The "shelf agreement" that the Israeli government has proposed to the Palestinian Authority, whose details were released Sunday, would leave within Israel some 220,000 settlers living in 48 settlements in settlements blocs. This area, west of the separation fence, more-or-less overlaps the seven percent of land in Judea and Samaria that Israel will annex according to the "shelf agreement."
Another approximately 70,000 settlers in 74 settlements east of the fence will have to leave their homes, according to the agreement. Most of these settlements are hard-core ideological communities where opposition to evacuation is likely to be strong and perhaps even violent.
A 20-year resident of the northern West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and father of 10, Yigal Amitai, says he and his friends "don't need to be loved, and therefore the evacuation of Yitzhar will look like the evacuation of Umm al-Fahm [would]. "Remember, for example, Land Day," he said, referring to the sometimes violent protests in that large Arab city in central Israel.
Regarding evacuation, Amitai says: "When a prime minister is involved with only a few percentage points of support, I am not worried."
Moshe Maiersdorf of Tapuah in the northern West Bank, a settlement previously identified with the extremist Kach movement, says his settlement has a varied population and there will be "no single pattern" of response to evacuation.
"I will personally fight for my home as any normal person would. There will certainly not be any hugs around here."
Emily Amrusi, a mother of two living in Talmon near Ramallah, says the separation fence "humiliates" her, adding: "The decision-makers have placed me beyond the fence, not only geographically, but psychologically. She says that of Talmon's 200 residents, about half have come to terms with the fence but others are less compromising.
She concedes she is torn but "certainly does not" lean toward violence. She also says that she believes even the less compromising "will not lift a hand against a soldier."
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