Uneasy neighbours in occupied West Bank

ARIEL/MARDA, West Bank, Nov 23, (Reuters)

The rolling hills inland from Israel's busy coastal strip are dotted with towns and villages nestled under towers rising above the olive groves. Look closely, though, and one sees differences. Some towers are the minarets of mosques, 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 ever to make peace in negotiations to be launched at next week's U.S.-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, and Palestinians insist the settlers must go in order for them to establish a functioning state. "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 fulfill this vision," Nachman added, sitting in his office in the neat, hilltop industrial town, 40 km (25 miles) east of Tel Aviv's beaches.

"I want to live in peace with my neighbours." A few hundred metres (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 on our lands. They should be removed ... You can't expect me to live with the people who took our land by force."

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

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 others part of Israel. For the 2,400 people of Marda, where murals lauding Basque guerrillas painted by visiting activists from Spain brighten the dusty main street, Ariel and a string of smaller settlements cramp their daily life by imposing security restrictions on their movement and, Palestinians say, curbing access to water. Nachman brands as "a big lie" the charge that Ariel pumps up water from a major underground supply and deposits its sewage on Palestinian land. "Untrue," says Khuffash when told of Nachman's assertion that Israel offers water to the Arabs on good terms.

Hard to reconcile, the two man have, they say, never met.

Water is an increasingly scarce resource in the Middle East and is, in itself, a core issue for any future peace accord. Khuffash also complains his 3-km (2-mile)trip to the town hall from the insurance office he runs takes him half an hour by car because Israeli roablocks create a 20-km diversion. Locals in Marda say olives are rotting on the trees this month because Israeli troops keep them from harvesting groves close to Ariel.