West Bank – The residents of Amona on Sunday accepted a proposal to move the outpost to an eight-dunam site on the same mountain where it is currently located, negating the need for a forceful evacuation by the end of the week. The proposal was accepted by a vote of 45 to 25, with two abstentions.
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The High Court of Justice had set a December 25 deadline for evacuating the outpost that was built on private Palestinian land.
No one has yet laid claim to the new parcel of land, though it is not entirely certain that there will be no such claims in the future.
The Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement saying that the Amona residents accepted the new proposal, which was hammered out over night between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, and the residents of Amona.
The Amona residents said they would give the offer a chance on order to build to their lives permanently in Amona. They promised to remain on guard to ensure the government keeps its part of the deal.
They thanked their thousands of supporters and said “thanks to them, Amona will stay on the map in a way that is properly regulated, and with God’s help, we will develop in every direction.”
“If the government doesn’t keep its obligation we will not cease to restart our struggle,” the residents added.
Netanyahu said at the start of the meetings that “we made great efforts to come to an agreed upon solution to Amona. We held dozens of meeting and brought many suggestions, some of them out-of-the-box. We did this out of a love for the settlement enterprise and out of goodwill. There was never a government that was more concerned about the settlements and the Land of Israel than this one, and there is no government that worries about it more.”
Netanyahu said that the leaders of Amona who spent the night in consultations with him and Bennett can testify that “we have done the maximum. I can only hope that the Amona residents who are discussing the proposal now, will accept it. That will be the right decision, for them, the settlement enterprise and all the People of Israel.”
Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant, whose car was set upon by teenagers in Amona when he visited Sunday morning, dismissed the incident as “pebbles against a tank.”
Before the cabinet meeting he said that there is a small group of bored teenagers making a lot of noise in Amona, fired up by right wing activist Itama Ben-Gvir.
Galant said he was received well by the Amona residents, and that his message to them was simple: “It is forbidden for there to be a split in Israel, forbidden that they harm IDF soldiers in any way. We are a state governed by law, we will preserve the law and obey the dictates of the court.”
Galant also said that “we will build the settlements and continue to build them throughout Judea and Samaria.”