A majority of Israelis support Jews living in the Strip.

By: David Isaac

In an exuberant display of support for re-establishing Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip, 5,000 activists filled three large halls to overflowing at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem on Sunday night.

A kind of Zionist revival meeting, the conference featured music, a cheering crowd, and a parade of rabbis and politicians delivering speeches and prayers.

Religious Zionists made up the vast majority of the participants, with a smattering of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. Notable was the marked youth of the attendees, with many of them tweens.

The energetic mega-event marked a milestone in a burgeoning movement begun following the Oct. 7 massacre calling for a Jewish return to Gush Katif.

Gush Katif was the largest bloc of 21 Jewish settlements forcibly evacuated from the Strip by Israel in 2005 as part of its disengagement plan. (Four additional settlements were evacuated in northern Samaria.) In total, more than 8,000 Jews were removed from their homes. Even Jewish graves were dug up and bones reinterred.

The traumatic event remains an open wound for Israel’s settlement movement—one that it determined to reverse when the opportunity arose.

With the Israel Defense Forces regaining control of the Strip, it views that time as now. “The nation of Israel returns home,” proclaimed one of the taglines of the event.

“Together, we will fix the injustice and undo the disgrace in Gaza and northern Samaria,” Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council and one of the event organizers, told the crowd to wild applause.

The event was the brainstorm of Dagan and long-time settlement activist Daniella Weiss, a former mayor of Kedumim in Samaria.

“The aim of this assembly is to bring people together to say we have to return to the Gaza Strip and establish Jewish communities right away in the Gush Katif area,” Weiss told JNS.

“We want people to return not only to the places that had been evacuated but also to new places in the Gaza Strip. Gaza will be Jewish,” she declared.

Movement activists aren’t waiting for government permission to get started. A young volunteer, Mordechai, from the haredi city of Beitar Illit in Judea, handed out flyers calling for volunteers to join in building ‘Gaza City,’ a Jewish municipality in the heart of the Gaza Strip.

Booths representing proposed Jewish communities to be spread across the Gaza Strip—an enormous map above showed their exact locations—afforded attendees the chance to sign up for the one of their choosing.

Hundreds of families have already formed settlement kernels for these new communities. At one point, dozens of families mounted the stage carrying standards bearing the insignia of their prospective Gaza towns.

The movement to rebuild Jewish Gaza faces what is likely to be insurmountable opposition at this time. Internationally, there is an expectation that Israel will allow Palestinian Arabs pushed south by the fighting to return to their homes as soon as possible.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself described the idea of resettling Jews in the Gaza Strip as “unrealistic.”

Weiss said that part of the purpose of the event was to put pressure on the Netanyahu government.

“Netanyahu has to manage pressure from the United States and the outside world,” she said. “But he should know that after this I will organize a bigger rally and a bigger one and a bigger one because the Jewish nation wants to live.”

(JNS.org)