Photo Credit: NatiShohatFlash90.jpg
Israeli police officers clash with protesters at the expulsion of Amona residents in 2006.

One family at Judea and Samaria’s largest outpost of Amona peacefully left their home Thursday, while approximately 40 other families at the community received a stay of execution as the courts try to decide who owns their land.

The eviction on Thursday was in sharp contrast to the vicious clubbing and trampling of sit-down protesters, including reserve IDF officers and Knesset Members, in the 2006 expulsion of nine families and the demolition of their homes.

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Peace Now has been trying to prove for years that the families at Amona are living on Arab land. The community claims it bought the land from Palestinian Authority Arabs, whom left-wing supporters insist lost their land through forged papers.

This item around, the courts are not going along with the Peace Now argument that the land is Arab unless proven otherwise. Palestinian Authority Arabs rarely, if ever,  sell their land to Jews unless going through a third party or using a fictitious name. Otherwise, they face the death penalty under Jordanian law, adopted by the Palestinian Authority, for selling property to Jews.

However, the Arabs have not been able to prove they ever owned more than a small part of the land at Amona.

The Supreme Court accepted a government request to delay eviction of Amona families and demolition of their homes, sparing them, for the time being at least, the fate of families in Migron last year. At that time, the court did not accept Migron families’ claims that they had legally bought the land from Arabs.

Following the ruling of Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein last week that only one trailer home was on Arab-owned property, the family moved to another home.

The fate of the other families’a houses will be determined in the courts, unless the Supreme Court accepts a Peace Now appeal that called Weinstein’s ruling “outrageous.”

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Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu is a graduate in journalism and economics from The George Washington University. He has worked as a cub reporter in rural Virginia and as senior copy editor for major Canadian metropolitan dailies. Tzvi wrote for Arutz Sheva for several years before joining the Jewish Press.