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Settlers from Texas anticipate orders to leave their West Bank home(Dallas Morning News, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) TENE OMARIM SETTLEMENT, West Bank _ Once again, Terry Jesmore is in a war. Now 65, this former Marine and Vietnam veteran keeps a 9mm automatic in his belt with an extra round in the chamber as he navigates his Toyota pickup past memorials to Jewish settlers killed by Palestinians. He and his family have lived here for four years _ frontier pioneers in their own eyes, usurpers of the land to Palestinians. The Jesmores came here from Fort Worth, Texas, believing their hilltop fortress of a settlement would endure as a part of greater Israel. But that conviction was dashed by an Israeli court last year. The court ordered a pullback in the line of a security fence and wall that Israel is building across the West Bank to separate Jews and Palestinians. The Jesmores' home is left outside the fence, on the Palestinian side of the line, in a hilly, windswept landscape of scrub trees and rocks. But that doesn't mean the Jesmores feel they are living in occupied territory. "Is Texas occupied territory?" Jerry asked. "Does George Bush live on a ranch that belongs to a Mexican farmer?" Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert led his Kadima Party to victory in last month's elections promising to pull the settlers back from parts of the West Bank. Marla Jesmore, Terry's 49-year-old wife from Murrieta, in Southern California, looks beyond her dining room to a patchwork quilt of green, sandy hills and prays it won't happen. But she spends a lot of time angry. "If I could find another Yeshev on a mountaintop, I'd go in a heartbeat," she said. "All our money's tied up in this house. If I knew we would be compensated penny for penny _ but it ain't gonna happen." (EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM) In the decades since Israel defeated its Arab neighbors in the 1967 war, more than 250,000 Israelis have moved into areas of the West Bank. Many settled in areas that today are suburbs of Jerusalem. A few thousand moved to hilltops like Tene Omarim to raise families and crops with the conviction that the land they were settling belonged to Israel. Throughout the 1980s, Israelis referred to these settlements as "facts on the ground" to warn Palestinian leaders to accept Israel and negotiate before the opportunity of a Palestinian homeland disappeared. As the settlers multiplied, however, the birth rate among Palestinians remained among the highest of any people in the world. (END OPTIONAL TRIM) Prolonged fighting with the Palestinians _ and demographics that showed Jewish Israelis were a shrinking majority _ convinced former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to build a combination of fences and tall concrete walls separating Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Next, he unilaterally pulled more than 8,000 Jews from Gaza settlements. Their evacuation last year took place amid much Israeli agonizing and Palestinian celebration, but without the violence many feared between settlers and security forces. After Sharon was felled in January by an incapacitating stroke, Olmert led Kadima on a platform of extending that withdrawal to the West Bank. The security fence is scheduled for completion in 2007. A year later, small settlements are to be pulled back in a "convergence" strategy that moves settlers into larger communities. The 120 families living in Tene Omarim anticipate orders to leave. The Jesmores say about half their neighbors are resigned to leave and seek compensation from the government. But for some new residents of the settlement who were already uprooted from Gaza, it's doubly offensive. For the Jesmores, it's a disheartening calamity. (EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM) When she was 20, Marla Jesmore spent a year living on an Israeli kibbutz. The experience changed her life. "When I landed in Israel and got off the plane, a sense of euphoria came over me, a sense of being home," she said. But her father fell ill, and she returned to the United States. Twenty-four years later, living with three young children and remembering the communal child care of the kibbutz, Marla turned to her husband and said, "Why don't we move to Israel?" Terry Jesmore spent more than 20 years in the Marine Corps. He had vivid memories of Israel and Jerusalem from visits made in 1961 and 1962. He'd planned to leave the Marines and live in Israel but re-enlisted for Vietnam. Jesmore said his mission during the war involved rooting out enemy leaders on clandestine missions. He was wounded twice. Security jobs then took him to California, New York and North Texas. When his wife asked to go to Israel, he was ready. (END OPTIONAL TRIM) "The Jewish community in Fort Worth was disappearing" to the suburbs, he said. "We decided as Zionists to bring the kids here to live freely as Jews." Kibbutz life had changed. "They didn't want us old farts," Jesmore said, explaining that the kibbutz favored younger families. They tried an apartment in the south, in Beersheba. That didn't suit them. So they bought a house in the southwestern edge of the West Bank at Tene Omarim. Jesmore volunteers as a police officer, patrolling the area in a pickup with his pistol. Palestinian gunmen shot up a neighbor's car as he was approaching the gate to the settlement, but no one's been killed in Tene Omarim since the Jesmores arrived. The Jesmores fly Israeli flags on each corner of their yard. From their patio, they can pick grapes, lemons, avocados and oranges in the trees that dot the lot. And in the distance, they can see the fence _ steel bars to block vehicles, coils of razor wire, chain link threaded with motion detectors, a road and still more razor wire coils. Terry Jesmore compares it to France's Maginot Line, the defenses on the border with Germany that were quickly outflanked during World War II. "When I got here we had total control of this area. Not now," he said. If forced out of Tene Omarim, the Jesmores could move back to the United States, but Terry Jesmore said he preferred to find another settlement in the West Bank. "I'm an old Marine," he said. "If I have to run, I'll attack in another direction." ___ (c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. 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