By ISABEL KERSHNER
OCT. 6, 2016
AMONA OUTPOST, West Bank — Thousands of Israeli police officers stormed this hilltop settler outpost in the occupied West Bank to raze nine illegally built homes. Settlers and their supporters hurled cinder blocks at the officers, who charged on horseback and beat protesters with batons. The homes were torn down, but 300 people were injured and the emotional scars ran deep. Some later called it a pogrom.
That was a decade ago. Now the residents of Amona are readying for another battle with their own government and security forces, trying to thwart an Israeli Supreme Court order that the entire outpost be dismantled by Dec. 25. Barring an 11th-hour compromise, organizers expect up to 20,000 sympathizers to move into Amona, where 40 families live in prefabricated homes and trailers, to resist a forced evacuation.
“I will sit down on my backside with my arms folded,” said Avichay Buaron, a lawyer who moved to the outpost a few months after it was established in 1996. “Thousands will sit down,” he added. “If they hit us, they hit us.”
A flagship of the settler enterprise, Amona is becoming a test of how far Israel’s right-wing government will go to avoid a clash with its constituency and how vested it is in more than 100 outposts built without authorization across the West Bank. It is forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to balance the demands of his conservative coalition partners, the state’s judicial authorities and world leaders, who overwhelmingly view the settlements as violations of international law.
The Obama administration on Wednesday condemned Israel’s plan to build 98 housing units east of Shilo, a settlement a few miles north of Amona, which are meant to accommodate the outpost’s evacuees. In an unusually sharp statement, the State Department said the plan, which Israel described as a new neighborhood of Shilo, was “deeply troubling” and would “create a significant new settlement deep in the West Bank.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/world/middleeast/west-bank-settlement-amona-israel.html?ref=world&_r=0
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