Eyeing an opportunity, settlers move to border towns so they’re ready to return to Gaza

JTA — Reut Ben Kamon was in third grade when her family was uprooted from the Neve Dekalim settlement during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. The scenes of soldiers clashing with settlers left her traumatized, she said. Yet she waxes nostalgic about life before the evacuation, describing the sand dunes she and her friends would roll down behind her home, the fresh air, the blossoms and the diverse mix of Jews who were her neighbors.

“It was a place where you truly felt the essence of the people of Israel and the land of Israel,” Ben Kamon recalls.

Two decades later, Ben Kamon joined several other families who braved an unseasonal bout of rain to spend the Passover seder in tents near Kibbutz Sa’ad in the Gaza border area, as a symbolic act calling for the Jewish return to Gaza.

Organized by the Nachala Israel Movement – a settler group promoting new Jewish outposts in the West Bank and the resettlement of Gaza – the encampment featured repurposed sukkahs, bouncy castles and a full lineup of speakers, children’s activities and tours. Thousands of Israelis visited over the intermediate days of the holiday.

The settler movement has long viewed the seder as a symbolic act of redemption and a catalyst for establishing new settlements. In 1968, activists posing as Swiss tourists used the seder as a pretense for re-establishing a permanent Jewish presence in the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron, three decades after the last of the city’s Jews fled following massacres. Today, Hebron is an epicenter of settler activity, with thousands of Jews living in and near the city.

And in 1975, activists from the Gush Emunim settlement movement held a seder in the northern West Bank at a site that would later become Kedumim, where Nachala’s founder, Daniella Weiss, served as mayor for more than a decade. Now, Kedumim has close to 5,000 residents.

Three years ago, Nachala hosted a seder near the Tapuach Junction, a move that preceded the establishment of the controversial Evyatar outpost – the term used for wildcat settlements that do not have permission from the Israeli government. In June, Evyatar was legalized by Israel’s cabinet along with four other outposts.

According to Arbel Zak, a senior Nachala leader responsible for mobilizing families to relocate to new settlements, some 80 outposts in the West Bank have been formed since the outbreak of the war. For her and others in the movement, Gaza is the next frontier.

“People say it’s not logical, or that it won’t happen. But Evyatar, and Gush Emunim itself, proved that it is possible and it is logical,” Zak said.

Ben Kamon was one of those who never seriously considered the idea of returning to Gaza – until October 7 happened.

“I never imagined for a second that moving back would ever be a possibility. But the second the war started, we knew it was a real option,” Ben Kamon said.

Last summer, Ben Kamon, her husband, and their four young children moved from the West Bank settlement of Eli to the southern community of Zimrat, to be closer to Gaza and to her dream. They now live in a temporary site meant for “pioneers,” she said – people ready to drop everything and settle a new place, sometimes with just a few hours’ notice.

According to Nachala activist Batel Moshe, who signed up to move to Gaza weeks after October 7, around 30 such families live in temporary sites, but a further 800 have signed up to move to six would-be Gaza settlements down the road. The settlement plans, which would see some embedded deep within dense urban areas like Khan Younis, were first unveiled at a January 2024 conference in Jerusalem organized by Nachala and attended by far-right ministers, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. The prime minister has publicly rejected the idea of reestablishing settlements in Gaza.

“People call asking if they can invest in [Gaza] apartments for their children,” Moshe said.

Weiss pointed to a surge in participation in the group’s activities since the war – including tens of thousands at a recent rally – as evidence of strong public support for its goals.

“Most Israelis are in favor of resettling Gaza, if not immediately, then after an Israeli victory against Hamas,” Weiss said. “This is the real path of Zionism.”

Polling does not support Weiss’s claims, however. While early post-October 7 polls showed support for resettling Gaza as high as 44%, more recent data, including a February survey from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, indicate a decline to 23%.

Although Weiss and her movement have called for the expulsion – voluntary or otherwise – of Gazan Palestinians, not everyone who has signed up to relocate to the coastal enclave shares that view.

“Whether there will be three Arabs living there or 3 million, it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care. The point is that Jews need to be there,” said Aharon Amos Ben Naeh, a Jerusalem resident who previously lived in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter.

He said IDF officers had visited the encampment and urged them to stick to their mission. “They came to our seder on the way out [from Gaza] and told us we need to move back there,” Ben Naeh said, in a recollection that another person who was present corroborated.

Accompanying a group of visitors to a nearby memorial for the female IDF surveillance soldiers killed on October 7 at the Nahal Oz base, Zak pointed toward Gaza, identifying the sites where she hopes new settlements will one day be built. Pillars of smoke – likely from IDF activity – rose against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea.

At that moment, Netanyahu was touring the northern Gaza Strip.

“Who knows,” Zak quipped, “maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see a pyrotechnic show for him by our soldiers.” Then she turned serious. “Seeing the destruction doesn’t make me happy, but I like knowing the IDF is there.”

Like Weiss, Zak insists that only a Jewish presence can deter terror. “Fences don’t help. October 7 proved that.” She rejected the argument that stationing troops for a handful of civilians drains military resources.

“The opposite is true,” she said. “When a soldier sees a mother pushing a stroller, he knows exactly what he’s fighting for.”

On the road back to the encampment, police had cordoned off the area in anticipation of a protest organized by anti-government groups to challenge the settlers’ presence.

Ben Naeh said he planned to go and greet the protesters. “I want to hug them. I want to tell them I’m proud of them. I don’t understand much about politics, I don’t even like Bibi. But I understand that, like me, these people care deeply about this country,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

At least one protester spurned Ben Naeh’s overture.

“I will never accept a hug from someone like him,” Yifat Gadot said.

According to Gadot, who was wearing a Bring Them Home T-shirt, the people involved in the encampment were complicit in thwarting a ceasefire deal that would see the release of the 59 hostages – 24 of whom are believed to be alive – still being held captive in Gaza.

“The only reason the war is not over, and that hundreds of soldiers are dead and the hostages are not home, is because for them, the land is more important than people’s lives,” she said.

At one point, tensions flared between protesters and Gali Bat Chorin, who came with members of the Café Shapira Forum to back Nachala’s efforts. Bat Chorin, who founded the forum, claimed it represents 15,000 mostly secular academics who, as she put it, “shifted right in one fell swoop” to reclaim Zionism in public discourse.

The protesters are “driven by a deep-seated hatred of Judaism and anything that is Jewish,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what our enemies have done to us, be it rape, abduction, slaughter, or burning children alive, [the protesters] feel the most important thing is to fight Daniella Weiss and stop her from taking land from Arabs at all costs,” she said.

Elchanan Shaked, an activist with Brothers in Arms, a protest group of reservists, from the central city of Rishon Lezion, also rejected the idea of a hug from the settlers.

“Tell them, before they hug us, they should quickly go hug the 59 families of the hostages and the deceased,” he said. “Then I’ll talk to them.”

Shaked rejected the notion that Jewish presence in the Palestinian territories protected Israel’s heartland.

“Gush Katif wasn’t even located in an area that would have protected the border,” he said, referring to the name of the dismantled Gaza settlement bloc. “If there hadn’t been an evacuation, they would have been the first to have been slaughtered on October 7.”

Shaked said he worried about an October 7-style attack in the West Bank in the future.  “We won’t send our kids to the army just to protect a bunch of crazy messianists who want to fulfill some fantasy about sanctifying the land,” he said.

In the encampment, Ben Kamon’s newborn – her fifth child – cried in his stroller. As she soothed him, she reflected on the deeper meaning his birth held for her.

He was born last month during an emergency labor on the side of Route 232, between Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Mefalsim – on the same stretch of road where dozens were killed on Oct. 7. She named him Binyamin Ori, after the biblical Benjamin, whom she sees as a unifying force among the 12 tribes.

“And just like my Binyamin, Binyamin was born on the way to settling the land,” she said.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.