The Ulpana case is part of a broader political and legal morass bound up with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Most of the world deems settlements in the Palestinian territory illegal because they’re built on land Israel captured during war in 1967. Under international law, countries are not allowed to transfer their own populations to a territory they occupy in war (Israel has a complicated legal argument to justify the settlements).

Successive Israeli governments have pledged to dismantle the outposts but have mostly succumbed to pressure from settlers to keep them in place. In 2003, Israel promised the U.S. it would dismantle 28 such communities as part of a peace plan known as the Roadmap. Nine years later, all but two of these outposts remain, according to Hagit Ofran, who monitors settlement activity for the Israeli left-wing group, Peace Now.

“There just isn’t the will in Israel or even in the United States to seriously tackle the issue,” Ofran told the Daily Beast. “When the United States has been serious about it, Israeli governments have found ways to fool them.”

Uplana’s status is even more complicated. Among the outposts (and in many settlements as well), settlers built some homes on land belonging to individual Palestinians. In a few cases, those Palestinians have petitioned Israeli courts and won judgments against the settlers. Right-wing members of Israel’s parliament tried this week to pass a law that would nullify the judgments and compensate the Palestinian landowners financially without uprooting the settlers. The bill failed to muster a majority.

Netanyahu has built his political career on support from the settlers. But he has also angered them at times—by agreeing to cede some West Bank land to the Palestinians during his first term as prime minister in the 1990s, and by consenting to a partial moratorium on settlement expansion two years ago.

Over the years, some analysts have suggested that Netanyahu would be more forthcoming with the Palestinians were he not beholden to the settlers. But after bringing the rival Kadima party into his coalition last month, Netanyahu now commands an almost unprecedented majority in parliament—94 of the Knesset’s 120 seats—making him one of the strongest prime ministers in Israeli history.

“He has the power to do many things,” said Klein, the political scientist. “But I think that in his heart and mind he is fully in favor of settlement expansion. The problem was never the coalition.”