The best response to the Gaza withdrawal of 15 years ago is the application of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and new settler homes, such as those just completed for the evacuees of the former West Bank outpost of Migron, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said.
“This is an important national moment,” Edelstein said he spoke Friday at a small ceremony to mark the completion of a new neighborhood for some 50 families that had lived in the Migron outpost. Among those who attended the ceremony was Ronen Peretz, who is the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office.
EDELSTEIN noted that according to the Hebrew calendar the Migron dedication fell just after the historic day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple 2000 years ago, known as Tisha Be’av and at the point in the Hebrew calendar that marked THE ANNIVERSARY OF the Gaza withdrawal in which 21 settlements were destroyed.
“We have come to this joyous moment,” said Edelstein. He noted that former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, one of the architects of Disengagement, had told the media that further withdrawals from the West Bank settlements should have followed from that initial Gaza one in August 2005.
As Edelstein looked out at the new Migron homes, he said, “this is the response [to Disengagement]. This is what provides hope. This is the response to those thoughts [of Olmert’s]. With God’s help, the application of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria will give an even more determinative response,” the health minister said.
Edelstein was among a small group of Likud politicians, called “the rebels” who opposed the 2005 Disengagement executed by former Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
To show his opposition, Edelstein had moved to the former Gaza settlement of Gadid so he could be in solidarity with its residents for the last few months prior to the withdrawal.
Edelstein was also among those Likud politicians who visited Migron to show his support for the residents there, both before and after its forced relocation.
So he was happy to be able to place a dedication mezuzah on the door posts of the Gefen family home at a moment, he said, when he could see “the larger picture.”
The IDF demolished the outpost in 2012 upon orders from the High Court of Justice, which rules that the modular structures were built on private Palestinian property and must therefore be removed.
The families were relocated two kilometers away on the same hilltop, just off of Route 60 outside of Jerusalem in the Binyamin Region of the West Bank.
Eight years later, new permanent homes to house those families and others have been completed.
The Migron residents would like to see their small community be considered a new settlement, but at present it is designated as a new neighborhood of the nearby Kochav Ya’acov settlement, even though it is well outside the built up area of that community.
Migron secretary David Ben-Dov said, “we could have given up along the way. But that did not happen. We are here today out of the determination to push forward.”