Threatening to repeat the relentless campaign of protest and civil disobedience they mounted against the mid-1990s government of the late Yitzhak Rabin, Jewish settlement leaders in the West Bank yesterday vowed to resist efforts by the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, to dismantle 15 illegally established settlement outposts. Mr Barak had hoped that the settlers would agree to evacuate quietly the hilltop mini-settlements - 15 of 42 that were hurriedly set up in the dying days of the Netanyahu government earlier this year. But after a series of meetings with him and with his advisers, the settlement leaders decided to dig in their heels. Apparently startled by the vehemence of their reaction, Mr Barak was holding further talks last night in the hope of finding a compromise.
The government's effort to evacuate the new outposts, fumed Mr Elyakim Haetzni, a member of the settlers' umbrella group, the Council of Jewish Communities, "is a prelude to the main act" - the evacuation of long-established West Bank settlements as part of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. "There will be evacuation, deportation, uprooting, ethnic cleansing," he said.
The evacuations had to be resisted, he went on, if the Jewish people were to have a future in the Middle East.
At the outposts themselves - small clusters of mobile homes, most of them perched on hills in relatively sparsely populated West Bank areas - some settlers vowed to resist any move by Mr Barak to send in troops to evacuate them. "If they force us out, we'll come back," warmed one settler, Mr Shimon Ricklin. "There will be painful scenes here."
Mr Barak is clearly anxious to avoid those kinds of scenes, and stressed last night that the "settlement enterprise is very important, very close to my heart". But some outposts had been established illegally, he noted, and the government had to uphold the law.
Using rather blunter language, Israel's Justice Minister, Mr Yossi Beilin, warmed the settlers "not to return us to the dark days [of antigovernment protest]. . . that led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin." Mr Rabin was murdered four years ago by a hardline, Orthodox Israeli who opposed the peace process that Mr Barak is now reviving.
The Palestinians have demanded the removal of all 42 outposts, and eventually want all settlements dismantled under the permanent peace deal. Mr Barak is trying to steer a middle course - to keep peace hopes high, preserve a potentially unstable coalition, and avoid an ugly dispute with the settlers.
In talks with the Palestinians yesterday, meanwhile, his negotiators reached agreement on the release tomorrow of 150 more Palestinian security prisoners.