BEIT EL, West Bank — The moving trucks arrived here on Tuesday morning while the men were in the middle of morning prayers, their heads covered by prayer shawls, and so began the first peaceful evacuation of a Jewish settlement from the occupied territories in memory.
More than 100 employees of Israel’s Defense Ministry, in neon-yellow vests, helped families pack books and diapers and then carried boxes to the brick path behind the 33 apartments in the neighborhood known as Ulpana that were declared illegal because they sit on private Palestinian land. The families moved quietly, though not willingly, to temporary homes down the hill that the Defense Ministry had constructed over the last 21 days, resentful of losing homes they love but grateful that the government had agreed to build 10 times their number in this sprawling religious settlement near Ramallah.
“This is a dark day for Israel,” said Brad Kitay, a 26-year-old rabbi whose family is one of 30 being displaced. “This is the evening before the morning, this is the darkness before the light. The Ulpana neighborhood will expand.”
With Israel’s Supreme Court having ruled that five of Ulpana’s 14 multifamily buildings had to be removed by July 1, the government spent the past several months struggling to find a solution that would appease the settlers without enraging the international community. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [3] announced that he would not only add around 300 homes to Beit El but also 500 elsewhere in the West Bank [4] and that he would try to relocate rather than demolish the Ulpana buildings in a feat of engineering the prospects of which are yet unclear.
So while the court ruling was seen as a victory for Palestinians [4] and the Israeli left that advocates for them, Tuesday was hardly a celebration on either side. Many experts and advocates said the handling of Ulpana — and two other settlements on private land scheduled to be evacuated this summer, Migron and Givat Assaf — simply proved Mr. Netanyahu’s commitment to the settlement enterprise and made any future two-state solution less likely.
“Bottom line is we won in rhetoric and they won in deeds,” said Avrum Burg, a former Labor Party leader in the Parliament who in January started a new research group, the Center for Renewal of Israeli Democracy.
Most of the international community considers all Jewish settlements in the West Bank territory that Israel captured in the 1967 war to be illegal but Israel distinguishes between those built with permits on state land and those constructed on private plots or without government authorization. While most maps of a potential Palestinian state imagine some of the settlements remaining in place in exchange for other land, Beit El, about 15 miles from Jerusalem, is not among them, making its expansion harder for those seeking an end of the conflict to accept.
Some on both sides see the deal as a sign that Mr. Netanyahu is leaning toward a unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank, essentially allowing Israel [5] to define the borders of a future Palestinian state.
“While Netanyahu may say from here to eternity that the Israelis will negotiate, the Israelis will compromise, what he does on the ground shows his real intentions,” said Tzaly Reshef, a Jerusalem lawyer who was among the founders of Peace Now, a left-wing Israeli group that opposes the settlements. “He is saying I am not going to the two-state solution, I am continuing to build, I am in alliance with the settlements. There is no two-state solution with Beit El.”
Dani Dayan, the head of the settlers’ Yesha Council, said Ulpana was a defeat in principle but a pragmatic victory. “It is quite an achievement that Beit El, for the first time in years, is going to grow,” he said. “Our endeavor is now strong enough to allow us to make such steps, going a step backwards in order to go later a few steps forward.”
At the 6:45 a.m. prayer service in Beit El, Rabbi Zalman Melamed told his followers that two months ago the idea of expanding the settlement “looked like a dream.”
“It is not the first time in history that evil rulings turned into blessings,” he said. “We pray here that this evil will turn into a blessing, with many more homes built on the land of Israel.”
The mood through the morning was a mix of somber and frenzied, as cranes hoisted furniture and iron cages crammed with boxes. Amid one pile, a laundry basket filled with clothes was taped shut; a few feet away, a white plastic garbage can held a box of detergent. Residents, even a 4-month-old baby, wore black T-shirts declaring, “We will be back.”
By noon, about a dozen families were trying to find space for bookcases and beds in their new homes, which are about two-thirds the size of the ones they left. Workers were still connecting telephone lines as women wiped down kitchen shelves in the modular yellow stucco buildings known here as "caravillas."
Fresh flowers and trees in pots were placed outside each door, and next-door neighbors mostly found themselves next door to each other in the new place, a former military base where the Defense Ministry had rushed to pave a new road, install water, gas and sewage lines, and construct the temporary homes. There were no more views, no grassy yards, but between each pair of caravillas was a small patio of the same red bricks that connected their houses on Ulpana.
"You can see they're making an effort," said Mr. Kitay's wife, Michal, 23. "But it hasn't got memories. Our home is in Ulpana. We brought both of our babies back from the hospital there.""
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