A ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court yesterday affirming the legality of Israel’s separation plan was a victory for the government and for the man considered the plan’s originator, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. But it also deepened the settlers’ resolve, as the battle was transferred to the court of public opinion – and to the negotiation of compensation for their loss of homes.

“The decision shows that not only the majority on the Court but also a majority of the Israeli public supports the plan,” Mr. Olmert, who was in Manhattan yesterday, told The New York Sun.

The court’s ruling, he said, “confirmed the legality and the political wisdom of the government’s decision” to uproot, in mid-August, all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.

The 11-member Jerusalem high court rejected 12 petitioners who argued that the government’s decision, known as the separation plan, was illegal and violates the settlers’ human rights. The majority decided that the government’s decision is legal and trumps any human-rights violations. A plan to compensate the settlers was also ruled legal, although it will have to be amended on four technical matters, such as its failure to compensate settlers’ offspring.

The sole dissenter, Justice Edmund Levy, wrote that the separation plan is illegal and might violate the rights of Jews to settle in their land. But the majority supplied the victory for Prime Minster Sharon’s government, and for Mr. Olmert. Mr. Olmert, a veteran Likud politician who in the past was aligned with the right wing of the party, began talking about “separation” months before Mr. Sharon adopted it as his own plan last year.

Yesterday, Mr. Olmert said the plan he called “the most significant political initiative” in Israel’s history has now been confirmed by all three branches of government. After the Cabinet first agreed to it, the Knesset affirmed it by a majority vote, and finally the judiciary ruled in its favor.

“The battle will now move to the streets,” the spokesman for Gush Katif, the largest Gaza settlement bloc, Ran Steinberg, told the Sun. “The Supreme Court justices never came to visit us. They sit there in their ivory towers and don’t even care that the people call them leftists. This uprooting shall not pass.”

Settlers are planning mass demonstrations, hoping to capitalize on recent polls that show weakening public support for the plan. According to several polls, the whopping 70% approval rating recorded a few weeks ago has dwindled to 50% after major traffic arteries in Tel Aviv were blocked by anti-separation demonstrators.

The government is concerned that the settlers, many of whom have refused to negotiate on an alternative housing plan and other compensation, could end up in tents, looking like refugees, which would stoke public sympathy and possibly cost the government more in the future.

“We are not going to crawl to them so they can commit this act of uprooting,” Mr. Steinberg said. He denied, however, any political maneuvering, such as making the monetary compensation too costly for the government to consider any future evacuation of settlements.

Many settlers fear that accepting current offers would be perceived as legitimizing the Gaza withdrawal. Some have accused the government of being ill-prepared to handle their compensation demands. Mr. Steinberg said that the government rebuffed even those who have started negotiating.

In an attempt to show that his Cabinet is addressing the compensation issue, on Wednesday, Mr. Sharon took the unusual step of opening a Cabinet meeting to the press at which the Gaza withdrawal was discussed. “The compensation we offer settlers, not only in Gaza but also in the Shomron [in the northern West Bank], is worthy and fair,” Mr. Olmert told the Sun.

Anyone can use the courts to sue for higher compensation, he said, adding that the package the government currently offers is fair. “Beyond the monetary component,” he said, it also takes into consideration the “frustration, disappointment, and personal pain, which the separation plan might cause.” Those damages cannot be quantified: “There are no absolutes on these issues,” he said.

Israeli officials said that yesterday’s ruling might make the separation plan much more expensive for the government than previously thought.

Removing the settlers and compensating them is currently estimated at a total cost of $910 million, the government’s budget director, Kobi Haber, told the Israeli newspaper Maariv. The estimate is expected to grow, he said. Only 199 settlers have begun to negotiate the compensation package so far, he said.