Israel re-establishes closed West Bank settlement, defying growing international protests

A new generation of Israeli settlers has returned to the settlement of Kadim, in the occupied West Bank, two decades after it was closed by a previous Israeli government.

Thirty "pioneer families" had arrived in the settlement on Thursday from Tel Aviv, according to the regional settlers' council, riding a wave of Jewish nationalism driven by Israel's current government.

They came in small groups, some under military escort, blue and white Israeli flags fluttering from their cars as they passed Palestinian villages and farmlands. Some dragged trailers loaded with bedding, furniture and building material.

Israel's government has overturned a 20-year ban on Jewish settlements around Jenin. Palestinian residents are watching the new push on settlement expansion here with fear.

All Israeli settlements and settler outposts are illegal under international law. Outposts are also illegal under Israeli law, though are often supported by state services and funding.

"21 years after the crime of expulsion from northern Samaria, we have completed the correction […] and have returned to the settlement of Kadim," said Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at the opening ceremony, using the Biblical word for the northern West Bank.

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Alongside him were Israel's Justice Minister, the Speaker of the Knesset, and Yossi Dagan, head of the regional settlers' council, who vowed that settlers would one day return to Gaza too.

Kadim, on a small hillside outside the Palestinian city of Jenin, was evacuated in 2005 by a previous Israeli government as part of a wider unilateral Disengagement Plan that also saw all Jewish settlers and soldiers pulled out of Gaza, and three other settlements in the northern West Bank dismantled.

At the time, the four settlements were considered too isolated and costly to protect, and of little strategic value.

In recent weeks, white trailer homes have appeared on the hilltop here again, in preparation for families to return.

Our request to speak to people at the opening ceremony was refused; we were told no media were allowed to enter the settlement today.

Driving along a dirt track on the hill behind it, we met a Palestinian vegetable farmer, living in the house he was born in 53 years ago.

He told me how, as a boy, he watched Kadim being built for the first time, then watched again as the settlers there were forced out by the government twenty years later.

"Back then, the settlers were living alongside us, and we coexisted peacefully. They lived their lives and we lived ours," he told me.

Now, watching them return, he's fearful.

"I'm afraid of the events spreading around us, and the bypass road [where] they demolished shops and businesses," he said.

"They drove my nephews away from their vegetables and citrus trees, telling them 'you have no place here, don't come back'".

He said his family fled here from Haifa during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

"There's no more displacement left in me," he said. "We're living with a sense of resignation. It's a life of fear."

After Kadim and the three other settlements here were evacuated in 2005, Israelis were banned from settling in this area. Israel's current government overturned that ban.

Kadim is the last of the settlements evacuated in 2005 to reopen. Ganim, Sanur and Homesh have already been formally opened, and families moved in.

But they are a drop in the ocean of the Israeli government's settlement project here. Since it took power in late 2022, it has approved more than 100 new settlements across the West Bank, including 19 in the northern West Bank.

Hagit Ofran, director of the Settlement Watch programme at Peace Now, says the rapid construction in Jenin is part of a wider race by the Israeli government to expand settlements in the West Bank before Israeli elections are held in October.

One of those new settlements is Emek Dotan, to the west of Jenin, formally opened last Sunday and now home to almost two dozen Jewish families.

From the small hamlet of Palestinian houses next door to Emek Dotan, teacher Samer Jaber, has watched the settlement take shape: first the bulldozers, then the caravans lifted into place. The problems began even before most of the families moved in, he said.

"Groups come and stand opposite our houses, filming us," he told me.