During the late afternoon of Feb. 2, as harsh images of the violent evictions from the Amona outpost and reports of wounded police officers flooded the media, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, at a memorial for Ron Nahman, the town’s former mayor. Having avoided the Amona eviction for a few weeks, Netanyahu took advantage of the forum to talk about it. During the eviction, activists threw cleaning liquids, acid, oil and glass bottles at the police, but anyone expecting to hear Netanyahu disavow their shameful actions, never mind condemn them, was soon disappointed.
His statements practically ignored that the 40 families evicted had built their homes on privately owned Palestinian land and that the Supreme Court had ordered their removal four years ago, in 2013. Netanyahu preferred instead to share in the “great pain of the families that were forced to leave their homes, that actually had to abandon their life’s work.” There was not a single word about how this “life’s work” was predicated on squatting on private property and systematically ignoring a court ruling. Netanyahu sounded like he was groveling before the Amona settlers when he promised that his government would compensate them as soon as possible by establishing a “new settlement on state land” to replace their illegal outpost.