A token evacuation in a building binge
Reports from AP, Ma’an and Al Jazeera
Settlers in the Amona outpost burn tyres on Feb 1st in attempt to keep police away. The military issued eviction orders the day before telling residents to evacuate Amona within 48 hours. Photo by Sebastian Scheiner, AP
Israel evacuates West Bank outpost amid new settlement binge
By Nebi Qena and Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press
February 02, 2017
AMONA, West Bank — Israeli forces uprooted this West Bank outpost on Wednesday, removing residents and hundreds of their supporters in sometimes violent clashes as they dismantled a community that has become a symbol of Jewish settler defiance.
The evacuation, which followed years of legal battles, came amid a flurry of bold new settlement moves by Israel’s government, which has been buoyed by the election of President Donald Trump.
Thousands of police officers carried out the removal, squaring off against hundreds of protesters, many of them young religious activists who flocked to the wind-swept hilltop to show their solidarity with residents.
Planting themselves inside trailer homes and the community’s synagogue, the protesters defied police, who carried some away. Protesters chained themselves to heavy objects or linked arms to form a wall against police, chanting “Jews don’t expel Jews!” Dozens of residents reluctantly left their homes without resistance, young children in tow.
“This is my home. I want to stay here. It is my right to stay here,” resident Tamar Nizri told Channel 2 TV news. “This is expulsion, destruction, an injustice and a crime. The most basic truth is that the Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel,” including the West Bank, she said.
With some 250 residents, Amona is the largest of about 100 unauthorized outposts erected in the West Bank without formal permission but generally with tacit support from the Israeli government. It was the scene of violent clashes between settlers and security forces during a partial demolition exactly 11 years ago, on Feb. 1, 2006.
Those homes were found to be built on private Palestinian land. Israel’s Supreme Court later ruled in 2014 that the entire outpost was built on private Palestinian land and must be demolished, setting Feb. 8 as the final deadline after repeated delays.
In an apparent attempt to temper settler anger over the evacuation, Israel approved thousands of new settler homes a day before the outpost’s removal, signaling a ramping up of settlement construction under President Trump, who has indicated he will be more accepting of Israeli settlement policies. The settler movement is a potent political force in Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist coalition government is dominated by settlers and their allies.
In contrast to his predecessors, Trump has voiced no objections to Israel’s latest settlement binge. Amona residents and their supporters had hoped Trump and his softer approach might open a door for the outpost to remain on the hilltop, to no avail.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some 3,000 officers were deployed to carry out the evacuation.
They were met by 1,500 protesters who erected makeshift barricades from smashed tiles, rusty metal bars and large rocks to slow the police advance. Police said some 20 officers were slightly injured by stones or an unidentified liquid hurled at them and a dozen protesters were arrested. Hundreds of protesters were removed from the hill and more than half of the outpost’s roughly 40 families had left their homes by nightfall.
Protesters, who began arriving in the weeks ahead of the slated demolition, heckled officers and pleaded with them to refuse their orders. The evacuation was expected to drag into the night.
As it proceeded, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a government proposal to move Amona’s residents to plots on the same hilltop, leaving them without a relocation plan. Many were headed temporarily to the nearby settlement of Ofra.
The Palestinians and most of the international community consider both outposts and settlements illegal and see them as an obstacle to creating a Palestinian state. The Palestinians want the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem — territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war — for their future state. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, and the territory was subsequently overrun by the Hamas militant group.
Trump has said he wants to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, but has given no indication of how he plans to do this. His campaign platform made no mention of a Palestinian state, the cornerstone of U.S. Mideast policy for decades, and he has surrounded himself with advisers with deep ties to the settlement movement.
A day before the evacuation, Netanyahu approved 3,000 West Bank settler homes, in addition to earlier approvals of 2,500 homes in the West Bank and 560 in east Jerusalem. In a statement, Netanyahu said he has set up a team to look into establishing a new settlement to house the residents evacuated from Amona.
Settlement supporters are banking on Trump to support or at least let slide an explosive bill that seeks to legalize several thousand additional homes built on land seized from Palestinian landowners. Instead, it would offer the Palestinians compensation.
The evacuation marks the end of a yearslong legal battle by the Palestinians who own the land Amona was built on and witnessed repeated delays by the government to implement the court ruling.
“Our feeling is indescribable,” said Abdel-Rahman Saleh, the mayor of the nearby Palestinian town of Silwad who assisted the landowners in building their case. “This will open the way for other Palestinians to move ahead and retrieve their confiscated land.”
Ahmad Majdalani, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also welcomed the evacuation, but said the other settlement moves were “meant to finally kill the two-state solution.”
Amona’s evacuation drove a wedge through the hard-line coalition of Netanyahu, who has been caught between appeasing his pro-settler coalition allies and respecting the rulings issued by the Supreme Court.
The pro-settler Jewish Home party had pushed Netanyahu to find a legal loophole that would keep the residents on the hill.
Bilha Schwarts, 24, came with her husband and 9-month-old daughter to support Amona’s residents. “If they want it they can take it, we will not fight,” she said. “We will leave but we will come back.”
Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Ian Deitch in Jerusalem and Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.
An Israeli supporter of the illegal Amona outpost throws projectiles at Israeli police on Feb. 1, 2017.
Netanyahu announces plan for new illegal settlement to host Amona outpost residents
By Ma’an news
February 01/02, 2017
BETHLEHEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday evening that he had taken preliminary steps to establish a new illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank to house settlers residing in Amona, on the same day as Israeli forces evacuating the illegal outpost faced violent resistance.
After years of court battles and months of delays, Israeli police forces carried out the evacuation of Amona on Wednesday due to it being built on privately held Palestinian lands.
Hundreds of Amona residents and supporters have adamantly opposed the evacuation of the outpost, which is deemed illegal under both Israeli and international law.
Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported that Netanyahu had named a panel, which would reportedly include representatives from Amona, the Ministry of Defence, and the prime minister’s office, to push forward the establishment of a new settlement.
According to the Israeli newspaper, if carried to fruition, the plan would lead to the creation of the first new settlement officially established by the Israeli government in more than two decades.
Netanyahu’s announcement came mere hours after the Israeli Supreme Court overruled a plan to relocate the Amona settlers to plots of land nearby, which also happened to be privately owned Palestinian property.
Israeli human rights group Yesh Din — which represented the residents of nearby Palestinian villages whose lands would have been affected by the relocation — welcomed the ruling on Wednesday.
“We hail the (Supreme Court) decision not to yield to extensive political pressure, and to cancel an illegal plan that would harm Palestinian property rights,” the NGO wrote on Twitter.
In response to the ruling, Israeli Education Minister and ultra-right politician Naftali Bennett said that “the government must build a new settlement for Amona’s residents.”
“This would be the proper Zionist response and should do it as soon as possible.”
Rights groups have highlighted that, while settler outposts constructed in Palestinian territory are considered illegal by the Israeli government, each of the some 196 government-approved Israeli settlements scattered across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are also built in direct violation of international law.
Netanyahu has been widely criticized for publicly claiming to advocate a two-state solution while simultaneously championing settlement policy to appeal to an increasingly right-wing government and Israeli public.
The evacuation order comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing for the speedy passage of the controversial “Legalization bill,” which would see 16 of illegal Israeli outposts in the occupied West Bank — excluding Amona — retroactively recognized by the Israeli government.
The bill states that any settlements built in the West Bank “in good faith” — without knowledge that the land upon which it was built was privately owned by Palestinians — could be officially recognized by Israel pending “minimal” proof of governmental support in its establishment.
In January, Netanyahu also pledged to lift all restrictions on settlement construction in occupied East Jerusalem and to advance settlement expansion in the West Bank. More than 6,000 housing units have been approved for construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank by the Israeli government since the beginning of 2017.
Secretary-General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Saeb Erekat released a statement on Tuesday describing Israel’s continued settlement expansion as an “immoral situation,” as he called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to “open an immediate investigation into the Israeli settlement enterprise.”
“The commitment of Netanyahu’s government to colonization and segregation and its determination to defy international law and resolutions continues to destroy the prospects of an independent and sovereign State of Palestine,” Erekat said, adding that the Palestinian leadership “will pursue all necessary political, legal and diplomatic steps in order to hold Israel accountable and to bring justice to our people.”
Israel clears settlers from illegal Amona outpost
Israeli police move to evacuate West Bank settlement as construction of 3,000 new settler homes announced elsewhere.
By Al Jazeera
February 01, 2017
Israeli border police have clashed with Jewish settlers resisting the eviction of a hardline Jewish settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank after a court ruled the homes were built on private Palestinian land.
Police said on Wednesday they were “attacked by anarchists with materials that made their eyes burn,” adding that more than a dozen officers were “lightly wounded by stones and the liquids thrown at them”.
Youths confronted the forces with chants such as “How will you feel tomorrow after you evacuate a Jew from his home?” and “Today it’s me, tomorrow it will be you,” as police began evacuating them from the area.
At least four protesters were arrested.
Hundreds of officers marched into the Amona outpost near Ramallah on Wednesday, just hours after the Israeli government announced that another 3,000 more illegal homes would be built in occupied Palestinian territory.
The officers’ evacuation of Amona marked the end of months of attempts by government hardliners to legalise the outpost, and the approval over the past two weeks of nearly 5,000 new settler homes elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territories was widely seen as a move to win their support.
There had been fears of violence after hundreds of hardline sympathisers of the settlers slipped past army roadblocks on foot and lit tyres around the outpost.
Some threw stones at the media, as residents started packing their belongings, an AFP correspondent reported.
Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from the village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank, which overlooks Amona, described fires being lit and smoke rolling down the hills.
“There are a number of people from surrounding settlements coming to support the settlers of Amona,” he said. “[Amona] is quite small. There are only about 40 houses there, but it really has become a symbol for the settler movement.”
As border police were inside Amona negotiating with the settlers to leave, Khan said that the settlers were threatening to return and “build on this land legally”.
“There will likely be a court challenge from the settlers,” Khan said.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled three years ago that the Amona outpost was, by its standard, illegally built on stolen Palestinian land, and ordered it to be demolished.
Dozens of other unauthorised outposts – distinguished from Israeli government-sanctioned settlements that are also considered illegal by the international community – have been constructed throughout the occupied West Bank by settlers.
The Israeli government has generally tolerated them.
According to the defence ministry, 2,000 of the latest new homes are ready to be put on the market, while the rest are in various stages of planning.
Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, said that “such a frenzied escalation of Israel’s illegal enterprise signals the final demise of the two-state solution”.
“We’re in a new era where life in Judaea and Samaria [the West Bank] is returning to its natural course,” said Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has himself long lived in an illegal West Bank settlement.
Since the January 20 inauguration of US President Donald Trump, Israel has approved the construction of 566 housing units in three settlement neighbourhoods of occupied East Jerusalem and 5,502 more elsewhere in the West Bank.
On Thursday last week, Israeli officials gave final approval for 153 settler homes in East Jerusalem.
They had been frozen under pressure from the previous US administration of Barack Obama, which had warned that settlements could derail hopes of a negotiated two-state solution.
Trump has pledged strong support for Israel, and Netanyahu’s government has moved quickly to take advantage.
“We are building and we will continue building,” Netanyahu said last week.
The international community considers all Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land illegal and regards their construction as the biggest obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the conflict.