West Bank Settlers Prepare for Clash, With Israeli Government
A flagship of the settler enterprise, Amona is becoming a test of how far Israel’s right-wing government will go to avoid a clash with its constituency and how vested it is in more than 100 outposts built without authorization across the West Bank.
.. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been working to retroactively legalize dozens of settler outposts that sit on public land. But Amona was built on privately owned Palestinian land, where Israel’s own judiciary insists the state cannot simply rubber-stamp construction.
.. Leafing through a bound folio of maps, photographs and documents from the outpost’s early years, Mr. Buaron pointed out how the state helped provide its infrastructure: a high-voltage power line, Housing Ministry plans to prepare 40 plots for permanent homes, a road.
.. The settlers are pushing for legislation that would force Palestinian owners to accept compensation rather than get their land back, arguing that the current legal strictures could be applied to thousands of settler homes beyond Amona. The attorney general has already ruled out that option, but 25 of the 30 Parliament members from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party nonetheless signed a petition backing it last month.
.. Mr. Buaron, the Amona leader, said there was nothing stopping Palestinians from coming to work their land, but Mr. Hamed’s wife, Nihad, 56, expressed a widely held fear.
“They would shoot us,” she said, noting that an unarmed man from Silwad was killed by Israeli soldiers in August. “I wouldn’t send my sons.”
.. Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, a Palestinian Authority official who focuses on settlements, saw the Israeli debate as hairsplitting that obscures the depth of the occupation. “It is not up to Israel to determine where each piece of land is going to go in our own country,” he said.