By the time the final showdown took place six weeks later, the mood had turned desperate. Most of the protesters heeded the politicians’ calls to refrain from violence, barricading themselves inside Amona’s homes, linking arms and singing “Al Tira, Israel,” “Don’t Fear, Israel,” as they were yanked away. But others threw rocks, paint, bleach, and bottles at the police and paramilitary.

The evacuation culminated in a standoff at the Amona synagogue, where protesters fought the police off with tear gas, pepper spray, iron bars, and rocks, the police said. On the wall inside the synagogue, someone had drawn the police logo with a swastika and the phrase “Ishmael Police,” equating Israel’s police with the biblical figure who gave rise to the Arab nation, according to tradition. Other graffiti blamed “Zionists from hell” for the evacuation.

With the evacuation underway, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would build a settlement somewhere in the West Bank to house the families of Amona—the first new one in nearly 26 years. This followed announcements that Israel would build 5,500 housing units in the West Bank and another nearly 600 in East Jerusalem. Estimates place the overall settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 600,000 and 750,000.

In the past, such behavior would have drawn intense rebuke from the U.S. administration for undermining the two-state solution. But Donald Trump has broken with decades of American foreign policy by declaring that he views settlements as no obstacle to peace, although the White House recently warned that building new ones “may not be helpful.”

On Monday night, the Israeli parliament passed 60-52 a bill that would allow the government to declare private Palestinian lands where settlements had been built “in good faith or at the state’s instruction” as Israeli state property. Netanyahu had informed the White House that he would be putting the bill to a vote, and ignored a warning from British Prime Minister Theresa May that such a move would further isolate Israel around the world. The bill will almost certainly be challenged in the High Court.

Two days after the Amona evacuation, the Greenberg brothers, both in spectacles and knitted skullcaps, were sitting down for a lunch of schnitzel, cabbage, and rice in a cafeteria at Ofra, a nearby settlement now sheltering several of Amona’s 41 families. The brothers could have joined their family at their grandmother’s home in another settlement, but they preferred the company of their neighbors from Amona, choosing to sleep in bunk beds at the Ofra girls’ school. “It’s important to stay together,” said Yotam.

Yotam never expected the protest to reverse the evacuation, but he said it was important to register his complaint with the world that Jews were being uprooted from land that he believed God had granted them. Unlike those who painted the graffiti, he said he had nothing against the police who evacuated his family, seeing them as unwitting pawns of the government.