Israeli Settlers Return to Kadim in West Bank Two Decades After Evacuation
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By Lucy Williamson, Middle East Correspondent (Reporting from Jenin)
A new generation of Israeli settlers has returned to the settlement of Kadim, in the occupied West Bank, two decades after it was evacuated by a previous Israeli government.
Thirty "pioneer families" 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.
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"Twenty-one 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.
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 said. 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. 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 added. "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 within Israel debated what had happened. Some felt the government had made a mistake by abandoning strategically important outposts so close to the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Nablus. Others saw it as a chance to end decades of conflict and create conditions for peace.
Today, with Israeli settlers back in Kadim, those debates feel distant. The noise of chainsaws and hammers echoes around the settlement, and the scent of fresh paint fills the air. A new generation has arrived, ready to build again.
