Bennett touts new deal to keep Amona residents ‘on the mountain’

With no state petition yet presented to delay a court-imposed evacuation of Amona, Jewish Home chair Naftali Bennett said Monday that a new plan had been formulated to move the residents of the illegal West Bank outpost to an adjacent plot of land on the same hill.

“After intense efforts and negotiations with the prime minister and the attorney general, we have succeeded in formulating a plan to keep Amona on the mountain,” Bennett told the Jewish Home Knesset faction meeting Monday. “The new plan has longer prospects than the previous and even has potential for expansion in the future.”

The families that live in the outpost, the subject of some 15 years of legal wrangling, were slated to be transferred to three plots of land, located just dozens of meters from the current site of the outpost, where they were to be allowed to stay for eight months while permanent alternatives were arranged. But that plan, conceived by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, was reportedly taken off the table last week after the anti-settlement group Yesh Din lodged legal appeals against two of the three prospective future sites.

The plots in question belong to “absentee” landlords, a term usually referring to Palestinians who left the country before or during Israel’s capture of the area in 1967 and whose identities are unknown. They are administered by the state’s Custodian of Absentee Properties, a legal status that Mandelblit has suggested would make the temporary use of the lands less problematic under law.

Bennett said that the new plan would be free of the same legal challenges, but refused to give any details of the agreement. “I don’t want to reveal the plan before we present it to the people of Amona, whose determination has brought us to this,” he said, adding that representatives of the Jewish Home would meet with residents later Monday at the Knesset.

“I believe that we will get their agreement,” he told his Knesset members, while stressing that “any evacuation of a Jewish settlement is a tragedy, but this will mean keeping the residents on the mountain.”

Amona is the largest of about 100 unauthorized outposts — erected without permission but generally tolerated by the government — that dot the West Bank. In December 2014, after multiple appeals and delays, the court ordered that the outpost be evacuated within two years, or no later than December 25 of this year. It has already rejected a petition to postpone the dismantling of the settlement, which was built on privately owned Palestinian land, for eight months.

Attorneys for the state were expected to ask the High Court of Justice for a one-month delay of the evacuation, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly saying that such a delay was needed in order to prepare temporary housing solutions for the 40-odd families slated to be evicted during the demolition.

But no such official request had been made as of Monday afternoon, and the petition was unlikely to be presented by the end of the day, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry told The Times of Israel, citing “political reasons.”

The latest efforts to prevent the evacuation come after the so-called Regulation Bill, which seeks to legalize settlements built on Palestinian land, passed a first reading in the Knesset last week without a clause that would also ensure recognition for Amona and effectively overturn the court ruling.