Several Israeli Cabinet ministers and lawmakers attended a conference Monday aimed at encouraging the resettlement of Gaza with Jewish Israelis.
The event, organized by the Nachala nonprofit, was held near Kibbutz Be’eri, roughly two miles from the border with the Gaza Strip. It was attended by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, along with 10 other Cabinet ministers, Channel 11 reported.
Reestablishing Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip is necessary because “firstly it’s part of the land of Israel, and secondly, without settlement, there will be no security,” Smotrich wrote in a long statement on X about the event.
Smotrich went on to describe a correlation between civilian Jewish presence in parts of Yehuda and Shomron and Israel’s ability to limit terrorist activity there. He contrasted this with Israel’s failure to contain terrorism in Gaza, where Jewish towns were uprooted during the 2005 disengagement.
“There eventually will be Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, just as it was clear to me that in the years following the expulsion from Gush Katif that, before long, we’d need to reconquer Gaza,” Smotrich added.
He stressed that resettling the Strip “is not part of the war’s objectives, defined by the Cabinet,” and that the discussion about it “concerns the day after the war.”
Cabinet Minister Miki Zohar and Mai Golan of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud party also attended.
At the conference, Ben-Gvir recommended encouraging the emigration of Palestinians from Gaza in conjunction with strengthening Jewish presence.
Daniela Weiss, the head of Nachala, said her group has paid for 40 structures it intends to “go into Gaza and set up.” She added: “Those who started this war will pay. No Gazan will stay in Gaza, without exception.” Cabinet minister Yitzhak Goldknopf of the Charedi United Torah Judaism Party also attended.
Goldknopf, whose party has a complicated relationship with Zionism, congratulated Nachala on the “important event for the revival of the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” he wrote on X. The Nachala event featured several sukkot.
Many on the left, which supports limiting or removing Jewish presence in Yehuda and Shomron, also vehemently object to the prospect of re-establishing a Jewish presence in Gaza.
Avivit John, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, where right-wing parties received only 5% of the vote in the 2022 elections and 21% voted for the far-left Meretz party, disputed the prospect’s importance to security and the ties of the Jewish people to Gaza.
Palestinians began firing rockets into Israel before the 2005 pullout, she noted in an interview with Channel 11. She added that “there were no borders 2,000 years ago, and with every piece of land these groups [like Nachala] remember that this is ours, and this is ours, too.”
Jewish presence in Gaza would “limit the Palestinians into a much more crowded area, and it will be a ticking time bomb that will explode on us even more forcefully than on Oct. 7,” she said.
(JNS)