Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed the government to ask the High Court of Justice to postpone or delay its expulsion of the residents of Amona from their homes by six months.
The Jewish community is slated for demolition on December 25th of this year, per a Supreme Court order.
But Netanyahu has asked state government officials to request the delay. Sources in the prime minister’s office say Netanyahu had been planning to ask for the delay in any case, but Education Minister Naftali Bennett exacerbated the situation, threatening Wednesday night to take his party and leave the coalition if the expulsion was not cancelled, or at least postponed.
After a meeting Thursday morning between Netanyahu, Bennett, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — a member of Bennett’s Jewish Home party — and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, it was decided to submit a request to the High Court for a delay of the demolition.
The 40 families who comprise the community of Amona live on a hill in the Binyamin region, on the outskirts of the Jewish community of Ofra.
Ten years ago this past summer, Israeli security forces carried out a court order to demolish nine permanent structures built at the edge of the Amona neighborhood. The footage of the horrific clashes that took place between the protesters and the security forces — some on horseback, nearly all wielding batons — at the site were the most violent between Jews in the history of the state of Israel, and certainly in the history of the settlement enterprise. Hundreds of people were wounded.
More than a generation has passed since the little neighborhood was created, and there is still nowhere for the residents to go if they are evicted. They built their homes in 1995 with a NIS 2.1 million grant from the Ministry of Housing and Construction. It probably never occurred to them that one day, the same government that helped the build would try to expel them without providing a place to go. Echoes of Gush Katif, anyone?