Israel’s Ambitious Plans for West Bank Settlement Revealed : Housing: Ministry’s construction blueprint envisions a tripling of Jewish population in the occupied territory.

JERUSALEM — Israel’s Housing Ministry has laid out a long-term plan for West Bank construction that would make it possible to at least triple the Israeli population in the occupied territory.

While it is unclear just how the giant building program would be financed, the work is planned to occur at a time when Israel wants U.S. loan guarantees, ostensibly to reduce its cost to borrow money to provide jobs and shelter for Soviet immigrants.

The blueprint was laid out in ministry documents released by members of the Israeli Parliament this week. The plans are tentative, but they give a powerful indication of the ambitious thrust of Israel’s settlement drive.

The plan calls for construction of more than 80,000 housing units over the next few years, many of them in large settlements set to quadruple in population.

In conservative estimates, the number of planned units could shelter 250,000 settlers. More than 100,000 Israelis reside in the West Bank.

The Housing Ministry, under the direction of a former army general, Ariel Sharon, has picked up the pace of construction with the goal of making it impossible for Israel to give up the land to the Palestinians after the self-rule period as part of an overall Middle East peace solution.

“The Housing Ministry builds in all parts of the Land of Israel in line with decisions made by the government and the priorities set by the government,” said a ministry statement in response to the release of the documents. Land of Israel denotes the terrain covered by Israel proper, plus the West Bank and Gaza Strip, won by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War, but which it has not officially annexed.

The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has often played down reports of Sharon’s building plans, saying they are fantasies that lack Cabinet approval. Yet in the 18 months that Sharon has headed the Housing Ministry, he has succeeded in building more than 18,000 houses in the West Bank and Gaza, the same documents show.

Opposition politicians charge that the figure amounts to a quarter of all the public housing undertaken by the government. The total cost amounts to about $1.5 billion at a time when Israel asked for and won guarantees from the United States for immigrant housing loans totaling $400 million.

“This information indicates the priorities of this government,” said Dedi Zucker, a liberal opposition member of Parliament and persistent critic of the settlement program.

Another 5,000 mobile homes, meant largely for new immigrants, have been set up in settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza, although relatively few of the newcomers have moved to the military-ruled areas. Israelis seeking cheaper housing have been the main targets for Sharon’s building boom; the government offers subsidized mortgages to settlers who buy in the disputed land.

Shamir is preparing to ask the Bush Administration for fresh guarantees to enable it to borrow $10 billion over the next five years at low rates. The money is meant to provide jobs and housing for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. In the 1992 budget, money was set aside to build 5,000 houses in the West Bank and Gaza, two-thirds of new housing funded for the year.

Administration and congressional irritation with the settlement program has made it tough for Israel to extract the loans, and the Administration is warning that stiff conditions will be placed on any new guarantees. One proposal floating in Washington suggests subtracting the sum that Israel spends yearly on settlements from the amount of loans covered by guarantees.

That proposal appears to present accounting problems. Even in Israel, no one seems to be exactly sure how much is spent on settlements. The Defense, Transport, Agriculture, Energy and Housing ministries all contribute money to land preparation and construction.

Also, Sharon was able to build housing at the rate of more than 10,000 units a year when Israel was absorbing more than 300,000 immigrants and with the Americans providing loan guarantees for only $400 million. Even a penalty of $1 billion would still leave Israel with access to more international funds than it has been able to obtain in the past 18 months.

In a speech Monday, Sharon blasted American proposals to tie any part of the guarantees to the pace of his settlement program, saying, “We must not accept an approach which makes receipt of the loan guarantees conditional.” He accused President Bush of holding Jews from the former Soviet Union “hostage” to the issue.

Sharon was already looking forward to some future U.S. administration that might be more friendly to his plans. “Presidents go after three or four years,” he said, apparently not sure of the normal length of American presidential terms. “But the Jews must survive. . . .”

The question of how to deal with the settlement program reveals the vast difference in importance attached to the issue by the Shamir and Bush administrations.

Expansion of settlements was a key platform of the right-wing government established by Shamir in 1990.

His Likud Party, as well as allied parties to the right, are ideologically wedded to expansion of Israel into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They believe that Britain, during its rule here after World War I, robbed Israel of the land by insisting that the Zionists and Palestinians had rights west of the Jordan River. The land east of the river was granted to the Hashemite royal family, Arab allies of the British.

Likud insists that the resulting state, Jordan, is the authentic Palestinian homeland and that Palestinians should move there, or, if they insist on staying, they should look to Jordan for political leadership while ceding to Israel control of land in the West Bank and Gaza. In effect, the Palestinians would remain as foreign guests.

Such an arrangement would relieve Israel of the need to grant Palestinians citizenship, which would dilute Israel’s Jewish majority.

The Bush Administration has a far less clear policy toward settlements. It has declared construction an “obstacle to peace,” a formulation that relieves the Administration of dealing with the legality of settling militarily occupied land; some experts contend that is a breach of international law.