All 50 families peacefully leave Migron outpost, fuming that demolition order is unjust
Police eject 70 youths who barricaded themselves in a trailer home, say they expect price tag retaliations; local council chief asks, ‘Why did the authorities need to cleanse the whole settlement?’
All 50 families living in the Migron outpost evacuated their homes Sunday in advance of a court-imposed military evacuation set for Tuesday.
The families “left on their own volition with great respect and shared sensitivity and without violent outburst of any sort, verbal or physical,” Judea and Samaria District Police chief Major General Amos Yaakov said.
Seventy youths who had entered the outpost overnight and played a game of cat-and-mouse with police officers — who removed them only to see them return — were finally taken by police to Jerusalem in the afternoon. Unlike the Migron residents, Yaakov said, the youths acted with “physical and verbal violence.”
Police arrested eight of the youths on charges of disturbing the peace and interfering with the police in the execution of their duty.
Yaakov said police anticipate an increase in retaliatory attacks following the evacuation. “we experience price tag operations after every such evacuation. There is a state readiness for an increase in such activities,” he said.
Moving trucks arrived at the outpost in early afternoon, to transport residents’ belongs to a school building in the nearby Ofra settlement that will serve as their temporary home.
Police distributed the evacuation orders at daybreak, in compliance with a High Court ruling. Migron, the largest of dozens of West Bank outposts, was acknowledged by the state to have been built on private Palestinian land, though residents of some parts of the outpost contest this.
Last Wednesday, the High Court ruled that the outpost must be partially cleared out by September 4.
Residents are ultimately expected to move to a nearby hill where the government is preparing trailer homes, known locally as caravans, for them to live in until permanent homes can be completed. The Ofra school is to serve as an interim housing solution.
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Though the outpost’s residents left Migron peacefully, they released a statement early Sunday morning saying they would continue to contest the evacuation order.
“The residents of Migron have not participated and will not participate in the action to destroy the settlement,” the statement read. “We call on every healthy and honest person to leave their home, to protest, to get angry and to yell with us about this terrible injustice and wretched destruction that this Likud government is wreaking today.”
The head of the local Binyamin Council, Avi Roeh, told the Times of Israel: “It is inexplicable to me that the authorities felt the need to cleanse the settlement in its entirety.”
He was “sad” and “to an extent angry,” he said, that the government had reneged on what he said was “its word” not to evacuate Migron if the land was legally purchased. (Settlers claim at least some of the Migron land was legally acquired from its Palestinian owners.) “This is a grave blow to the credibility of the government as a government, to the ministers as ministers, and to the people as people.”
Roeh said he was sure that “we will expand the settlement enterprise and continue to purchase and to build.” In the end, he said, there would be “not one but two settlements on this hillside” — Upper Migron and Lower Migron.
Itay Harel, a father of six, who was among the first group of settlers to move to Migron in1999, called the government decision “a threat to the rebirth of the Jewish nation.”
“We believe that there will be two settlements,” he said. He also said he felt betrayed by cabinet minister Benny begin, who had given his word that if the settlers were able to purchase land in the outpost, there would be no evacuation.
Migron, which had some 300 residents, has taken on potent significance for both sides to the dispute.
‘We call on every person to protest, to get angry and to yell with us about this terrible injustice and wretched destruction’
Michael Sfard, a lawyer representing the original Palestinian appellants claiming to own the land, told a three-judge panel Tuesday that the outpost was “a symbol of defiance against the rule of law.”
To settlers, the hilltop that looms over Route 60 north from the capital has historical relevance — King Saul is depicted in the Bible as having camped there with his army while defending Jerusalem — and is a parcel of land that proved itself crucial security-wise during the Second Intifada.
On Friday morning, security forces evacuated and destroyed the Ramat Migron outpost, a smaller cluster of temporary homes built nearby.
Three minors were arrested, but security forces reported that the evacuation proceeded smoothly, with no incidents of violence.
The last major outpost evacuation, the Givat Ulpana hill in Beit El, took place peacefully in June, though a number of families requested that security forces carry them out so as not be seen as leaving by choice.
Mitch Ginsburg contributed to this report.
