prime minister Ehud Barak, was more outspoken. "We are at a moment of tremendous change," Greenstein told a crowd at the Aipac conference, in response to a question on whether the legislation serves Israel's interests. "Things change from one minute to another, which is why every side needs to maintain maximum flexibility. Of all the tools that a government has, legislation is the most rigid, and there needs to be a way for a government to respond to a constantly changing reality."

The bill, introduced in the House of Representatives last month and in the Senate on Tuesday, sets tougher benchmarks for engaging with a Hamas-led Palestinian government than the ones set by Israel's transitional government.

It calls for the president to certify that a set of conditions are met before federal money can be appropriated to the P.A. Those include institutional changes such as the promotion of peaceful coexistence in Palestinian media and textbooks. Another condition for engaging with a Hamas-led government is that the Palestinian government recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, a demand never posed by Israel or the international community to the Palestine Liberation Organization, Egypt or Jordan when they signed peace agreements with Israel.

The bill is not the only area where Aipac seems to be taking a harder line than Israel on future relations with the Palestinians. At Aipac's conference this week, the organization's director for legislative strategy and policy, Ester Kurz, participated in a panel discussion on the question of whether to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the U.N. body that provides services to Palestinian refugees.

Panel participants, including Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, accused Unrwa of being bloated, corrupt, anachronistic and acquiescing to anti-Israeli violence. Despite such criticisms, Israel opposes dismantling the U.N. agency - a point acknowledged by Kurz during the session. She said that Israel does not want to see the U.N. agency dissolved out of fear that Jerusalem would end up inheriting the responsibility for the welfare of about 1.5 million refugees in the West Bank and Gaza.

Aipac leaders say that no daylight exists between the organization and Israel on the strategy toward the P.A. Asked by the Forward if Aipac was lobbying for an agenda that does not reflect Israel's interests, a former president and board member, Melvin Dow, said: "I don't think there is any incompatibility between the interests of the United States and the interests of Israel.... I think we all share common interests."

Israeli officials said that Israel has coordinated its positions on Hamas and the P.A. with Aipac, but could not say whether Israel had consulted regarding specific provisions of the bill. The measure, according to several congressional staffers who followed its development, was drafted with the active involvement of Aipac's staff. Israeli officials would not say whether they suggested to Aipac that the bill be softened.

Regardless of the bill, most projects funded by the American government in the West Bank and Gaza have already been frozen. According to executives with non-governmental organizations that are contracted by the American government to carry out projects in the West Bank and Gaza, all initiatives that require interaction with representatives of the Palestinian government have been put on hold. The executives said that the United States Agency for International Development is conducting a thorough reassessment of its programs in the territories and wants all potentially problematic ones frozen during the review. Also, in anticipation of the formation of a Hamas-led Palestinian government, the American agency does not want to put NGO workers in a legally problematic position of dealing with members of a terrorist organization and does not want to be seen as assisting or cooperating with one.

Conversations with several officials with American NGOs indicate that the distinction made by the proposed Aipac-backed legislation between humanitarian aid that is permitted and assistance for economic development or infrastructure that is forbidden is not always clear. "NGOs are very much in the dark as to what will and what will not be funded," said Theodore Kattouf, president of America Mideast Educational and Training Services, an organization that is mainly involved in education and training.

America's aid money to the territories is funneled through the USAid, a federal body responsible for the disbursement of most non-military foreign aid worldwide. The agency's budget for the West Bank and Gaza for 2006 is $150 million. More than half of that amount is slated for economic growth projects, which the administration has signaled will be suspended once a Hamas government takes office.

The administration's position and the proposed congressional legislation both allow for humanitarian aid to continue, as long as the assistance does not go through a Hamas-led government. The problem is, according to officials familiar with the delivery of such aid, that almost any aid project requires dealing with Palestinian government officials, on one level or another, and almost any project relies on Palestinian government institutions to deliver the aid. As it turns out, a good deal of the billions in foreign-aid dollars sent to the territories from the international community, including the United States, have been invested in recent years in enhancing these P.A. institutions.

For the most part, USAid contracts charitable and other non-governmental organizations, which typically interact with Palestinian organizations or sub-contractors, and with the Palestinian government. USAid has frozen all projects that involve contact with the P.A., which account for about 80% of all the projects in the territories funded by the agency, according to officials with the NGOs in question.

One example, according to Peter Gubser, president of the American Near East Refugee Aid, is a USAid-funded program to rebuild, train and improve well-baby care clinics in the territories. "We were told [by USAid] to drop the government clinics and move to NGO and Unrwa clinics," Gubser said.

Most clinics in rural Palestinian communities are P.A.-run, which means that the majority of Palestinian newborns and their mothers in more than 500 villages in the West Bank won't have easy access to such clinics.

Another example is a new USAid-funded project to prevent avian flu, which involves cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli scientists. "We have been working on doing some prevention and detection. That is also now on hold," said Liz Sime, West Bank and Gaza director at Care, a charitable organization fighting poverty worldwide that has signed a two-year contract with USAid to deliver services in the territories costing $10 million.

The anti-flu project cannot proceed because it necessitates contacts with Palestinian health ministry officials, Sime said in a phone interview from her office in East Jerusalem. "You can't do proper surveillance without working through an official national body," Sime said, adding that Israeli public health officials "have communicated their concern" to Care over the freezing of this project.

Representatives of NGOs that contract with USAid have recently met at least twice with senior State Department officials to discuss ways to continue their projects, the Forward has learned. In both meetings, NGO representatives told administration officials that almost any type of assistance project to the Palestinian population - whether humanitarian or not - involves interacting on some level with Palestinian government officials.

Sources familiar with the meetings said that while the administration promised that the American government would not go after NGO staffers who deal with P.A. officials affiliated with Hamas in the course of delivering humanitarian aid, administration officials pointed out that "third parties" might try to take legal action against them.

NGO representatives will ask the administration, the Forward has learned, to issue a legal opinion making a distinction between P.A. politicians affiliated with Hamas and P.A. workers, or "civil servants," with whom working-level contacts could be permissible. But legal advisers have warned NGO executives that this approach could not be legally sustained if the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 is passed.

Aipac spokesmen say that passing the legislation sooner rather than later is important in order to send a strong message to Hamas and to the international community. They also argue that it is important to set clear markers for America's policy before the resolve in Washington to isolate Hamas erodes. Larry Garber, the former USAid mission director in the West Bank and Gaza and current executive director of the New Israel Fund, said that Aipac's push for the legislation could in practice preempt not only the administration but the Israeli government as well.

"It's not smart to push in an unequivocal way yet," he said. "It really would be useful to ask Aipac: 'Do you really want people to be going up to the Hill [urging members of Congress] to support that legislation when the administration has not yet come up with a policy and the Israelis have not come up with a policy yet?'"

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its Policy Conference in Washington this week. There were long speeches and discussions about the problems of the day (nuclear proliferation, Iran, and the rise of Hamas), as well as about the "strong alliance" between Israel and the US.

As in the past, this strength was seen in the impressive presence of senior administration official and Congresspersons, including Vice President Richard Cheney, who praised Israel's contribution to US security interests, and promised reciprocation in the form of constant support.

However, mingling in the crowded hallways of the Washington convention center that hosted the event gave one the impression that the threat of a mushroom cloud in Middle Eastern skies in the coming years bothered the thousands of participants far less than the clear and present danger to AIPAC: the pending trial of two senior officials, Steven J. Rosen, who was responsible for foreign affairs and was a strong figure in the lobby, and Keith Weissman, a former Middle East analyst.

Rosen and Weissman are suspected of "receiving classified information" without being authorized to do so, and passing it onto Israeli and other diplomats, as well as other crimes. They are not actually being charged with espionage, but these are still crimes could put them into federal prison for many years.

In an act of self-preservation, AIPAC fired the two men last year, shortly after they were exposed as supporting actors in a bureaucratic drama about the leak of information in the Bush administration, known as the "Pentagon mole affair". The mole was Defense Department Iran analyst Lawrence Franklin, who leaked to Rosen and Weissman juicy details from a presidential document about Iran and the threat that Iranian agents might kill Israelis in northern Iraq.

AIPAC feared that Rosen and Weissman would refuse to fall on their swords for the sake of the lobby, even though AIPAC offered them generous six-figure sums to finance their defense. The road the two men are expected to take is the one paved by Franklin. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but his sentence was slashed in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution.

If Rosen and Weissman decide to buy their freedom with confidential information about goings-on at AIPAC - and Washington sources believe that they will do so - AIPAC as we know it is liable to disappear, and this could have a decisive effect on US-Israeli relations.

However, beyond AIPAC's real distress, the affair reveals another worrying problem in US-Israeli relations. What exactly led to the capture of Rosen and Weissman? Is AIPIC under surveillance? Not necessarily. Former and current intelligence officials told "The New York Times" says, "The two men may have stumbled into an American intelligence operation involving electronic monitoring of Israeli interests in the US". The working assumption in Washington is that all embassies in the capital are exposed to surveillance, but it is not clear whether the surveillance of "Israeli interests" was limited to the embassy.

Some say that the entire affair is another sign that beneath the tight US-Israeli ties bubbles a constant US fear about Israeli espionage. Former AIPAC director of legislative affairs Douglas Bloomfield says this fear existed even before the Jonathan Pollard affair, but Pollard's arrest in 1985 almost certainly drove US defense establishment figures to view Israel not only as an ally, but also as an adversary.

Flare-ups between Israel and the US over Washington's allegations that Israel sold weapons and technology, some including US inputs, to China merely fanned the coals of hostility of these officials.

You don't have to be excessively paranoid to see a link between the way Israel is perceived in some corners in Washington and the bureaucratic obstacles placed in the way of the acquisition of Sourcefire by Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) last week. One of the Maryland-based IT security company's products, Snort, is part of the intrusion prevention and detection technology systems used by the US Department of Defense and other entities in the US.

Ostensibly, the obstacles are anchored in national interest security considerations: a (rare) 45-day investigation into the security aspects of the transfer of control of sensitive technology to foreign hands. But when one examines the obstacle in light of well-publicized accusations spread by anonymous government sources against a few Israeli technology companies a few years ago, fear arises that Check Point ought to prepare not only to allay the regulator's legitimate concerns, but also to deal with in-built hostility on the part of certain administration officials towards Israel, especially towards a particular sector of Israeli technology companies.

In May 2000, reports began appearing in the US media linking Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) to the wiretapping of government communications. "Insight", a magazine of the right-wing "Washington Times" group, cited "scores" of sources, including intelligence sources, who claimed that the FBI was convinced that Amdocs, a contractor for upgrading the White House's telephony system, had listed to conversations in the president's residence.

The reports was echoed widely, until "The New York Times" quoted two FBI sources as saying that Amdocs was clear of all suspicion. Nonetheless, the conclusion about Amdocs's innocence only came after a year-long investigation. There were enough FBI officials to whom the allegations against the Israeli technology company seems likely enough to warrant such a lengthy investigation.

In December 2001, two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, reports reemerged, again citing "federal sources", about the involvement of Israeli technology companies in US espionage activities. In a series of shows, "Fox News" correspondent Carl Cameron claimed that, in the late 1990s, the FBI and other agencies had investigated Amdocs "more than once". In 1999, the US National Security Agency (NSA) warned that electronic records telephone calls in the US had reached Israeli hands, according to Cameron.

In another report, Cameron said Comverse Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: CMVT) subsidiary Comverse Infosys, a provider of surveillance equipment to US law enforcement agencies, was itself conducting secret wiretapping through a back door in the equipment it installed.

This was not a marginal report or a loony medium. Fox is the leading television news channel, with twice as many viewers as CNN. Nor is Cameron small fry. He is now "Fox News" chief White House correspondent. Nor is "Fox News" hostile towards Israel; on the contrary, it is considered the most pro-Israel television news channel in the US. This may explain why it erased Cameron's reports from its website a few days after they were broadcast. The reports can now only be found in electronic archives.

The reports disquieted Israeli diplomats at the time. They believed that there was a hard core of officials at the Defense Department, FBI, and other agencies, who bore bitter resentment of what they saw as Israeli intelligence operations in the US, rightly or wrongly. This assessment has not changed, and the same figures are probably involved.

As for Israel's Embassy in Washington, embassy spokesman David Segal said on Friday, "We have no comment on the matter."

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on March 9, 2006

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2006

But he said he would give Hamas time to reform, disarm and embrace past interim peace agreements before pursuing a unilateral solution.

Hamas, which won elections in January, is in the process of forming the next Palestinian administration.

"Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Palestinian territories is a declaration of war against the Palestinian people," Mr Meshaal told AFP.

He said the plan would "permit Israel to stay in the largest section of the West Bank, to maintain their wall and settlements, to refuse all concessions on Jerusalem and to reject the Palestinians' right of return".

Mr Meshaal said that Mr Olmert was "in the process of committing the same errors toward the Palestinians that [Israeli PM Ariel] Sharon did".

Mr Olmert, whose ruling centrist Kadima party is leading in the polls ahead of the 28 March election, outlined his disengagement plan in an interview with the Jerusalem Post newspaper on Thursday.

He said that as part of such moves, Israel would build more Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land between Jerusalem and its largest settlement, Maaleh Adumim.

Palestinians say the Maaleh Adumim plans would cut East Jerusalem off from the West Bank and wreck their aim of establishing a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

Deadline

Correspondents say the four-year deadline is the first timescale set by an Israeli leader for what is expected to be a large-scale pullback from parts of the West Bank.

Mr Olmert took over the Israeli government after Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke in January and he has promised to carry on Mr Sharon's work.

Mr Sharon pulled Israeli settlers and troops out of the occupied Gaza Strip in 2005 as part of a unilateral plan that circumvented stalled negotiations with the Palestinians.

The US has said borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories should be determined through negotiations with the Palestinians and has warned Israel not to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.

The international community considers all settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

Israel says the West Bank barrier is designed to stop suicide bombers from entering, but Palestinians see it as an attempt to grab West bank territory.

The International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling in 2004 that the barrier breached international law where it is built on occupied territory and should be dismantled.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways.

If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements."

JERUSALEM

With Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: The settlement enterprise has lost the support of Israel's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front- runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements.

These promises reflect a change not only in Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with the settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire - in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: The warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War.

An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Meron wrote unequivocally: "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Meron explained that the convention, to which Israel was a signatory, forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,'" he wrote.

Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: The international community would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: If the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity, in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: You cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary.

A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established, through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts.

By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

Meron left Israel's foreign service a decade later to teach at New York University. A child survivor of the Holocaust, he became one of the world's leading experts on the laws of war - and, more recently, a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, it did not take long before explicitly civilian settlements were established in land occupied in 1967. Israel's diplomats and supporters reverted to the argument Meron discounted - that the Geneva rules on occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.
Yet the contradiction between keeping Palestinians under military occupation while settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens has become glaring, even to the Israeli center-right.

Today it is clear that Israel's future as a Jewish state depends on ending its rule of the West Bank. Settlements have shackled Israel rather than served it. Thirty-eight years after the missed warning, we must find a way to untie the entanglement.

In one of the documents Foreign Office official Donald Cape concluded: "On the whole I would prefer not to mention this to the Americans."

When questioned about his involvement by the BBC, Cape said he could remember nothing about the episode. Washington had previously refused Israeli requests to purchase heavy water without a guarantee it would be used for exclusively peaceful purposes.

The heavy water was surplus from a consignment bought by Britain from Norway. Though shipped to Israel from a British port, it was presented as a deal between Israel and Norway.

Robert McNamara, U.S. secretary of defense from 1961, said he was "astonished" by the cover-up.

"It is very surprising to me we were not told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British.," he told the BBC.

Former Conservative defense and foreign office minister Lord Gilmour said the revelations were "quite extraordinary." The civil servants involved must have known Israel intended to use the heavy water to develop a nuclear bomb, he added. They seemed to have no idea of the political or foreign policy implications of what they were doing, he said.

"They just seemed to be concerned with making a bit of money."

Experimentation with heavy water -- as opposed to light water -- is considered to be a sign of a military rather than a civilian nuclear program.

In February, a senior Foreign Office official said, in reference to Iran, that there was no reason for a country to engage in heavy water research unless it was aiming for a nuclear weapons program. Heavy water reactors produce byproducts which are used in military programs, he added.

Heavy water production reactors can be designed to turn uranium into bomb-usable plutonium without requiring enrichment facilities. Due to its potential for use in nuclear weapons programs, heavy water is subject to government control in several countries and safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

By the time Israel requested more heavy water in 1961, the existence of the Dimona reactor had been exposed by the media, as had Israel's probable weapons program.

With the issue fixed in public attention, the British Foreign Office refused a further sale, the documents reveal.

Sir Hugh Stephenson of the Foreign Office wrote: "I am quite sure we should not agree to this sale. The Israeli project is much too live an issue for us to get mixed up in it again."

Israel has never admitted nor denied having nuclear weapons, and has not publicly conducted any nuclear tests.

However it refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, saying it will not do so as long as it feels threatened by other Middle Eastern countries such as Iran. The IAEA is therefore unable to inspect Israeli nuclear facilities or impose sanctions.

But few international experts question Israel's nuclear capabilities; the Jewish state is widely estimated to have as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In comparison, India and Pakistan are thought to have around 20 warheads each. Israel's nuclear program is arguably one of the most secretive in the world, a fact that contributes in no small way to its value as a deterrent.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said in the late 1980s: "A certain amount of secrecy must be maintained in some fields. The suspicion and fog surrounding this question are constructive, because they strengthen our deterrent."

Israel began showing an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons shortly after its creation in 1948, as the ultimate deterrent after the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1952 it formed the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, which began working closely with the Israeli military.

Construction of the Dimona facility began in the late 1950s as the result of a secret agreement with France, which provided assistance with reactor design and construction, according to Washington based website GlobalSecurity.org.

It was in 1958, the year that Britain's secret deal took place, that flights by U.S. U-2 spy planes confirmed Demon's construction.

U.S. inspectors visited Dimona several times during the 1960s, but while they reported that there was no scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large reactor, they found no evidence of weapons-related activities.

However in 1968, a CIA report concluded Israel had begun to produce nuclear weapons. But it was not until 1986 that the international community was afforded a glimpse of the true extent of the Israeli program.

Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked as a technician at Dimona, gave the Times of London detailed information about Israel's nuclear program, on the basis of which analysts concluded Israel had up to 200 warheads. However before he could reveal more, he became the victim of a "honey trap" operation by Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and was imprisoned for 18 years as a traitor.

Israel's nuclear program is a source of much anger in the Arab world. The West's tolerance of its existence, contrasted with the denunciation of other suspected nuclear states such as Iran, Syria and pre-war Iraq as a threat to global security, is frequently held up as an example of double standards.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, told Israel's Haaretz newspaper in 2003 its nuclear program was "a continued incentive for the region's countries to develop weapons of mass destruction to match the Israeli arsenal."

Israel asked Britain in 1966 to supply 10mg of plutonium. Israel would have required almost 5kg of plutonium to build an atomic bomb, but British defence intelligence officials warned that 10mg had "significant military value" and could enable the Jewish state to carry out important experimental work to speed up its nuclear weapons programme.
Documents show that the decision to sell plutonium to Israel in 1966 was blocked by officials in both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, who said: "It is HMG's policy not to do anything which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear weapons." But the deal was forced through by a Jewish civil servant, Michael Michaels, in Tony Benn's Ministry of Technology, which was responsible for trade in nuclear material, according to Newsnight.

Peter Kelly, who was British defence intelligence's expert on the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, knew Mr Michaels. He told Newsnight he believed Mr Michaels knew that Israel was trying to build an atomic bomb, but that he had dual loyalties to Britain and Israel.

Mr Benn told the programme that civil servants in his department kept the deals secret from him and his predecessor, Frank Cousins.

He had always suspected that civil servants were doing deals behind his back, but he never thought they would sell plutonium to Israel. He told Newsnight: "I'm not only surprised, I'm shocked. It never occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against the policy of the government.

"Michaels lied to me, I learned by bitter experience that the nuclear industry lied to me again and again." He thought Wilson may not have known that Britain was helping Israel to get the bomb.

Last year Newsnight showed that in the late 1950s Harold Macmillan's Conservative government provided Israel with 20 tonnes of heavy water to start up its Dimona reactor. Newsnight said it learned that Jack Straw had admitted to the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, that Britain knew the heavy water was destined for Israel, and that in 1961, Macmillan even made a failed attempt to get it back.