Hadassah Spitz is sitting on a swing outside her house in the illegal Jewish West Bank outpost of Amona, her six-year-old daughter, Miriam, in her lap. With the rest of her family, she is waiting.

Within the next fortnight – by 25 December at the latest if things go to schedule – Amona will be evacuated and demolished under an order issued by the Israeli high court two years ago. The settlement was built illegally on private Palestinian land, without the state’s direct support, and the court is insisting that it and its 300 residents have to go.

Hadassah watches as a steady stream of supporters, most of them teenagers, pour into the settlement with sleeping bags and rucksacks, many heading for a series of plastic tunnel greenhouses set up by residents for them to sleep in. They have come following media reports of a police training exercise, before the operation to remove Amona, at the Tze’elim army base in the Negev desert.

Amona was built illegally on land belonging to the Palestinians. Amona was built illegally on land belonging to the Palestinians.

The first to arrive have already been busy. There are tyres stacked ready to be set alight on the road into the outpost. Temporary toilet blocks are being built for the thousands expected to come.

Already a cause celebre for the settlement movement, Amona has come to exert an outsized influence on Israeli politics and society, dominating the political agenda. The reason is simple. Beyond its solitary hilltop, Amona’s fate has become inextricably bound up with new and controversial legislation currently before the Israeli parliament. The so-called legalisation bill seeks to retroactively legalise some 4,000 outpost homes such as that belonging to the Spitz family.

Except – by a bitter irony – the new law, drafted in the first place by Amona’s supporters in the Israeli parliament, will not apply to the Spitz family or their neighbours. The reality is that this cluster of dwellings has been transformed in recent weeks into a key fracture line in Israel’s increasingly febrile rightwing politics. Critics say the issue has the potential to threaten the Middle East peace process and the prospects for a two-state solution.

This is because, while jubilant at the election of Donald Trump as US president, Israel’s pro-settler far right are now asking themselves whether the sacrifice of Amona to political contingency can be turned into the last ever such “evacuation”; whether the end of Amona may paradoxically represent a new beginning for the settlement movement, as its leaders in the Knesset call for a new policy of ever greater annexation of Palestinian land and the imposition of full Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territories.

For Hadassah Spitz, however, on Friday there were more urgent questions. Not least, what she will do with her children when the bulldozers come. “I have lived here for 18 years,” says the 38-year-old. “My husband has been here longer. He was here on the first day.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hadassah Spitz, 38, pictured with her daughter Miriam, 6, outside the house in Amona where she has lived for 18 years. Photograph: Peter Beaumont/The Observer

Amona was the scene of violent confrontations with Israeli police 10 years ago – the last time the Israeli authorities came to destroy houses in the outpost. Then, Hadassah recalls, the Spitz family cut their house into four pieces and moved it to its present location. This time, however, she does not seem so convinced Amona will survive.

“I think bad things will happen,” she says. “It was a trauma the last time. My oldest son just received his army call-up papers [for national service]. He is so angry. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with an army that could do this to us. We feel so let down by the politicians.”

That emotion is not new to Israel’s settlers. The truth is that Israel has been here before, in 2005, when the Gaza settlements were evacuated by Ariel Sharon, and in the events around Amona a year later. This explains in large part why the question of Amona has become so loaded. The violent images from that period 10 years ago – of Israeli security forces expelling Jews from their houses – remain indelibly inscribed in the settler community’s consciousness, and are viewed like kryptonite by Israel’s most rightwing government ever.

And more alarmed than anyone at the prospect of a repetition has been Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who took votes from the pro-settler Jewish Home party to win the last elections in 2015 and who is afraid of losing that constituency as his coalition has increasingly stumbled.

For if there is an irony, it is that if Amona is destroyed and its residents relocated in the coming weeks, it will happen despite the efforts of key figures in the Israeli government, who have gone through the most elaborate acrobatics to bypass the court ruling demanding its demolition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been criticised for his government’s handling of Amona. Photograph: Atef Safadi/EPA

Driven by the courts’ 25 December deadline, Netanyahu and his rivals have competed to give the impression of trying to find a solution for Amona, even as the issue has exacerbated the bitter power struggles within his own coalition. The direct result has been the legalisation bill, condemned by US, EU and UN officials, and seen by many commentators as a sop to settlers if – and when – Amona is knocked down.

Netanyahu strongly opposed the bill initially, but was forced to fall into step after threats that Naftali Bennett, leader of the Home party, might collapse his coalition. The prime minister did warn his coalition partners that the legislation could lead Israeli politicians – himself included – into the dock of the International Criminal Court. None of these gyrations have been lost on Israeli commentators. “Naftali Bennett has scared him more than the US administration and more than the European Union,” Amnon Abramovitz, political analyst for Israeli TV’s Channel Two, told Reuters last week. “Even though Netanyahu has been prime minister for 11 years, he remains more a politician than a leader.”

All of which has left Netanyahu facing a choice: between domestic survival on the one hand, and international condemnation on the other. And all week, as the legalisation bill has moved forward, the international clamour has grown. On Thursday the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, joined other governments and international organisations in warning that the new law would be in breach of international legislation, and urged Israeli lawmakers to “reconsider their support for this bill which, if enacted, would have far-reaching consequences and would seriously damage the reputation of Israel around the world”.

At the week’s end, as the prospect of evacuation came closer, that argument was falling on deaf ears among Amona’s supporters, including a group who demonstrated outside Israel’s high court demanding an end to “the court’s dictatorship”. Others have made appeals by email and social media for supporters to converge on the outpost. Among them is religious-Zionist youth movement Ariel, which said in a statement calling on members to act: “We cannot keep silent while the destruction of a settlement in the land of Israel takes place. It is our right and obligation to safeguard our country, our way and our faith. Everyone should choose the form of struggle that works for him. Of course one should not protest violently or break the law.”

And in Amona on Friday, it was not only the teenage members of groups like Ariel who were arriving. Lior Angleman, 40, had come for the day with his family from Kfar Saba, bringing sweets for Amona’s children: “I came to show my support as it looks as though things are going to happen soon. I cannot believe that they are planning to throw Jewish people out of their homes on their own land.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters of the Amona settlers have been bringing supplies ahead of the evacuation. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA

Back on her porch, Hadassah is not sure that a confrontation can be avoided if push comes to shove. “We are not violent but when things happen, people react. Events like this concentrate the anger inside.”

As if to underline her point, a sudden noise comes from inside her house. It is her oldest son – the one called up by the army – shouting and crying.