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CNN Live At Daybreak

If Mideast Struggle Could be Summed Up in One Word: Homeland

Aired March 05, 2002 - 05:32   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: If the Middle East struggle could be boiled down to one word, it could be homeland.

CNN's Ben Wedeman visited one Jewish settlement in the West Bank to see why its residents have chosen to live there.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Loshinsky family spends an evening piecing together a puzzle in their comfortable, spacious five-bedroom home in the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Despite the location, they say they feel safer here than in Israel Proper.

SHACHAR LOSHINSKY, SETTLER: If you look statistically in terms of the amount of suicide attacks that happened in downtown Jerusalem, which is our capital, vs. in Ma'ale Adumim -- I mean, thank God, Ma'ale Adumim has been quiet.

SHLOMO LOSHINSKY, SETTLER: Or Tel Aviv or Brakhadera (ph) or in Ashkelon -- anywhere in Israel.

SHACHAR LOSHINSKY: Palestinians are not differentiating. Palestinians are not differentiating. They are not saying, you know, we are only going to target those places that we have our eye on, because unfortunately, I think they have their eye on my stake (ph).

WEDEMAN: Most of the people here see themselves as ordinary Israelis, enjoying a suburban lifestyle, hard to come by in Israel's crowded, expensive cities. Modern creature comforts, combined with a quiet confident conviction, that this land is theirs.

(on camera): This community of more than 25,000 is the biggest Israeli settlement on the West Bank, and despite the 18-month-old Palestinian uprising, there is no sign here that anyone is about to leave.

(voice-over): Construction of new houses continues unabated, built, like almost all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, by Palestinians who work where they can find it.

Jaffa (ph) has been building houses here for five years, earning around $20 a day. The only thing he shares with the people whose homes he builds is a profound skepticism of attempts to resolve the conflict.

"Empty talk," he says. "From the time they made the Oslo Agreement, there have been 100,000 initiatives. But what have they done? Every day there are more settlements."

In other settlements deep inside the West Bank, more ideologically-driven Israelis put their safety and the safety of their children on the line to back up their claim that this is their land. Pain (ph) scants heed to those who say the settlements are a violation of international law.

YISRAEL HAREL, SETTLER LEADER: Who will tell me (UNINTELLIGIBLE)? The Europeans that slaughtered Jews for more than 1,500 years? Who is going to (UNINTELLIGIBLE)? Or America what they have done to the Indians? Or what they do today in Afghanistan freely, because they are a world power and nobody controls them and nobody says something? So I would like the world to (UNINTELLIGIBLE) to be concerned about the morality of the Jews and of Israel is it wants to live -- the Jews want to live in their homeland, and they will.

WEDEMAN: In Ma'ale Adumim, Israeli schoolchildren prepare for a presentation about their ties to the land they live on, perceived ties that are increasingly being put to the test.

Ben Wedeman, CNN, Ma'ale Adumim on the West Bank.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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