SHALOM 50 - Judea - Samaria

For those who still think that the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is only a temporary and useless episode, a short tour of the Kiddah region is required. Only a few meters from this hamlet of just a handful of houses there is hill that provides a stunning view of the Jordan valley, bordered on the south by the Dead Sea and in the north by the Golan Heights. Whoever holds this position quite simply dominates the entire region, and today it is in Israel’s hands.
But what is Kiddah? This village, located 40 minutes by car from Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, is built on Israel government lands. Today it has only thirty families, who are determined to turn it into a town that in the end will be home to between 400 and 600 families. If for the time being just two families are active in local agriculture, the region, which is developing fast, will gradually offer more and more places of employment in this field. A group of seven new families, young couples with an average age of 30, came to settle there this summer, providing a 20% increase in the population. Another group of seven families is waiting until the housing units are built and available. In a casual chat with TSOFIAH DOROT, married and mother of two, and among other things in charge of the integration of new families in Kiddah, she told us, “Our being here is ideological, religious, strategic but above all symbolic. We are in fact an integral part of the country, like Tel-Aviv or Haifa. We live normally, work, bring up our families, pay our taxes and our husbands go to the army. Israeli society and the world need to understand that we are here to stay, to build our lives and the future of our children. Our presence here is not something temporary or a statement of some wild and wooly desire. We are normal Israeli citizens who have decided to live in this part of Israel. Our ideology is no different or more extreme than that of other Jews who live in Israel. What we do here is work every day and our objective is simply to develop this little corner of earth that we love so much, without having to keep thinking if we will or will not be expelled tomorrow. What’s more, by living here, we believe we are contributing, in our own way, to the well-being and development of the Jewish state, as do thousands of other citizens, all over Israel.”