The bill was submitted by Peretz together with MKs Ilana Cohen and Yuli Tamir. It stipulates that if least 60% of a community's residents agree to leave on their own, all the residents will be compensated. The implication is that the 40% who do not agree would be forcibly expelled and then compensated.
Peretz appears to be attempting to emphasize his left-wing bent. He spoke this week of the likelihood that he would include an Arab party in his government, about the need to end the "conquest," and his desire to continue the path of Oslo.
Peretz's co-sponsors of the bill, Cohen and Tamir, are also his political allies. Cohen, chairperson of the Nurses Organization, joined Peretz when he formed the One Nation party, and then again again when he joined Labor. Tamir was one of the few Labor Party MKs to support Peretz in the leadership race against Peres.
The bill's introduction explains that the momentum of the Disengagement Plan must be continued. That event "was a concrete example of the State's ability to form an appropriate system of compensation for citizens who are evacuated from their homes."
Most of the 8,500 citizens expelled from their homes during the recent disengagement have not yet received a cent of their compensation money. The Supreme Court was forced to order the State last week to begin making advance payments to hundreds of residents.
"The successful implementation of the disengagement plan," the bill's introduction states, "should be used as a lever for the continued attempts to reach a final status agreement - and this, among other things, via the formation of incentives for continued voluntary evacuation of Israeli citizens in Judea and Samaria."
The proposed bill, according to its three co-sponsors, will become a "supportive wind for the implementation of further evacuations," and will remove obstacles that might stand in the way of future final-status diplomatic agreements.
A similar initiative is being promulgated by the Bayit Echad (One Home) organization. The group claims that the partition wall being built between Yesha and the rest of Israel endangers and abandons tens of thousands of residents who will remain on its "wrong" side. Bayit Echad therefore promotes public action for legislation that will "guarantee the Yesha residents a future economic promise that will enable them to leave their communities today, and to receive appropriate compensation in the future."
Among the backers of the initiative are MK Avshalom Vilan (Meretz), MK Collete Avital (Labor), former MKs Dalia Rabin (Labor) and Yehuda Lankri (Likud), Prof. Avi Ravitsky, and others.