Israelis in recent days have pitched tents in Lebanon. A member of Knesset introduced a bill on Dec. 17, 2024, promoting settlement in the Gaza Strip. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government included money in the new budget to double the Golan Heights’ Jewish population.
Spurred into military action by the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Israel has said all along that its goal is to neutralize the security threat posed by Hamas, not to gain land. But now some Israelis see the war zones, or areas near them, as places for new Jewish settlement.
Knesset members led by a settler leader toured Gaza on Dec. 19, 2024, with the national security minister saying Israel needed to stay in a military corridor there for national security reasons.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) now control much of Gaza. Some Jews want to settle there. About 9,000 Jews lived there until 2005 when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon deemed the costs of defending them too high.
The army left and took with them the Jewish residents. Many had to be removed, screaming, from homes or synagogues. Israel left the Gaza Strip, occupied since 1967, to the Palestinians.
While Israel occupied parts of southern Lebanon for decades, Jews never looked to settle there. The Golan Heights is a different story. Israel annexed it more than 40 years ago.
Only the United States recognizes that, but it’s land few Israelis want to cede back to Syria under any circumstances.
Netanyahu’s government announced plans on Dec. 15, 2024, to double the Jewish population there, allocating $11 million toward the goal.
One settlement looking to grow is Trump Heights, a community of 26 Jewish families close to Israel proper.
Community leader Yarden Freimann told AFP on Dec. 17, 2024, that he expects the community to double within the next year and reach 99 families within three years.
It was Trump who recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan in 2019, the year the community was launched.
About 30,000 Jews live in the Golan, outnumbering 23,000 Druze who lived there when it was Syria. Israel occupied it in 1967’s Six-Day War. Druze who live in Israel proper are citizens and serve in the IDF.
The United Nations doesn’t recognize Israel’s annexation. But Israel is firmly established there. Israelis have made it a center of the Israeli wine industry and put a ski resort on Mount Hermon.
As Bashar al-Assad fell, the IDF occupied abandoned Syrian military positions on the Syrian half of Mount Hermon—higher ground than the Israeli half—plus the 155-square-mile buffer zone between the two countries, to keep them from being occupied by hostile rebels.
Few Israelis advocate settling the buffer zone. But with enemies having been pushed farther away, more Israelis may start to see the Golan Heights itself as secure and attractive.
Most of Israel’s focus on settling disputed land regards what it refers to as Judea and Samaria—the West Bank. The area has strong religious and historical roots for Jews.
Most of the events of the Bible—the wanderings of patriarchs such as Abraham, the establishments of later kingdoms under David, Solomon, and their descendants—take place there.
It’s also the land seen as what would be the heart of a Palestinian state in a two-state solution. But now, after the Oct. 7 attack, three-quarters of Israelis see that solution as unlikely.
More than half a million Jews—some say as many as 800,000— now live there.
Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes West Bank leaders such as Treasury Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has poured money into development and green-lighted land for more Jewish communities.
Some West Bank leaders now advocate new settlements in the Gaza Strip.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leading advocate of settlements, toured the IDF’s Netzarim corridor in the Gaza Strip on Dec. 19, 2024.
He said that that land, which divides the Gaza Strip’s south from its north, must remain under Israeli control.
Netzarim was the site of the last Jewish community removed from the region in 2005.
The tour was organized by the Knesset Caucus for the Renewal of Settlement in the Gaza Strip and the Nachala Movement, a West Bank settlers movement led by Daniella Weiss.
Ben-Gvir linked the 2005 withdrawal to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Another caucus member, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot, said: “Victory over Hamas must be clear. Absolute victory will only be achieved when the side that started this war loses territory.”
Netanyahu, though, opposes Gaza resettlement. He has said Israel would maintain security control over the Gaza Strip but is “not seeking to govern Gaza.”
But it was a member of his own Likud Party who introduced a bill on Dec. 17, 2024, to allow “freedom of movement” for Jews in Gaza.
It stopped short of directly referencing resettlement but was a pointed reference to the 2005 removal of Jews from the area.
