View of the caravan homes in the Amona Jewish outpost in the West Bank. Photo: Flash 90.

JNS.org – Demolition orders for a West Bank Jewish community, plans to build a replacement for that community, and proposed legislation that would legalize more Israeli settlements are at the center of an ongoing political debate in Israel.

The Israeli government petitioned the country’s High Court of Justice last week for a seven-month extension on a court ruling to evacuate and demolish Amona — a 40-home Jewish outpost in the West Bank. The evacuation is currently scheduled to be carried out by December 25. The extension would give the government time to advance and complete the building of a 98-home replacement location for the community several miles to the north, adjacent to the nearby settlement of Shiloh.

Members of Israel’s Knesset have also postponed an upcoming vote on new legislation, known as the “Arrangement Law,” which would legalize these kinds of outposts by compensating the land’s Palestinian claimants with alternative tracts of state-owned land and financial reparations.

Supporters of Amona claim that settlements — including outposts — are not at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while opponents insist that the Jewish outposts are illegal based on Israeli law and harm the peace process.

What’s the practical difference between a settlement and an outpost? Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and  an expert on international law and the Arab-Israeli conflict told JNS.org that “the difference is purely a bureaucratic issue. An outpost is a settlement that did not get certain permits from the government.”

Israeli Deputy Attorney-General Avi Licht said this week that his office considered the proposed bill to legalize outposts “indefensible” before the High Court of Justice.

Several members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition sharply criticized Licht’s announcement, including Tourism Minister Yariv Levin, who said that Israel is “a country that has a court, not a court that has a country. In this matter, like many others, there is no problem to find a legal solution.”

According to Kontorovich, any plans to legalize or build settlements will receive immense international scrutiny. “Almost all of the concern is based on international diplomatic reaction,” Kontorovich told JNS.org. “There is a fear of international retaliation.”

Several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have investigated the ownership status of lands on which outposts are built, and have identified Palestinians with legal claims to the land in question, bringing these claims to Israel’s High Court.

Further complicating the status of the outposts is that these lands were fallow for decades, if not centuries, prior to the modern Israeli construction. And many outposts received initial government funding, even though they later failed to receive full administrative approvals and are considered illegal by the government.

For example, Amona received NIS 2.16 million ($570,000) from Israel’s Ministry of Housing and Construction prior to its establishment in 1995.

Amit Gilutz, a spokesman for B’Tselem — one of the NGOs that challenges Israel’s settlement enterprise– told JNS.org that “it is Israel’s duty to withdraw all its citizens from all settlements in the occupied territories; those it considers legal and those it considers illegal. It is clear however, that it has no intention of doing so.”

In an attempt to remain sensitive to the Jewish residents of the settlements and to the government’s coalition members, Netanyahu has preferred to relocate settlements ordered evacuated by the court to nearby communities on West Bank lands that are owned legally by the state of Israel.

B’Tselem and several other NGOs argue that replacing one settlement with another may solve isolated land ownership claims, but does little to solve the question of the Jewish presence across the West Bank.

Yet Jews are not the only ones building illegal houses in the West Bank. According to Josh Hasten, the international spokesman for Regavim, a watchdog organization that monitors illegal Arab and Bedouin building on state lands, “The quantity of illegal building of Jewish homes pales in comparison to the rampant building of Bedouin homes on State lands in the Negev, as well as illegal Arab construction in the West Bank’s Area C — lands that were partitioned as part of the Oslo Accords as being under full Israeli administrative control. Yet the [High] Court has been reluctant to take on illegal Arab building with the same fervor as they rule on illegal Jewish communities.”

Kontorovich, who is also a senior researcher at the Kohelet Policy Forum think tank, thinks there is a deeper problem at the core of the debate over whether to evacuate Jewish settlements. “The open secret of the peace process that everyone knows about, but is afraid to talk about, is that the Palestinians have a demand that is unprecedented in the modern history of national movements or peacemaking: they will only accept a state if it has been pre-cleansed of Jews,” Kontorovich said.

The issue of the Palestinians’ demand must be openly addressed by Israel and the international community, he said.

“That is a demand that is so morally outrageous, also so obviously inconsistent with a true desire for peace and coexistence,” said Kontorovich, “that the only way the international community has chosen to deal with it is by pretending it doesn’t exist.”