Leftwing Israelis have accused the new government of kowtowing to the right over the handling of an illegal settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus, in what is viewed as an early test of the ideologically divided coalition’s stability.
About 50 Jewish families who have moved to the Evyatar settlement over the last two months, building on a hilltop claimed by Palestinian olive farmers, agreed to vacate the land on Friday afternoon.
Under the terms of a deal thrashed out this week by the pro-settlement prime minister, Naftali Bennett, however, their homes will stay standing and a military base will be established there, which is legal. The defence ministry will then perform a land survey to determine whether the area can be claimed by the Israeli state, in which case a civilian religious school will also be built at the site.
Since local Palestinians are likely to have difficulty producing deeds and documents proving ownership, the deal is expected to pave the way for the settlers’ return in the near future.
Under a scorching hot sun on Friday, settlers cleared and vacated their makeshift houses and loaded up cars, many of them returning to their permanent homes in the nearby Ariel settlement. With the help of a crane, a large Star of David was erected, the words “We will return” inscribed on its side.
Several hundred metres away, on a hill opposite the outpost, about 450 Palestinians who live in the nearby villages of Beita and Yatma met the settlers with protests, yelling and setting tyres on fire.
Israeli soldiers shot rubber bullets and used drones to disperse teargas into the crowd, injuring several men who were taken to hospital by ambulance. Several teargas grenades exploded while soldiers tried to attach them to the drone, but they did not seriously harm any troops.
“The army has told us to leave and that’s what we’ll do,” said a 22-year-old settler who asked to remain anonymous. “Palestinians can live here too as long as they respect our culture and the fact that according to the Torah, all of this is Jewish land. If they don’t like that, they can leave.”
Four Palestinians have been killed and dozens injured in previous protests and clashes with Israeli police over the settlement since its establishment in early May.
Gaby Lasky, a Knesset member with the social democratic Meretz party, tweeted: “Evyatar outpost is illegal. Even the settlers admit it. The outline of evacuation of the outpost is the laundering of loot. Building a military base and then allowing a yeshiva is not a solution outline, it is a fault outline. Justice would be to evacuate the outpost, and allow the villages of Beita, Kablan and Yitma to own the land.”
Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war approximately 475,000 Jewish settlers have built on land in the West Bank captured and occupied by Israel, a practice considered by most of the international community to be illegal.
Evyatar, which sprung up unusually quickly this spring because the Israeli and Palestinian authorities were preoccupied with elections, civil unrest and war in the Gaza Strip, is also illegal under Israeli law.
“The law that protects settlers in Beita is the same one that is used against Palestinians when it comes to our land. Political violence is routinely practised against our people,” said Amani Odeh, a 34-year-old dentist fighting a demolition order for her own home in Jerusalem. “We have no rights,” she added.
While Friday’s evacuation may defuse tensions for the time being, Palestinians and the Israeli left are worried about the precedent Evyatar sets for the new government’s policy on settlement building.
“There is no chief of staff,” the Knesset member Mosi Raz of Meretz said in an interview on Israel’s 103FM radio on Friday, referring to how the defence establishment and the Israeli army, which ordered Evyatar’s demolition, had been sidelined by Bennett’s deal.
“These settlers are our chief of staff. This government is currently 20 degrees to the right compared with the previous one and it is dangerous. It will crash if it continues like this.”
Israel’s two-week-old government was formed after the Yamima party’s Bennett and his centrist partner, Yair Lapid, managed to bring together parties across the political spectrum with one shared goal: ousting the former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his 12-year stint in office.
The coalition encompasses leftists who oppose settlement building, rightwingers such as Bennett who previously led a key settler lobbying group, and, for the first time, members of an Arab party. An agreement to focus on areas of common ground in governance has quickly come unstuck, however, as the Evyatar issue has shown.
Next week the Knesset is scheduled to vote on extending controversial emergency legislation that bans Palestinians married to Israeli citizens from getting Israeli citizenship, and that rights groups say prevents thousands of families from reuniting and living together.
The law has been renewed annually since it was introduced during the peak of the second intifada in 2003, but now elements of the government and opposition are unwilling to back it. Netanyahu’s Likud party hopes the impasse will damage the new government and trigger fresh elections.
