The Civil Administration issued the declaration after rejecting eight appeals by Palestinians against the move. A ninth appeal was accepted, and the land covered by this appeal was consequently removed from Efrat's jurisdiction.

However, construction is still a long way off. First, the Civil Administration must formally allocate the land to the Housing Ministry, which, under new rules adopted by Ehud Olmert's government, cannot be done without approval from both the prime minister and defense minister.

Then the Housing Ministry must give Efrat's local council a permit to start the usually long planning process, which involves securing permits from various agencies. Only then can the work of building some 2,500 housing units in the Givat Ha'eytam neighborhood begin.

Since the outcome of the elections makes it likely that the next government will lean more to the right than the current one, Efrat plans to wait until the new government takes office before submitting its request.

Efrat, with around 9,000 residents, is the largest settlement in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, and Givat Ha'eytam is the last unbuilt hill of the seven within the town's jurisdiction. Despite being the hill nearest Jerusalem, Ha'eytam lies outside the planned route of the separation fence, which has yet to be built in this area.

Gush Etzion is one of the settlement blocs that all Israeli governments have said they want to retain under any final-status agreement with the Palestinians.

"The state of Israel has become the enemy of the people and the land of Israel," settler rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe said Tuesday during an emergency meeting on the state's plan to evacuate a house in Hebron whose ownership has been at the center of a bitter dispute for over a year.

The four-story building became a flash point for tensions when settlers moved in early last year after claiming to have purchased it from a Palestinian. But the Palestinian denies the claim and Israeli authorities have not recognized the sale as legal.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday said the settlers will be evacuated from the building, but that defense officials will sit down with them first to try to persuade them to leave voluntarily.

The Supreme Court has given the settlers until noon Wednesday to leave the house. They say they aren't budging. The court says if the settlers do not leave willingly they will be evicted within 30 days.

The court ruled that the settlers must turn the house over to the state until a different court decides who the legal owner is.

"Anyone who tries to raise a hand at the peace house in Hebron will long for Amona, and will find that Amona was nothing," MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union- National Religious Party said, referring to the violent riots during the 2005 disengagement when Israeli authorities evacuated the Gush Katif settlement of Amona.

Some 1,000 Kiryat Arba residents attended the emergency meeting Tuesday, held at a local youth center, after the High Court on Sunday gave settlers three days to voluntarily vacate the house or force will be used to evacuate them.

Immediately following the meeting, participants accompanied four new families into what has been called by some the "house of contention."

Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, the head of the Nir yeshiva in Kiryat Arba, responded to rabbi Wolpe's remarks, saying "the state of Israel is not the enemy of the people of Israel. She belongs to us, to every last Jew. Stop this nonsense. We are fighting against those who want to enforce lies and perversions of justice, those who have disconnected themselves from Judaism and Zionism and the land of Israel, against those who have ceased to believe in the natural justice that Israel belongs to the Jewish people."

During the meeting, several attendants spoke out against the High Court. Orit Strock, one of the leaders of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, compared the High Court ruling to the laws of Sodom, saying "they bent everything that was bendable and completely ignored the fact that the seller of the house faces death threats, as if it is a given."

MK Uri Ariel (National Union-National Religious Party) said that the court's ruling was political and biased, saying "we will be there, I will be there with my fellow MKs. We will protect this house the way any man protects his home. There is no need for violence, but if anyone hits us, we will protect ourselves."

The Israel Defense Forces were gearing up to forcibly evacuate the house on Tuesday, presuming its residents continue ignoring a court order to vacate the premises. The deadline expires at noon Wednesday.

The "shelf agreement" that the Israeli government has proposed to the Palestinian Authority, whose details were released Sunday, would leave within Israel some 220,000 settlers living in 48 settlements in settlements blocs. This area, west of the separation fence, more-or-less overlaps the seven percent of land in Judea and Samaria that Israel will annex according to the "shelf agreement."

Another approximately 70,000 settlers in 74 settlements east of the fence will have to leave their homes, according to the agreement. Most of these settlements are hard-core ideological communities where opposition to evacuation is likely to be strong and perhaps even violent.

A 20-year resident of the northern West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and father of 10, Yigal Amitai, says he and his friends "don't need to be loved, and therefore the evacuation of Yitzhar will look like the evacuation of Umm al-Fahm [would]. "Remember, for example, Land Day," he said, referring to the sometimes violent protests in that large Arab city in central Israel.

Regarding evacuation, Amitai says: "When a prime minister is involved with only a few percentage points of support, I am not worried."

Moshe Maiersdorf of Tapuah in the northern West Bank, a settlement previously identified with the extremist Kach movement, says his settlement has a varied population and there will be "no single pattern" of response to evacuation.

"I will personally fight for my home as any normal person would. There will certainly not be any hugs around here."

Emily Amrusi, a mother of two living in Talmon near Ramallah, says the separation fence "humiliates" her, adding: "The decision-makers have placed me beyond the fence, not only geographically, but psychologically. She says that of Talmon's 200 residents, about half have come to terms with the fence but others are less compromising.

She concedes she is torn but "certainly does not" lean toward violence. She also says that she believes even the less compromising "will not lift a hand against a soldier."

Demography Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a member of research teams that prepared the Jerusalem Master Plan commissioned by the Cabinet and the Strategic Master Plan commissioned by the Jerusalem Municipality, believes that it would be wise to "relinquish parts of the city's territory in which mainly Palestinian residents live." DellaPergola wrote this in an article slated to appear in the coming months in a book to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the city's reunification, published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. In the article, he stresses that his statements are based on demographic considerations and the forecast of an additional decrease in the Jewish majority by 2020.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jewish share of the capital's population dropped from 73.5 percent to 66 percent. The current forecast predicts that, in another 14 years, Jerusalem's Jewish majority will dwindle to 60 percent. DellaPergola's advice is to expand the city to include unsettled and settled areas to the West, so that the exodus from the capital's center will remain within city limits. Until now, those who endorsed plans to remove Arab neighborhoods and Palestinian residents from the city limits were mainly leftist politicians and policymakers, who considered this to be a solution to demographic and political problems. The most conspicuous such plan was proposed by Ehud Barak's cabinet at Camp David in 2000. Barak agreed to a sweeping plan: Division of Jerusalem, as outlined by Clinton, such that every area in which Jews live would remain in Israel, and nearly every area in which Palestinians live would be transferred to the Palestinian Authority. Barak was also prepared to divide the Old City and sovereignty over the Temple Mount, but Yasser Arafat rejected the proposal.

Another State

DellaPergola, considered a leading demographic authority, told Haaretz yesterday that he supports relinquishing most of the Arab population, including those who reside in Jerusalem's northern neighborhoods, Beit Hanina and Shoafat. However, he believes that Israel should strive to achieve a solution based on a Vatican model in the Old City and the Holy Basin. "In that area," DellaPergola suggests, "another state will be established that is neither Israel nor Palestine, like the Vatican in Italy." The municipality, which employed DellaPergola in the past, and Israel's current government do not support the division of Jerusalem for demographic or other reasons. In practice, a few Arab, North Jerusalem neighborhoods in which tens of thousands of Palestinians live were already placed beyond the "Jerusalem Envelope" section of the separation fence. Right-wing parties also vehemently oppose division and demand that measures be taken to minimize Jewish emigration from Jerusalem and to attract Jews to the city. In contrast with DellaPergola's position, an American-Israeli research team led by Bennett Zimmerman, Dr. Roberta Seid, Michael Wise and Yoram Ettinger proposed that Israeli policymakers alter their approach to Jerusalem demographics by annexing areas to the east rather than the west of the city, despite the fact that this would mean annexing a Palestinian population. The team maintains that, "Avoiding expanding the city's territory, due to demographic concerns, will increase the housing and employment burden and accelerate negative migration out of Jerusalem."

Need for Annexation of the Periphery

That team re-examines research conducted by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, indicating that the problem is negative migration of Jews from Jerusalem, a result mainly of a lack of housing and employment. The team maintains that these problems derive from the lack of space for traffic infrastructure essential to upgrade housing and employment conditions. An appropriate addition of land requires the city's territory to be doubled, according to the research team. The researchers note that annexing areas in the direction of Ma'aleh Adumim, Givat Ze'ev, and Gush Etzion would increase the Arab population in Jerusalem by about 100,000 residents, but the Jewish population would grow by tens of thousands of residents, due to annexation of Jewish populations on the city's periphery. Annexing territory to increase the size of the capital would increase the number of Arab residents in the initial phase, but it would significantly decrease Jewish emigration from Jerusalem. In the next phase, the city would become attractive to Jews, thus restoring the demographic balance.