West Bank Rabbi Makes Peace His Mission : Mideast: Menachem Fruman angers fellow settlers by reaching out to Palestinians.

TEKOA, Israeli-Occupied West Bank —  On many counts, Menachem Fruman is an archetypal settler in the rolling hills that he calls by their biblical name, Judea and Samaria.

The Orthodox rabbi was among the first Jews to move into this Spartan enclave, where most of his 10 children were born. He was a founder of the uncompromising West Bank settler movement Gush Emunim.

Like many of his Orthodox colleagues, Fruman believes that he lives in the land of God, and for years he refused to travel abroad because it would take him too far from the Lord.

Otherwise, Fruman is a most unorthodox rabbi.

In a move that is anathema to most of his religious and secular peers, he has launched a dialogue with Muslim sheiks of the Islamic extremist group Hamas and other Islamic movements. He is said to be the only Orthodox rabbi in Israel engaging in such a dialogue.

Recently, he infuriated some of his settler neighbors by inviting Ahmed Tibi, an adviser on Israeli affairs to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, to his home in the disputed territory dominated for centuries by Palestinians but occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East War. Tibi opposes the Jewish settlements.

Now, Fruman is prepared to go further.

He says he is willing to share custody of the West Bank--even to surrender some of God’s land--to Palestinians.

“Establishing a Palestinian state in the Holy Land brings no less honor to the land of God. Just the opposite,” he said in an hours-long interview. “This is not a land just of Israelis or Palestinians. It is the land of God, so every man is allowed to live here freely.”

Gush Emunim, which accounts for at least a quarter of the 120,000 West Bank settlers, contends that ceding control of Judea and Samaria violates the covenant between Abraham and God to create Greater Israel, or Eretz Israel, which they believe is the precondition for the coming of the Messiah and humankind’s redemption.

The movement was founded by followers of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who formulated the theological arguments for resettling Palestine.

Fruman was among his most devoted students.

At 50, Fruman stands largely alone among settlers and Orthodox rabbis. His ties with Hamas, in particular, have isolated him because of the group’s bombings and kidnapings designed to sabotage the 1993 peace accord between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

But Fruman argues that religious people must serve as a bridge to peace.

“The political agreements are only a fragment of peace. If you want to make peace not only in Washington and Oslo but also on the land, then you have to take the religious factor into account,” he said in his tiny, well-worn living room. “You have to build not just between Rabin and Arafat but also between me and [Hamas Sheik] Hamed Bitawi.”

For such views, many Gush Emunim settlers have disowned Fruman. Some neighbors call him a gadfly. Members of the Israeli right say he is a publicity hound. And religious peers claim that the dialogue with Hamas is the seed of nothing short of treason, a violation of the Zionist dream.

“The vast majority of Gush Emunim members are very extreme in their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim beliefs,” said Ehud Sprinzak, a specialist on the Israeli right at Hebrew University. “They see Islam as a negative and vicious religion. So they can’t understand how a person who had the same inspiration and education could turn out to be so open with the Islamists.”

Their views have hardened with the deaths of scores of Israeli civilians in the West Bank since Jews began to settle there in the early 1970s.

Among them were two of Fruman’s immediate neighbors, Jewish emigres from the United States and Russia.

“There are many bad feelings. For settlers, what happens here is not just academic. It’s what they’ve risked their lives for,” acknowledged the bearded Fruman, whose long, lean frame hung out of a small white plastic picnic chair. There is not enough furniture in the room to seat his whole family.

Living among West Bank Palestinians for so many years has softened his views.

“I speak with a lot of them about their position, which is worse. We gave our men and won, but they gave their men and didn’t win. And after being occupied by Israel for 28 years and by Jordan [before] . . . they’ve never had their freedom or feeling of independence,” he said. “This is really why we need the help of God.”

The dialogue began two years ago when Fruman approached several Muslim clerics. Some were hesitant, but a few agreed.

The results have been mixed.

Bitawi, who lives in the West Bank town of Nablus, remembers that Fruman called to ask if he would shed light on Islam, which Fruman said most Jews believe preaches violence and the impossibility of coexistence.

Bitawi was irritated but agreed to meet.

“We are not against dialogue between religious scholars, but our religion is well known and its principles are known to anyone who cares to familiarize himself with them,” Bitawi said, explaining why he responded.

“Fruman also asked about suicide bombings. We told him that someone who carries out this kind of operation is someone who has given up on his life because of all the injustice he has faced under occupation and [who] believes that death is better than life.

“Another point we disagreed on is Jerusalem. Fruman says that we Muslims have only a right of passage in Jerusalem to our holy sites. We, of course, say we have a right to all of East Jerusalem because it is Islamic and Arab,” Bitawi said.

Not exactly a meeting of minds.

But Bitawi called their two face-to-face discussions “a good attempt. It is always valuable to have a discussion with a religious scholar, even though you stand on different ground.”

Sheik Talal Seder of the Islamic Movement recalled his first encounter with the rabbi: Fruman came to his home in nearby Bethlehem and sat up all night talking to Seder’s family.

Seder pulled a blue Torah from the desk drawer in his storefront office. Fruman had brought it as a gift.

“The rabbi said the first thing we had to do was work for nonviolence and that the solution lay among the people,” said the sheik, who also has 10 children.

The budding relationship led Fruman to ask Seder, imprisoned Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin and other Muslim leaders last October to appeal to Islamic militants who had kidnaped an Israeli soldier to spare his life. They did. And Hamas modified its demands and extended the deadline for action.

But Nachshon Waxman, 19, who had dual Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was later shot by his captors in a preemptive Israeli rescue attempt. The captors were also killed.

Bitawi has not seen Fruman in more than a year. But Seder and the rabbi still keep in touch, mainly by phone.

“There are few, very few, like him willing to talk,” Seder said.

Neither Fruman nor the sheiks have any illusion about affecting the political situation.

“I’m not the Israeli foreign minister, and they’re not Arab generals or the [Palestine Liberation Organization]. All we’re trying to do is build mutual confidence and develop a common language,” Fruman said.

Fruman has been a maverick in Israel for a decade. Long before the peace accord, he met with Palestinians who are now part of Arafat’s inner circle and are recognized by the Israeli government and the world.

Much of Fruman’s energy now goes to mobilizing support and funding for his project to found an institute where Muslims and Jews can study together.

He calls it the Children of Abraham and envisions a center where sheiks from Saudi Arabia and Algeria could sit with rabbis from the United States: “We want them to have a place to speak to each other. There’s no place like that, and where better to build one than in Jerusalem, the capital of peace?”