No deal on outpost bill; Bennett, PM to meet again in morning

A meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett ended without resolution on Saturday night, as the two tried to reach a compromise on a bill to retroactively legalize West Bank settlement outposts built on privately owned Palestinian land.

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit also attended the meeting on the so-called Regulation Bill, which came ahead of a Monday Knesset vote on the controversial legislation.

The bill, which was proposed by the national-religious Jewish Home, has been presented as a plan to avert a December deadline to demolish the illegal outpost of Amona.

But the cabinet is divided over the bill, with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon (Kulanu) opposed to the clause in the legislation that would include Amona in the outposts to be legalized, despite the High Court ordering its demolition by December 25. Kahlon’s opposition to the clause led to the vote on the bill, which was planned for last week, being postponed until Monday.

Kahlon’s 10-seat Kulanu faction has de facto veto power over legislation in the 67-seat coalition, as bills require a 61-seat majority to pass. According to the Ynet news website, Bennett is being pressured to agree to remove the clause on Amona.

Bennett said Saturday night that no compromise had been reached on the contentious issue.

“Nothing has been concluded regarding the regulation of settlements in [the West Bank],” Bennett posted on Facebook. “We expect the Regulation Bill to pass in full as required by the coalition agreement.”

Netanyahu and Bennett are expected to meet again Sunday morning, the Hebrew-language media reported.

The meeting itself, held in Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, was not without controversy of its own. Netanyahu ousted Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich from the room over an interview the latter gave to Haaretz newspaper published Friday, in which he cast doubt on the prime minister’s commitment to right-wing policy.

After over a decade of legal wrangling, the High Court of Justice ruled in 2014 that the Amona outpost, near Ramallah, which was founded in 1996 and is home to some 40 families, was built on privately-owned Palestinian land and ordered it razed by December 25.

The issue has galvanized pro-settlement politicians who have sought legislative ways to circumvent the court’s decision. But past proposals to grant the state the ability to seize the private land for Amona residents’ use were met with vociferous opposition of officials and political leaders. Mandelblit told lawmakers last month that such a breach of property protections would be deemed unconstitutional by the High Court of Justice. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman have both expressed misgivings or opposition to the idea.

Kahlon’s opposition to the measure has sparked frantic maneuvering in Netanyahu’s coalition. According to Knesset sources, his party opposes the bill’s article 7, that explicitly overturns the High Court of Justice verdict forbidding the expropriation of the privately-owned Palestinian land on which Amona sits.

Jewish Home MK Nissan Slomiansky said last week that when the Regulation Bill was finally put to its first of three votes on Monday, lawmakers would take the rare step of voting on two versions of the bill at once – one that explicitly overturns the High Court of Justice’s ruling on Amona and a second that leaves Amona out of the bill’s protections – while negotiations over its final version would take place in committee after the vote.

He asserted the bill now enjoys the support of “both the Knesset legal adviser and the Knesset speaker.”

But legal adviser Elazar Stern later warned that the version of the bill that overturned the High Court verdict on Amona may mark a “very problematic” precedent for Israeli legislation “in that it cancels the final verdict of a court.”

According to Stern: “We examined all the examples brought to the committee that seemed to offer a precedent for legislation that canceled court verdicts, and all these examples, as well as others, not only did not seek to cancel a verdict, but in fact contained the explicit caveat that they would not apply to previous verdicts.”

Raoul Wootliff and Marissa Newman contributed to this report.