New settlement inaugurated in Samaria

Rehavam is named for assassinated right-wing minister Rehavam Ze’evi.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A new settlement was inaugurated Sunday in Samaria as part of an announced plan to almost double the region’s Jewish population to one million residents.

The first 10 families were welcomed in a ceremony to their new trailer homes in Rehavam, located at a strategic point along the Trans-Samaria Highway, amid a chain of settlements viewed by local leaders as strengthening security along the vital route.

“We are privileged to make the dream of returning to Zion come true… amidst all the difficulties of the war,” said Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Council.

“We are working according to an organized plan – a million in Samaria,” he added citing efforts to identify land, establish communities and farms, and steadily expand Jewish presence in the area.

Dagan first presented the initiative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in August 2023, less than two months before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 invasion and massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

His plan envisions the establishment of at least 25 cities in Samaria by 2050, compared to just one today – Ariel – along with the application of full Israeli sovereignty in the region.

Rehavam is one of 22 settlements throughout Judea and Samaria that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism party, led the Cabinet to authorize last May.

Smotrich, who also serves as a minister in the Defense Ministry, overseeing Jewish settlements, land management and planning, sent his congratulations on Rehavam’s establishment.

“We are working hard so that the many decisions on the establishment and regulation of the new settlements will not remain on paper but will take shape and become a reality,” he said. “Great efforts and large budgets are being invested in this.”

“We will continue to consolidate our hold throughout the homeland in Judea and Samaria and fortify Israel’s security belt,” the minister added, reflecting the nationalist view that Jewish settlement in Israel’s historic heartland prevents Palestinian terror attacks in the country’s densely populated center.

“We are happy to settle here and turn on the light,” new resident Evyatar Hollander told Channel 14. “There is something amazing in the bond between the land of Israel and the Jews who come and settle and enjoy it.”

The new community is named for the late Rehavam Ze’evi, an IDF general who founded the right-wing Moledet party and was the tourism minister in October 2001 when he was assassinated by Palestinian terrorists.

Calling it a “privilege” to establish a settlement in the minister’s memory, Dagan noted that as head of the IDF Central Command following the Six-Day War, Ze’evi “was the first to prepare a master plan for settlement in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.”

“The settlements that we are establishing now are also based on the plan that Rehavam Ze’evi wrote,” he said.